Wild Flowers

Recently I'd been to my grandmother's place, which also happens to be my birthplace. A small village by the name Melpal, situated about 70 kilometres from Chickmaglur. In all a 310 kilometre drive from Bangalore.

As always, the drive to and from that place is absolutely exhilerating.And if I have to write more about the drive itself, I shall have to post it as a separate thread. In short, all I can say is that it really gives me the sense of riding an unstoppable juggernaut and see all other vehicles on the highway fade away into oblivion in my rear view mirror.

Now let me talk about some of the subtle things in life. About things created by nature.

Each and everytime I go there, the first morning of my stay, I compulsively seem to hang the camera around my neck and start walking around my grandma's house. And everytime I get to photograph different things.Different flowers, different birds (winged variety only) and you wont believe it, everytime I get to see even different varieties of coffee beans!

But the ones that I personally like the most are that of the flowers. Flowers that you might never see in any flower show, flowers that never are grown in any garden or park. Flowers that just grow for themselves in the jungle. Flowers that most of us never get to see in a lifetime.Seeing all this reminds me the famous words of a Kannada poet that translates something like this.

"Live a life that is like the fragrant wildflower that blooms silently behind the leaf and gives fragrance to the mankind without geing ostentatious."

Here are some of the chosen pics.

A few of my friends came back to me saying that they unable to access my Flickr album, thanks to the website blocking mechanisms in place in the office network. That's why I decided to hit back with brute force and post some of these pics on my blog as inline images. I guess this ploy will work as long as the IT security guys decide not to block even blogger.com.

And since I'm always so much of a show off, here are some more selected pics that a few of my friends werent able to access.

This last one's that of Soma. I remember him getting us exotic fruits from deep inside the orchards when we were kids.Itseems he's been working with the family for the past 30 years or so now. I wonder if my folks gave him a long service award of some sorts for that.

I guess that's about it for now. Hope to be back soon with a lot more things to share.

Hitting out!!!

After a long period of sullen silence, its time for one of those Point Blank posts.
A few days back I was thinking of the importance of planning. Then the picture of this freeway interchange in LA that I had to drive through a few years back came into my mind.

This interchange was so intricately complex that it took me almost 20 minutes of studying Google maps to figure out which part to take to reach my destination. When I reached there, I was simply astounded to see a multistoreyed flyover system in place. All this prompted me to read more about this concrete labyrinth and find out, "How did they do it?"
To my surprise, I found that this interchange was initially built in the late 1950's and this is how it looked then.



I could figure out that all this needed an enormous amount of planning.Not only it had to meet the needs then, but also it had to be scalable to meet the traffic needs of the future.
They might have taken a couple of years initially, and a couple of years later for the lane doubling and also to increase the number of tentacles. But most definetely they must have spent three times that duration in just planning about this interchanges.

In contrast, I wondered how many of the softwares that we develop are truly scalable. Then I remembered this famous line, "For any software to be reusable, it first has to be usable" and then concluded "No chance".

After having spent close to six good years in this industry, I figured out a whole lot of things which make a project a successful one. Some of the items that I can list out are good planning and analysis, a good design, disciplined implementation and an exhaustive testing phase.

Planning has to essentially come from the top i.e the manager or the lead or even higher, and that has to percolate down to every developer. Right from the moment the project starts, till it ends there needs to be plan for every major activity that's done.

A thorough analysis is important right at the beginning, so that what's to be done i.e the requirements are clearly captured so that the planning is much more effective. This has to be done by all the members working in the team, so that everyone knows what's expected out of them. The leads and the senior engineers need to take initiative in guiding everyone, but everyone needs to participate in this.

A well documented design which is of utmost importance. The design also needs to be done in such a way that it's scalable,manageable and also modifyable without it affecting the rest of the design. The golden rule here to be remembered here is, "The cost of a defect increases if its found at a later stage in a project."


Disciplined implementation is necessary to ensure that the code developed by every developer works in every scenario that its designed to.And if it doesnt work, then atleast it shouldnt take the whole system down with it.


Good testing phase is essential so that every possible scenario that was missed out by the developer either in analysis or design or implementation is made blatantly visible to everyone.


All this doesnt need a SEI CMM Level Certificate or a Six Sigma Black Belt to get this fact straight into the head.


