Happy Pheesh.

Now after all the cribbing, I’ll tell you a happier tale, one where even I laughed, alone! This evening, I attended a presentation by one of the senior members of my department concerning a power plant somewhere in India. He went on to say things about the generator and the turbine and stuff and he happened to come to the point where he mentioned how the thing was cooled. According to him, there’s a ring with multiple exit points for the coolant to circulate through the generator structure and only one entry point. Between the two, are horses, flexible horses that allow the coolant to move freely.

I laughed.

Now let me tell you about the people I share my room with. Between the three of them, they have just the same number of trousers as me. One has a bath with soap once a week. The other leeches off people like there’s no tomorrow and also like he doesn’t get paid his salary. The third has a community wardrobe where the various members share whatever clothes happen to be available. One of them has a home planet where water from wet clothes drips up, not down like on earth. There also happen to be “proper” and “improper” parts of cities. One uses one pair of trousers and two shirts for the entire week and by the time it’s Wednesday, you need a gas mask to get anywhere near him. It helps though, you save on ironing costs not to mention washing powder, the effort, the time the everything else.

I need to learn how to economise.

A quarter of an hour.

The fifteen minute post

In that much time, I could brush my teeth twice, K could walk to college from Vashi station and Srinivasan could nail a dinner date. But a blog post? We’ll give it a try. For starts, my life has come to a complete stop. I no longer have anything that even resembles a life. My entire day consists of a few, well planned activities which in in chronological order are : get up, morning ablutions, wash clothes (alternate days), eat whatever’s available, dress, ride the bus to work, work, get back, wash clothes (alternate days), eat, study, sleep. In that series of events, I barely have time to talk to anyone, socialise or even go out. The only time I do these things is on the weekends which certain people are wont to snatch from me, but no, I will prevail and you won’t get my weekend. I don’t want a paunch, no time to get rid of it. I want a HAM radio license, no time. Apply the same logic to a million other ‘wants’ and you know how I feel. I dare not comment on anyone at work, even indirectly, you never know who’s reading this and what could happen if they did know what sinister deeds I do outside the office. And yes, I waste a lot of time cribbing, dammit.

This Sunday, since I have no company over the weekend (K’s headed to Bombay first and then Nagpur), I’m going to look through the papers for things worth going to see in and around Baroda. Travelling to the nearest place that has the semblance of a city, Ahmedabad, is too far and too tiring. There simply have to be people here with tastes similar to mine and people willing to cater to them.

Speaking of catering to tastes, I’ve been eating out quite a lot these days and I must stop to say one thing. Domino’s Pizza is pathetic. In the name of giving you cheaper prices, they skimp on the packing, the taste, the service, the ambience, the everything. That place is awful and you should only eat there if you haven’t seen a baked, bread disc with sauce and toppings in the time it takes a light bulb to blow.

Besides complaining, I’ve also noticed that I happen to be a pretty good judge of people and their character. It’s happened a few times here, primarily because everyone’s new, but what I’m going to do with that skill I’m still unsure of. We’ll see in due course of time.

Your time will come, sang Iron Maiden, on The Wicker Man, and my time has come, it’s 7 am, time to start moving and I just jumped like a galvanised frog at the sight of a lizard above my head. Cheers to the critter, he’ll keep the mosquitoes away!

Love from Baroda!

PS – I don’t know why I didn’t say peace. You tell me what’s happened to me!

Ephemeral.

Ephemeral.

MSR had once blogged about this and I draw inspiration from the word she taught me to bend and twist it to fit into my present situation. Actually, when you think of it, it needn’t be twisted or bent all that much, ephemeral is what it is. I met a chap here in Baroda, who of all places to have done his schooling from, did it in Bahrain, in the Indian School, my rival school. That got me thinking, Bombay was temporary, I was born there, made to inhale a plethora of toxins, flown away to Bahrain, which too, was emhemeral, and then shunted back to Mumbai (which it had become by then) to further my education. In Bombay, I never imagined the places I’d be travelling to and the colleges I’d be studying in, and sadly, those too were brief, six years in the city and I was out.

This time it was Baroda, all alone and independent, doing as I pleased, when I pleased. If you’re wondering why this post suddenly materialised after almost a month if inactivity on this blog, it’s because I didn’t go to work today. I have an upset stomach and plus, I needed the privacy to sit alone and think about what’s to be done with the rest of the time available to me on earth before my expiry date.

It all comes and goes, you never know where you’ll be tomorrow and what you’ll be doing, that’s the best part of life, you get thrown in the deep end of the pool and that’s when you realise what you’re made of. Every single day I crib about being sent to Baroda, and then I talk to some of the people here and don’t feel so bad. I’m fortunate to have had some really good friends in Bombay and I’m in the process of making some more here. I’ve amassed products from Delhi, Madras, Maharashtra, Calcutta, Rajasthan, Punjab, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Saurashtra, Jabalpur and god alone knows where else.

It’s when you meet all these people that you start to realise your place in the world. I’ll state an astonishing fact here, I live with three others in this flat and between the three of them, they have fewer shirts, and just the same number of trousers as I do. Am I lavish or extravagant or what? One gets by on two shirts and one pair of trousers for the entire week; another has a community wardrobe, where all those enrolled share clothes as per their needs. I’ve heard about people sharing food, shoes, combs, watches, and even tooth picks, but clothes? Come on!

