Never So Busy....

It's more than a month since i put up my last post.
Life has been too busy since then... it's full of pressure... excitement... work... The task is uphill. Aggressive client... challenging requirements, Stringent deadline and to add icing on the cake, there is a fresh inexperienced team...

The stage is set perfectly for a spectacular show.Only time will tell what sort of show it will be..... I hope and shall try for the best. The only downside I find is that it is becoming difficult to find some time out for myself. I even could not go home this time for Holi festival.

This is first time I am shouldering an entire project. Till now I have always been part of teams in which other members were equally good or experienced in the tasks. Here the scene is entirely different; I am the only experienced member in the team.

Surely there is en excitement in the air.
Not only the professional front but also on the personal front.
Deepa’s parents visited home today... to discuss about our future… the engagement... wedding etc etc. so life is rocking to the fullest resulting in the lapses in posts due to lack of time.

I have spent more than a month in Hyderabad now and still could not find time to explore the city. Only place I could explore out was the Golkonda Fort.

I felt very sorry for the state the fort is currently in. Although it is in far far better condition than the forts in Maharashtra, still given the fact that the state tourism department arranges for a daily show there about the history of the fort, the fort should have been in a better maintained state.

Life has become fairly routine now…. I am staying in the company guest house. Campus is far off from the main city. As a result life has become a bit restricted inside the company. Only occasional visits to the city on the weekends and that’s it.

Let’s see how many more days before I get bored and move out to some PG accommodation outside in the city.

Bye Bye Bangalore...

I left Bangalore for Hyderabad Today.

It's been 3 years now... I came to Bangalore Almost exactly 3 years back; that was on 2nd March 2004.

We were seven people staying together then, all transferred from Infy Pune to infy Bangalore. Me, Parshant, Pankaj, Prashant, Manish, Rohan and Anupam. Our first house was in Koramangala S.T. Bed layout. Stag Saptagiri Appartments.

Flat was tooo specious... 3 bedrooms with attached bathrooms... 2 big halls one kitchen and 3 balconies. We stayed there for almost 6-7 months. There was one big problem about that flat… the building was adjacent to a big sewage and it used to give out that typical smell. So we used to keep all windows closed that faced the sewage. But soon we all were bored of it. Also number got reduced from 7 to 5. Manish left the job and Rohan moved out after certain disagreements within us. The house was toooo big for 5 people and rent was also more. So we decided to change the house.

So finally one fine day we arrived at our new house in BTM layout. This was also a nice house. It was ground floor of a bungalow. Two bedrooms, a hall and a kitchen. We were 5 people staying together. I don’t remember the house number now but it was at the end of (second last house) 23rd Main of BTM 2nd stage.. Then I left For Jeddah. By the time I came back, number had further reduced. Prashant’s parents had shifted to Bangalore so he was now staying with them. Amupam had already left for a long term assignment in US. So now only two members remained in Bangalore were Parshant and Pankaj.

They had shifted to still smaller room in BTM…. It was a one room kitchen. House No. 495... 29th Main BTM 2nd stage… Soon I was back from Jeddah and we were three again. Now this house was just sufficient for three. We stayed together for a few days. Then one of my college friends Shirish got a job in HP Bangalore. He joined us in that small house. Now it was difficult to manage for all 4 with a single bathroom and all leaving at same time for office.

So we decided to split. Shirish and I decided to move out. We first moved into another one room kitchen house. But we fount it too small to manage for two people. So we left that house and we shifted into a separate house nearby this was sometime in Jan 2006. This was a two room kitchen.

After some days one more person joined us. Manoj. He had just joined HP along with Shirish. Now we were three staying together.

After some days Parshant got transferred to Infy Mysore. Pankaj then again joined us in our house. The strength was now 4. This continued for almost 3-4 months when Pankaj left infy... left Bangalore and shifted to Pune.

Now it was Me ,Shirish and Manoj.

This continued till today. Today I moved out. Apart from Prashant, who is now settled in Bangalore, I was Last man from the group that had initially come to Bangalore three years ago.

