A healthy disrespect

It is nearly two months since I quit my old job, took an idealistic stand and 2/3rds paycut. There was a part of me that was convinced that I was doing the right thing, another that acknowledged that this driven partly by boredom, and minor third that was just scared shitless.


So 2 months in, what do I think of my decision? Best decision ever. I had fallen into a rut, a captivity of negativity and soul crushing boredom at my previous workplace. I was actively slacking but no one could see it. Even if they saw it, an acknowledgement was as damning on them as it might have been on me. So I was coasting on the momentum generated by the first three years of my career. A five year freewheel based on that push. Funnily enough, I got most of my, perhaps undeserved, rewards during this phase. I don't dwell on it much. In the long run things always balance out.


Back to my present situation, I am still in not that dramatic a changeover. My work still sucks from time to time. But there is potential for new and interesting stuff, so I am at it. There is a sense that I am perhaps idling my engine on this job. At least I don't take home an outlandish paycheck that guilts me.


And the paycheck...While there was some fear at the beginning if my lifestyle of material excesses would be able to adjust to the relative impoverishment, I think I am pretty well adjusted quickly on that front. But an unexpected side effect of the paycheck is that I seem to be more willing to speak my mind when my boss comes and asks me, "What is your honest opinion about how I run things here?". Consequences be damned, it is a rush to speak my mind. Of course within reason and the constraints of polite conversation and my boss quite reasonably invited criticism in a private setting than a public forum.


For the first time in 8-9 years, I have been spending time on things that interest me outside of work. Two python programming classes. One upcoming cryptography class and another on sociology. The limits that we once placed on ourselves are disappearing, but to sense them fading you have walk towards them. And it is crazily exciting. I do not know what the future holds for me, but I do know that there is less time than ever to get hung up on bullshit.


Do the things you love. Find some way to pay the bills while making your dream happen. If your work and your passion are the same, you are probably one of the lucky minority. If they aren't don't sweat it and get stuck in a web of dissatisfaction. Just keep a healthy disrespect for your job, get it to pay the bills and make sure it doesn't spill over into other parts of your life. Don't get sucked into playing an office politics game. It is never worth the effort. Someone wants to screw you over and get promoted. Let them. If you continue to get paid without having to care so much about it, you are coming out a winner.


Thus ends this ramble. I have barely been blogging, but when I do it is usually negative abstract crap. But this is the peppiest I have ever been! It is a good life, if you let it be one.

Resolutions. Dissolutions. New Solutions?

I consciously made no resolutions for the new year. But a lot has happened or threatened to happen, which makes it necessary to chart out some sort of mission statement to live the rest of the year, and possibly the rest of my days.


For a while now, I have struggled with my work and the urge to quit it all. Always the voices of reason have stayed this execution with typical words of wisdom. "What is your Plan B?", "Don't do things you will regret later.", "But that is escapism!"


I appreciate all the constructive criticisms and pithy witticisms. But it is my life dammit and it is better lived on my own terms. To this end, I feel it is important to make this easy on people who actually do have a vested interest in me. But I digress... We shall deal with consequences when we get there. It is a sequence after all, so we do have somethings that we need to get out of the way.


So I have now figured out what I don't want to do. I don't want to work at my company or with my client or in my current shift, which I have been doing for the better part of the last 8 years. Geographies and timezones did change a bit, but not much else from the perspective of the day-to-day, professionally. So no more working stiff at an IT services company for me. It is the life of a very respectable whore. But it is that and nothing more.


So now that a certain way of life has been rejected, we need to find a replacement. 'Confounded' doesn't even begin to explain how I feel going about answering that question. So I am going to be a student. I have identified a few subjects that have some interest in me at this time. I am going to go after them in a trial & error basis. Nights shall be spent learning to code Python, learning to write, learning to read & write my mother tongue, watching documentaries and posting music on my FaceBook (even if it doesn't interest anybody). Days will be spent sleeping or catching up on it if required. Evenings are when we shall make the donuts at the brain farm. I plan on slacking off as much as possible at work. I will go to work only to ensure that they don't stop paying me or start firing me. At some point it is likely that I find something that shall interest me. I sincerely hope that is the case. 


The next order of business would be to change the social scene. The more that I think about it, there more Bangalore makes sense. It is the last of the places where I still have a few friends who are not either a) getting married or b) making several babies. It would help if my current employer actually painlessly (relatively speaking, of course) allows me to transfer out to Bangalore. The job search to change addresses is going pretty badly. Apparently once you have been doing IT for too long, you are not as attractive a proposition to new employers any more. If that doesn't make you sick to be working in this industry, then I am not sure what you have for a stomach (PVC pipes?).