It’s been almost a year since I travelled by sleeper class in the trains, and I decided to try it on Sunday, the day I went to Ahmedabad to meet Babloo. On the journey back, I started talking to this chap who came from some village in Rajasthan, he’d never seen the bright lights of Bombay or any large city for that matter so travelling out of the country like I had was out of the question. He had a family to support and he was probably as old as I was if not younger. He was a commerce graduate and he was preparing for the civil services exams, the IAS to be specific. He had a battery of tests to clear, a written on, followed by a group discussion and an interview. And that wasn’t all, people have been know to exit the fray during the medical tests for reasons known to the medical brains behind them. He had a single bag with him, his clothes and necessities. I was on my way back from making the rounds of some of the most overpriced stores in the Ahmedabad malls, places whose glass facades he would probably stare into, wistfully, one day. In my tattered bag I had an iPod Touch, a SONY camera, two cell phones, two books that I’d bought off the road and a pristine white shirt worth the better half of a grand. The cost of my ticket in the train didn’t seem an unnecessary expense but this chap pointed out that taking the bus back to Baroda would have cost me half the train fare. Point taken. Then he started asking me about where I worked and on hearing about Lunch & Tea, he had that spell bound look in his eyes that said “I’d LOVE to work there”. He said that he’d seen their sparkling offices and was impressed though he had not the faintest idea what was done in them.

This just shows how the better half of India lives. Here are people like me who are city slickers and would never dream of gorging on anything less that cheddar cheese filled chapattis in the mornings and on the other side you have people like Mr fake-Levis-shoes in the train, who’ve never been to an outlet of an international retail chain;  on one hand are people who dream of working abroad, getting to work in flashy cars and having a posse of people to attend to them whenever they decide to step out for a breath of fresh air and on the other you have people for whom living and working in a city, breathing its polluted air is a refreshing change from the quite lives they’ve led in their villages.

It makes you think, is it really worth it, working like a dog just to get an SMS confirmation that your salary has reached the eager hands of your private bank, ready to swallow you whole by dangling the promise of a flashy life style funded by their ridiculously expensive personal loans? Is this how different we are in the same country?

Imagine.

Click For Me!

To support me in my madness http://www.inkfruit.com/mysales.php?location=19464

Side Comment:

PJ Power : So when you're done having an orgasm about finding a free Wi Fi connection you can come over to my place and see the internet as it should be. (PJ Power to someone else, referring to me).


Cheers!

PS - No, this will not turn into a Twitter style update feed.

Coming to terms with Baroda.

Coming to terms with Baroda.

The first step to doing that was when I realized that all the people in the supposedly “great” Bombay were just loafing around with not much to do. Then I found a free Wi-Fi network and surfed the net and after that I started my professional networking lessons with a member of the Jindal clan.

Pranay Jindal is just the stem of the Y away from Pranav, the only remnant of my halcyon days of college. The former is what I’d like to equate to being the male equivalent of a certain nursery rhyme character that I knew in Bombay, ok I still know the concerned character, but what the heck? I don’t seem to be making much sense these days, not after your mind gets strangled by the endless tangle of wires that constitute the average “electrical scheme drawing”. For the uninitiated, that’s what the “technical” people draw up on paper for the technicians to follow when they wire the components of any electrical panel. Believe me, all of the wires that snake across the places where you live and work started their days as lines on a piece of paper; from the ridiculously simple in your average hut to the insanely complex in a multi megawatt power plant. Technically, I shouldn’t be writing about work and the company I work in, but since I haven’t taken the name anywhere or said anything bad, I should be ok, right?

Yes, back to the male equivalent of the nursery rhyme character, Mr. Jindal. For starts, his appearance reminded me of an alligator, or a sapping turtle or some related creature of the natural world. If you manage to draw a connection of some sort between those two, then you’re bloody brilliant, believe me, even this man has trouble reading my tone of voice and facial expressions, I tend to exaggerate a lot and send out the wrong signals at the wrong times. Finding a rock n roll fan is not easy task, especially in a small city cum industrial town but here you go, I’ve found life where I previously thought there was none. Rock n roll will always find a way to survive in the harshest of conditions! And he makes a lot of noise with external speakers for his lappy! I don’t make sense!

Yes, think of Jindal and you think of Jindal Steel, the company whose shares are likened to the Reliance of yesterday, with four figure valuations and yearly dividend payouts. Our man here seems to have had his intravenous shots of finance at a very young age, believe me, I can tell. Whether or not he’s connected to the illustrious clan of entrepreneurs, I don’t know and don’t want to ask, but I’m sure the act of forwarding this mail to him will elicit some sort of response, it ‘s worked in the past and I bet it will work yet again, words are all I have after all. Oh he'll be stalking the corridors of power very soon indeed.

The male equivalent you ask, and that has not yet been answered, ok I’ll tell you why. I cannot talk for monkeys nuts, I just cannot get my point across and convince people. But this man specializes in that, PR work you can call it. From using a few contacts to build a network that spans generations to leaving his footprints in the sands of Baroda, I think he’ll do it all. When you attend some session of Toastmasters International in Baroda, you know where it all started, in an air conditioned office on the outskirts of the town.

I could wax eloquent about what little I know of this man, but time restricts my rave to this much. There’s only so many times that you can turn your head around to make sure that no one’s watching you as you waste time in office!

Till the next post,

Cheers from Baroda!