Now some straight questions.

1.How many of the project plans are really good plans and not just ones that hoodwink the quality audit team?


2.How many of that our managers make are feasible and not something that's so aggresive that the members working in the team forget their way to their homes and their family?


3.How many of us do the design document before we complete our coding?


4. How many of us consciously write code with the same commitment that we used to write out exam papers (as if our lives depended on it)?


5.How many of us even actually sit at own desks for even 50 % of the time that we have entered in our timesheets?


6.And how many of us take every bug reported by the tester as a serious one and attempt to fix it from the root cause?


Here are some excerpts from my recent experiences.

1.There was this person from another team who was implementing something who tried to explain me what he was doing. When our team asked him for a design document, he nonchalantly replied, "Coding is still not complete."


2.Another female member in my team had the ignominy of getting her code reviewed by me. And being the incorregible stickler that I am,I asked her this exact question,"Do you ever dress up with the same shabbiness as you have written this code?"
She tried to convince me that the time alloted was too less for her to do all that.I took a full 300 seconds to cleanup the code that she had developed in past 3 weeks.


3. And coming to her point that time wasnt sufficient, I could clearly figure that why when I found that she took 2 half an hour coffee breaks, 1 one hour lunch break and 1 of those forty five minutes snack breaks in the evening.


In the formative years of my career I had the oppurtunity to work as a contractor in a small company comprising of 60 people in the UK. But what they developed was being used in more than a few million phones worldwide.I found that logically and technically they were just a little better than us. But what made them click was their planning, their approach and the unwavering focus and passion towards their work. And yet they found time for everything else in life, because of the kind of planning that was put in by their managers.

In contrast, one the first day in my present project I was given the impression that I was already 3 months behind schedule.


I had another brief stint in the US a year later where I worked as a contractor at the headquarters of a large semiconductor company. My manager there used to develop the highest amount of code in our entire team. Added to that 2 of my team members whom I never met were seamlessly checking in their code from another location situated a couple of thousand miles away.

The question is, "How do they do it?"
Planning, process and attention to detail were the key things that I could observe in their approach. Work was so well planned that on most days I had enough work to do for 8 hours and then leave for home peacefully thereafter.

In comparison, when I leave for home nowadays, I either have the compulsive guilty feeling of leaving so early, or a premonition of the bad things that might happen to me following day in office.

Being a part of this sytem I just wonder if something can be done to change all this.
Or is it just a crazy dream?


Till the time that I find an answer, here's something real whacky that I read in my good friend's status message,
"If you find your application hanging, then just tighten the noose and let it die."


Maybe that's what I should try!

The Inner Turmoil

As I sat down in the bus today, I just asked myself, "Isn't my greatest enemy, the enemy who's within?"

It all started with two days of lull in office, most of which were spent hitting the refresh button of all my Email clients, GMail and so on.All this led to an unusually long rally of thoughts, which went back and forth in my mind and led to a few unanswered questions as I boarded the evening bus back home today.

Its not that something wrong happened in these 2 days.It was just that nothing happened at all. A state of perennial nothingness, one can say.

Some random thoughts, some of them just Echoes that I hear from my favourite band.

"Did I get to trade my chance for a stroll in a park to a lead role in a steel cage?"

"Why do my plans either come to nought, or half a page of scribbled lines?"

"Is patience such a big virtue that it later manifests into procastination?"

"Am I a firefly that gets sucked into the next light bulb that I chance upon?"

"Is it really better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all?"

"Do I try to not jump into lucid spring water just because I'm afraid to swim?"

As I look outside my bedroom window,the skies look so blue and the world seems so true, but then I ask myself "Is that why am I so numb?"

But here's One question that's been bugging me for the past 3-4 months or so.Ever since I played hopelessy badly in the badminton tournament, and yet won it.
"Have I forgotten how to win, or is it that I just dont want to win?
Or am I winning only because I don't want to lose, and not because I really deserve to win ?"

I dont know the answers to many of these questions myself. And I even dont know why I chose to blog this.
I guess that nearly sums what's on my mind.
"Don't know what to do.
Whether to live in a world of blissful ignorance and a saint like complacence.
Or......"