Finally, the long drawn out wait for the Thunderbird *might* be coming to an end. All things swinging my way, I expect to have my ride by the end of Feb. Which brings me to the final agenda item for 2012. I want to ride to Ladakh. There is a friend who has promised to hop along for the ride. I intend to keep my word.


Thus ends this statement of purposelessness.

The attack

S1 : The wind gained speed as he ran like a dog on a fiery chase. The ground was dark and firm, there were no obstacles to be seen for miles, or so he thought. It shook him when the wooden barrier hit him in the face. It's dark colour had deceived him. When he emerged from the other side he felt the small pieces flying in the air around him, but he did not stop. The log house was not too far now. His hands slowly felt for his sword.

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S2 : She loosened her grip on the rope. While slithering down slowly she sharpened her senses, dulled her memory and felt the heat in her palms. Her sword did not feel heavy now. The log house was in sight even though the air was foggy. She felt the ground and saw the three guards at the same time. They were motionless but she could feel their alertness.

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S3 : He saw the house, the guards and her in that order. The guards spotted him before they had a chance to see her. She ran up the now unguarded staircase. The dust under her​ footsteps didn't fly up nor the the vibrations leave the planks as she hit them.

Old Garden

Revolutions are mostly filled with stories of pain. The movie starts with Oh coming out of Jail after 20 years and trying to pick up his broken life with his family. He was imprisoned for his role in Gwangju revolt. His lover and the mother of his kid has died while he was in jail of cancer. Her daughter is living somewhere unaware of her father. He tries to retrace the parts of his life which he spent with Han and we are thrown back and forth between present and past and sometimes into a sweetly drawn dream world in Yuans mind.
Do the stories about communist revolutions across the world have similar structure? That was the question on my mind while watching "The Old Garden". At the end i felt this one was told in a much better way than many others. I was painfully ignorant about the communist movement in South Korea and that prevented me from properly understanding the mindset of these revolutionaries. But some faces from the movie left deep impressions on my mind.
The first one would be the protaganist, Oh the young revolutionary who greeted dissuaders who cared about him with a sweet smile. He hid a very strong mind which took the harshest decisions and carried them out behind a deceptive handsome face. Strong conviction in ones ideals, fearlessness and comraderie are typical traits of revolutionary heroes. But the way he would react to the recurring thoughts about the oppression of the state and the cruelty it has perpetrated on his comrades and innocent people was not at all a stereotype. The rage came out as tears.
Then the girl who gave him shelter and protection when he was in hiding, Han who became his lover. She was herself a revolutionary. Her comments when Oh leaves sums up the stereotype female companion of revolutionary heroes, "I fed you, i gave you shelter, i even let you fuck me, why are you leaving?" But above that she was a cool character. She was a revolutionary who was fiercely independent and very feminine. At some point in the movie the story is told from Han's perspective. We could see her mocking at the current state of the revolution and the revolutionaries.
The character which was most memorable was the female comrade who immolated herself while protesting against the factory authorities. The picture of her standing at the factory gate with leaflets and persuading other employees to join the protest and then standing firm when the police tries water cannon to disperse them is still clear in my mind. And later her cries just before she set herself on fire protesting the injustice in firing her. Somehow her voice conveyed the defiance in her, along with her feelings of helplessness.

The Incredible Bulk prepares...

...To fail spectacularly.
It is 3:02 AM and I am about to throw in the towel. I am looking at this 'Quantitative Aptitude for the CAT Exam' by Arun Sharma with equal parts of horror and admiration. Apparent short cuts involve memorizing squares and cubes of numbers 1 thru 20 AND their bloody inverses. If showing an aptitude to a skill in management requires demonstration of brute force number crunching skills, what really is the point? That might be just me trying to rationalize my inability to play a game whose rules have changed. But I really do want to do well in this test (which is not the CAT, by the way) as am just a few leaps of faith away from burning some solid bridges.

For the better part of 3 years, I have been struggling with reconciling my expectations with my life. While I still do not have a clear idea of what I want. I have become an intuitive expert in what I don't. I have not been very good in how I went about with managing this gap. It began with denial ("It is a phase. You will get over it"), anger ("if this is the best there is, logic states that things can only get worse"), self pity/loathing ("Man up, loser! There are people who would give an arm and a leg to be where you are now") and general disinterest in my own well-being.

At some point a change had to be forced and status quo disturbed. This is the logical attempt. I have given a haphazard, half-assed interview to a panel of IIM-A professors where my star statement was - "I don't follow current affairs nearly as much or as well as I should." - 1 point for honesty and -100 for general stupidity. Now I am following up on that with an equally (or possibly, even worse) effort on a shot at the IRMA entrance exam on Nov 14th.