I really don’t know when I will go back to Bangalore now. This city has given me many good friends. I shall never forget days spent in Bangalore.

Bye Bye Bangalore….

Hong Kong...

Last two weeks I spent in Hong Kong.
First time I visited a country outside the Middle East. Finally broke the jinx.
Although I was too busy with work (Hence no blogs…) and could not visit the popular tourist spots, I did manage to do a lot of traveling across the islands.

Here are a few useless experiences :-)

The story starts from the airport…. The runway is parallel to seashore. As the plane lands, you can see the sea a few meters away. After entering the airport, another major surprise was awaiting. They had a underground metro train to transport passengers from runway to the immigration area!!

Next on the line was my first exposure to systems that “Trust” the people. Till now I had only read about them. I came out of airport to the bus station. I already had enough information with me about reaching to hotel. I entered the Bus. No conductor. People were dropping the exact fare amount into a box near to the driver. I could not stop from imagining what we would have done in India under such system?
Temperature was OK… about 17-18 deg. I dumped my luggage in hotel room and went roaming around the area.

Given that Hong Kong is a former British colony, I had expected that English would be a very common language. Nut instead I found that even after so many years people are not so good at English. Although English is one of the official languages, Cantonese is the common language in use.

Next I was exposed to the Life line of Hong Kong… local metro railway “MTR’. I can easily see it as a counterpart of local railway system in Mumbai. The scene at platform was no different except the fact that people were disciplined. Same rush of people in the morning and the evening in different directions.

The client office was in the central region where all other administrative offices were situated (just like our Fort – Churchgate Area in Mumbai). So every morning we used to become part of the river of people… train frequency was very good… with a gap of just two minutes. In spite of so many people traveling the stations are maintained very clean.
Apart from disciplined people, there was one more reason or that, eating was banned in the train or on the platform.

Another thing I noticed was that the city was very much disabled friendly. All the buildings had some or the other way allowed the disabled people to move around. All the steps were generally accompanied by either a lift or a slope. All the areas had different patterns engraved on the flour to guide the blind people. The patterns changed indicating different messages stop or where there was a turn. The pattern would change from strips to blocks and so on. These patterns are followed on most of the footpaths also. When it comes so signals, the traffic signals have two indicators one is the sign in red green and another is the audio signal for the blind.

I had also expected that we would face food problems. But nothing of that sort happened thanks to a sizable population from the subcontinent. After some days stay in hotel we moved into serviced apartments. This was a typical Chinese place. We could smell the food from the road. Roaming through the market we saw all those “famous” things about Chinese food…. Lizards, frogs and all other animals I don’t know about. We went into a shop that served the fishes. The fishes, crabs, lobsters were kept live in tanks. One could choose the fish and have the dish prepared.

I had entered in Hong Kong on a on arrival 14 day visa. The total stay accounted for 17 days. So in order to get the visa extended we had to visit Macau… erstwhile Portuguese colony. We entered Macau. Spent some time there and came back to Hong Kong. This act of immediate return made us a subject of interrogation. The immigration authorities suspecting us to be potential illegal immigrants had a brief interview of ours before stamping the visa again.

Not much shopping…. I found that there was not much difference in prices in India and Hong Kong for the standard branded electronics items. So I did not buy anything from there except some small gifts and an antique watch I could not resist buying. I just told my colleague that this watch can be face but still I m willing to take that risk.

On my return journey, While at Suvarnabhumi Airport of Bangkok, I thought of getting some Thai coins. I went to nearby exchange counters, and handed over a Ten HK Dollar note to the girl at the counter. I still remember the surprised and curious look on her face since all others were exchanging at least a hundred US dollars. Somehow she was even more surprised when I requested for “Coins only”.

Life as usual…

My last post was on 5th Dec… Nearly a month ago.
It is not that I did not get time to write… but nothing worth writing was happening.
Or may me nothing happened I would have liked to write about.
Finally this feeling of “not happening” itself had made me write this.
Again it is not that there were no events….as I have started writing, so many events are passing through my mind.