One Fine Saturday Morning

It was a pleasant Saturday morning and I decided that I wont waste this one lying around at home. So I woke up long before sunrise and decided to drive away someplace not so far away from Bangalore city. My good friend Sunil's always eager to give me good company, provided that he's in India.

He said knew a hillock just after the international airport, which was used by my old manager(from my previous company) for his previous photoshoot. Itseems he was so impressed with the place that he spent a couple of hours in that place, taking pictures of this boulder in every angle that he could.


But being the simple person that I am, the esoteric is always far beyond my grasp.After walking a few hundred steps, I found this place which was in ruins.


That's when we chanced upon a milestone which said, "Nandi - 23 kms". So we decided, "Nandi door nahi". The moment I took the smaller road that branched off the national highway, we were pretty much convinced that we had made the right decision. Our first sight was that the first rays of the sun had still not melted the mist that covered the mountains. For both of us who are used to all the smoke and polluted air of Bangalore city at rush hour, this seemed like heaven.

The climb up Nandi hills seemed no competition to the scary climb that I had done six months ago on the western ghats region of Agumbe.The roads were also seemed a lot better asphalted making this climb up seem like a mere sprint.

Most of Nandi Hills was developed during Tipu Sultan's rule, when he used this as a summer paradise. And the entrance to the place gave ample example of the type of architecture that existed during that time.



If the entrance was about all about architecture, what was inside was about nature's beauty at its best. I could say a thousand words about it. But then I would finally give up saying that I simply dont have the vocabulary to match it. Thats why I decided against boring everyone including myself into writing so much and chose to post these photos instead.




There were quite a few people there already, who I surmise were there to view the sunrise which Nandi is so famous for. A few random clicks were taken here and there, when I realised that the sun's rays were at it melting down the mist slowly, but surely. We spent the next one hour or so just walking around aimlessly and trying to capture some images. Then it was time to get back. Our initial plan was to drive to BIAL and check out the place. But then our empty stomachs commanded us to get back straight home. We then figured out,"CTR ka signal mil raha hain!!!"


On the way back, we chanced to see a few Fauji bhai log who had come all the way from Bihar for some kind of training. They seemed to be taking a break, I mean breakfast. And I didnt miss the oppurtunity to take some pictures.



And in return two of their senior officers didnt miss the oppurtunity to ask for a lift in my car to the foot of Nandi hills, which was the starting point for their trek.

We encountered a lot more traffic on our way back. But that didnt deter me from driving in the range of 100-120 kmph consistently. This, to me gives a heady feeling, similar to what a sadhu feels when he has had his puff of opium. The hunger of the empty stomachs was such that we would have stopped at the next chai ki dukaan and have something to eat there. But then, the prospect of having tasty CTR masala dosas made us decide against it.

If the trip to Nandi was one thing, then the taste of CTR's masala dosas was quite entirely another. As the old Lays that goes like this, "No one can eat just one", we never could stop at just 1 dosa. Sunil and I gulped down two each. Knowing our voracity to devour good food, we could have easily gone on to eat a few more, but then sanity got the better of us.

Some points of note from the short trip which started at 6 AM and got over at 10 AM.
1. The serene quietness of Bangalore city in the wee hours of the morning. Drive on the same roads at 9 AM, and you'll feel its at the other end of the spectrum.
2. A great drive back and forth to Nandi proved me that exhilaration is not always due to acceleration(pardon me for this Joshi-ism).
3.Nandi hills, simply amazing and reminds me yet again, "Nandi door nahin".
4. CTR masala dosas. No one can eat just one.
5. Getting to catch up with a very good friend and talk about life and its travails. Only after I reached back home I realised that the car stereo was never switched on for the entire duration. A rare occurence in my car.

Signing off with hope that this is the first of many such drives and saying,"Life's a journey, enjoy the drive."

Never miss the bus

Its been a long time since I posted something on my blog. Thanks to laziness, work pressure and thanks to IPL too.

I've always believed that one should never miss the bus. And being the stickler that I am, I kept the record intact for 7 long years right from my college days. And 2 weeks back this streak ended when I missed the bus for the very first time. I guess a lot of it had to do with the fact that I was badly shaken and stirred by the near miss while driving home the previous night.
Anyways, that's another story altogether.
Everybody who knows me well enough knows that I absolutely adore my car. I'd never miss an opportunity to take her out for a long drive.In fact, she's been my only girlfriend till now.