The worst part is that I have taken 10 weeks off including a month on loss of pay to ostensibly prepare for these interviews and exams. Going back to work would be the worst thing that can happen to me now. Even as I wait for my Bullet Thunderbird to be delivered, the temptation is rather great to just hop on and ride away into a sunset. With no destinations or routes in mind.

Escapism has always been my strong suite...

AHA | Anger, Hunger and Anxiety!

facet films in association with neo-ram-zeus trinity presents....

AHA | Anger, Hunger & Anxiety!

Scene 1:
07:30 AM. Jameel hurriedly signs in at the biometric attendance machine, greets no one, walks to his desk, docks the laptop, switches on the LCD, presses Function-F4 to wake up the sleeping laptop, maximizes the Microsoft Outlook window, presses F5, sees "Sending/Receiving messages", stares away into oblivion and sips from the new 500 ml Al Ain pet bottle. Anxious about what will arrive? No way....

Scene 2:
1:15 PM. Anushka tries to focus on the vendor's delivery methodology and risk mitigation plan, being massacred by the in-house team, in the board-room. Her stomach grumbles for the cut-fruits a few meters away. Everyone seems satisfied with Tea & Cigarette breaks. Hungry? No way…

Scene 3:
4.15 PM: Harry looks around his cubicle. It’s almost empty. The corporation teaches him to slog for another man’s selfish motives. Angry? No way…
Cut to…. The past…..

Scene 3A:
Harry and his friends flutter around the notice board. Has he been shortlisted out of the 300 others who applied? Anxious?

Scene 2A:
The taxi driver rolls down the window and asks “Where to?” . “Sharjah “ – Anushka replies meekly. That one too whizzes away. Granted, its rush hour, but he has not right to pick and choose a passenger! – Angry?

Scene 1A:
Jameel is balancing on the aluminium ramp and clamping network cables. It’s the 55th floor of an unfinished sky scraper, and it must be atleast 40+ in the room. He wipes beads of sweat from his forehead, and decides to continue with another hour of machine like repetitive clamping. It would take 25 minutes for him to get to ground zero and find something to eat. Hungry?

Dissolve into ….. Logo of AHA. Its like a chemical formula. One H atom and 2 A atoms… all 3 balls connected by coloured lines. The H-A relationship a double bond. The A’s are not connected. H in blue and A in black….

Roll credits….

Phew!

Primer

Post vacation, I have been diagnosed with Acute Sinusitis and Acute Pharyngitis. I am on a 7 day course of Augmentin, Olfen, Otrivin and occasionally Panadol whenever I get fever. I am also on a 2 day sick leave , which has cost me an additional 900 rupees (Just to prove that I am sick, the doctor writes a certificate and the ministry of health stamps it, and charges me - fantastic! its a crime to be sick - even if you are only sick for 2 days in 3 years?)

So, I decided to watch "Primer" - IMDB Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0390384/

I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. I am completely lost ... what does it mean?. If anyone has found any meaning to all of it, do let me know.
Meanwhile, I have decided not to give up and watch the next one "Pi".

TED | My new found escape

For a long time, the only sites I used to visit were lifehacker.com, zenhabits.net, gulfnews.com ...


Not anymore, I have found a brilliant collection of talks by the most fascinating minds of our times --- www.ted.com. I spend an hour or two ,every Friday, listening to the talks. They are short (not more than 20 minutes), minimalistic, and truly matching the categorization the site has given - jaw-dropping, courageous , inspiring, informative.......

Here are some

Jaw-dropping:
A Robot bird that flies
The thrilling potential of Sixth Sense - by Pranav Mistry
Underwater Astonishments



Ingenious:
A rosetta stone for the Indus Script

Courageous & Disturbing at the same time
Sex Slavery & Trafficking in India


Funny:
Close up card magic tricks


Or , if you prefer the youtube way, search for "TED" on youtube. I am not sure, if all the talks are posted there.

Father

For the longest of times, I was my momma's boy (in every sense, you damned cynics!) and pops always found the easiest way to get to my nerves.
The man was impeccable.
Everything I was not.
Restrained, patient, intelligent and compassionate.

I spent the last ~30 years trying not to be like him and I find myself copying his mannerisms and catchphrases to the point where I cannot recognize myself anymore. Maybe he is not such a bad guy, after all...

Organisized

One of these days I have to do that myself just so that I can post here with any form of regularity. I have lost the inspiration to create any kind of contrived lyrical structures, that I call poems (Its mine and I have rights to name it what I want).

But half way through most drafts, I do hit delete and go back to sleep. I wish there was some way where I could train myself to sleepblog.

It might be way more interesting, unrestrained and actually readable.