Biggest event was Sachin’s wedding on 14th Dec. It was an event for which I had planned since long. And there are some incidents associated with it also especially about the Air Ticket.
I was almost certain that I would miss the wedding because of planned trip to Hong Kong. I thought of using the tickets for some other visit to home. I called up the Yatra.com for rescheduling the tickets. To my horror, they said that I can not reschedule the tickets. So I asked about cancellation. This was even bigger shock. I was not permitted to cancel the tickets too. If I cancelled then all I would get back was the taxes that I had paid. That is 975*2 and I would loose the ticket cost and booking charges etc etc... a loss of about 4000 was imminent. I was advised to travel anyhow.
Luckily I decided to wait and watch and cancel the tickets a day before I leave for HK.
The trip got delayed and I was saved for the day.
As a result I made it to Pune along with Vinayak to attend the wedding. Still I did not feel like writing much about it may because it was not as surprising as his engagement a year ago.

Return Journey from Pune was another big story… We left from Pune at around 4 00pm expecting to reach Mumbai by 7 00pm. Thanks to Traffic, I made it to Borivali at 11 00 pm (Yes… Borivali. This was the blunder. Instead of Dadar we came by Borivali bus.).

Actually this HK trip had another big impact. It made me prepone me the biggest event in recent period in my life. I was supposed to meet Deepa on 15th Dec to decide fate of our relationship. I was forced to prepone it and visit home on 25th and 26th Nov. (this was the “some other visit” I mentioned earlier.). I will write about that big event some other time.

On Picnic front also nothing much happened apart from a one day visit to Infy Mysore.
In fact I am feeling very sad that I wasted two big weekends just sitting and sleeping at home. For so many reasons, I could not gather friends to accompany me for a picnic.
All I did was sit at home and read books.

In office, days have been pretty much busy because of this Hong Kong matter.
Just before 31st that is on 29th we had a team outing for my project. It was fun.

Hmmm… I ended up writing so much even when I say there was nothing.
Now I realize that these events were not the ones that excited me and the ones that excited me I am not willing to write at this moment.

Now I am supposed to travel to Hong Kong this week end. Life again is expected to become exciting…

Serial on Ravana

Few days ago I saw on episode on a new serial on Ravana.

First time perhaps it showed the “other side of the story” we have always been looking at the character as the epitome of the badness. No doubt he serves as a fine example of greatly personality spoiled by ego.

But this serial makes you think.
In fact all many of the bad boys in the history if we take a relook at, we generally find positives a lot. It is generally one or two bad acts or characteristics that end up in putting them up in the bad rankings.

I had same feelings when I read the Mein Kampf.
Take example of Karna also. An otherwise perfect personality was portrayed badly just because he did not betray his friend. If he had done then he would also have been portrayed as a good boy.

And the basic fact that history is always written by the victors who would obviously try
to glorify themselves. This is not to glorify Ravana, but is it not wrong to ignore completely the good traits of Ravana as well as mistakes of Ram?

What if Ravana had won in the war? One more thing is that all the right wrong opinions are relative.

Ravana was a great devotee of lord Shiva. Ravana is known to be a great Brahmin and composer of Shiva Tandava Stotra. He was also a master of Veda’s.
Even though he won Lanka from Kubera, he was a just king and as the name “Golden” implies Lanka flourished under his rule.

If we look at some basic facts from Ramayana, Ravana did not abduct Seeta out of lust or something. He did so as a revenge for the treatment Lakshmana gave to his sister shurpanakha. Certainly, cutting someone’s nose and ears just because she expressed her love was not a just act.

Moreover he kept Seeta perfectly safe in his Ashokvan. If we wanted he could have done whatever he wanted with Seeta, what if he had cut nose of seta and sent her back? But he did not do so.

On the other hand, Rama did kill Vaali hiding behind a rock. No rules applied to Ram and he could justify it because he was victor.

I always like to compare the behaviors of Vibhishana on one hand and Karma, Bhishama and Dronnacharya. They stuck to their duties and loyalties in the face of adversity. On the other hand Vibhishana left Ravana and joined Rama.

Karna was perfect in this regard. He fought against his own brothers but did not betray his friend.