Inspite of all this, I prefer to travel to office by company transport. One of the reasons being that I feel extremely guilty to travel alone in a car that can seat 5 people comfortably. And the other being that going by office transport means that I can outsource my driving woes through Bangalore traffic to someone else and just enjoy the goings on around me.
So what's so special in travelling by bus, so much so that I prefer doing that vis-a-vis being in company of my lady in red. Here are some random thoughts about my experiences on travelling by office bus.And as usual I've changed the names of all my colleagues to be a bit more discreet and maintain their privacy as well.

Its 8:10 AM and I get into Route 16.The driver floors the gas pedal even before I get a foothold. I seemingly lose balance and inadvertently stamp on Prathima's feet, who immediately glances at me with that "How dare you do that?" look of hers.
I walk quietly past the Rajah's seat where Lord Ranjan is reading his newspaper. I call that as the Rajah's seat because the way in which he sits on it seat reminds me those old Hindi movies where a haughty king ruled the world from his throne. And he wont budge, no matter who comes and asks him for space.

I settle down in one of the backseats, I hear a manager and a HR personnel working on the rumour mill about the HR's new foreign travel policy. I jostle myself next to a lean and short person who seems to be taking a full one and a half seats and leaving me with the rest.I think to myself, "What crap are these people discussing early in the morning!!!"

My prying eyes glance on everyone around. I find Suresh in the first seat happily dozing away to glory. And Deepti is listening to FM on her new Samsung mobile in the very next seat.

Across the aisle, there are two ladies, who don the role of regulators of the bus. Right from the route the driver takes, to the radio station that's played and all the way upto deciding the departure time in the evenings, everything has to be approved by them. Without them itseems that everything is shunya on Route 16.

Then I happen to see the two most effervescent people in the bus, Prathima and Navya.
A sleepy looking Navya is reading a magazine, or rather covertly preparing for her CAT exams. She looks cute in her blue dress, but that look on her face suggests that she hasn't slept properly for a long time now.

Prathima tries to pick up a conversation with her. On seeing Navya's keen interest in the book, Prathima gives up and rests her shoulders on Navya's and quickly pretends to fall asleep.
I'm through with glancing at all the junta in the bus, I start to aimlessly look at the world outside the bus. I see a few students waiting for their college bus. A few cabbies stopping bang in the middle of the road to pick up some passengers. All this sightseeing comes to an abrupt end, when the driver screeches the brakes as he decides to stop at a red signal for a change.

The last passenger is picked up and we all sign in the attendance, and the regulators quickly double check if everyone's signed in. All's well and quiet. The bus goes past some of the college areas, after which I decide to get my forty winks.

I manage to close my eyes for the next 300 seconds and suddenly my reverie is interrupted by a broken speaker which loudly blares, "Jinke marina...Ni jinke marina". Apparently this is the favourite song of one of the regulators, and it looks like she's literally threatened the driver to increase the volume, "Or Else...."
As I regain my senses I find that I'm not the only one who got a wake up call. I hear the people behind me mutter feebly, "Enappa ee golu". I look at the time in my watch and say, "Not bad.8:45 AM and we are already on Old Madras Road. 10 mins more and we are in office. I bet I couldn't have driven this quick in this traffic." I quickly make a mental note of things to be done for the day and also get prepared to be tormented and also to torment others.

Our driver negotiates past the million speed breakers on the Bagmane main road, everytime reminding me to work out my back, or risk a disc failure. Everybody is waiting to get out of the bus, just like a shaken can of Coca Cola is waiting to be popped open. This short travel has probably energised everyone so much that all are raring to go and start off with their day's work.


If that was about getting to work, then here's the getting back home part.

Being in the IMS team, me and most of my colleagues rarely get to leave by the 6:15 cab. So much so that we consider leaving at 6:15 as working half day. Most of the times I take the 8 PM cab, in which I have good company of Chethan who will be back from his gym workout. But the problem is, that Chethan is mostly in sasuraal, a.k.a Suwon a.k.a HQ.

If Chethan's around, most of the discussion revolves around our managers,team members and office politics. If he's in sasuraal, most my journey is spent rather uneventfully.

But sometimes the work pressure gets so much that my head involuntarily starts debugging the brilliant looking and yet crappy code in my head. To make matters worse this goes on in a for(;;)loop all the way till next morning, even after I've gotten into sleep.

The times when I get to leave after half day's work (read as 6:15 PM), the whole world seems a different place. The sunset scene when the bus goes past Ulsoor lake is simply outstanding. The silhouette of the trees and the birds perched on them just reminds me why Bangalore's so beautiful. There seems to be a flurry of activity everywhere around.
At one of the signals, I find another bus from our office standing next to us. I am shocked to see a couple of people standing and doing a sequence of animations which suggested that they were having a fight. I crosscheck with my baddy friend in that bus who's busily birdwatching outside. He quickly dispels all my doubts about an ensuing fight by saying, "Dumb Charades".

Recently I bought a new mobile of which I like to make maximum use of. So I frantically change the radio stations to see if my kind of music is being played in any of them. Finding none I fallback to the media player. And nine times out of ten, the first song that I play is Echoes by Pink Floyd, which simply seems to take me to a different ethereal world altogether.

I also have some good company in the form of Navya and Prathima who are ever exuberant and always in the mood for some good natured banter. Being the recluse that I am, I rarely can bring up a good conversation. But somehow these two ladies get me to get started off with my one liners (read as PJs).
Somehow I surmise that Navya is thinking that if she was alone with no one around, then she could have spent most of the journey chatting or texting on the mobile with her boyfriend(also can be interpreted as a friend who's a boy).

The rest of the bus seems to have dozed off into glory. As the cab wriggles its way past through the congested lanes of Bamboo Bazaar, Im momentarily depressed to see a whole lot of people living in shanties. I feel bad to see their baneful existence, and ask myself, "Why is there an ocean of poverty around an island of wealth?"
We Indians we are wealthy enough to buy out entire companies of luxury brands like Jaguar and Land Rover, but still we dont have enough money to take car of our poor and desolate. And then I feel there's still some hope as the cab slowly goes past a sculpture of Christ. If not much then the least that we all can do is pray.

Sixteen of the eighteen kilometres from office is covered in 45 minutes. But the last two take up a full 20 minutes. As my stop comes near, I nervously decide to walk up to the driver and tell him to stop the bus. Nervous, because not so long ago, when I told a driver to stop, he stopped instantaneously in the middle of the road, making me tip over onto the engine bay. Needless to say a biker rear ended our bus in the process.
I slowly tread the weary way and muse about the irony that my stop's about 3 minutes walk from my from my house. And sometimes it takes me 2 minutes to just cross the jam packed road. With this, I'm happy that I'm still fresh and re-energised enough to write this post. Happy that I didn't have to negotiate Bangalore traffic. Happy that I got to switch off from my work. And these are precisely some things that I wont be able to do when I drive down myself to office.
That's why I say, "Never miss the bus."

Bangalore'd

Imagine a pleasant Saturday morning and you are driving at 7 AM and tuned in to Time Tunnel on Radio Indigo.Happily listening to Freddie Mercury singing "Those were the days of our lives..." in his magnificiently operatic voice .Eager to drive along picturesque Golf Course Road.A road which instantly makes you feel as though you are passing through a sleepy village in Europe.The golf greens, the tall trees and the first rays of sun trying to make their way through the fog, just make one feel lucky to be in the place called Bangalore. But when I drove past this road a few weeks back, I was aghast to see that all that remained were uprooted tree stumps.The whole road seemed to look like a place which was ravaged by a hurricane.Apparently the civic authorities wanted to build a 6 lane access road to the new international airport and decided to cut a few hundred trees and widen the road.This sight just made me wonder, "Is this the price we have to pay for development?"
For a long while I wanted to get up early on a Saturday morning, drive upto the Golf Course road and take some photos of that beautiful stretch of road.But now I'm too late for that.Driving on that road will never be the same.

So I thought I shall post this one taken inside Cubbon Park, before someone decided to turn it into a concrete jungle.This photo was taken by my good friend Vishal Jogi, who won an award at the Bangalore Photography Exhibition for this photo.

He also gave me this pic of BRV on Cubbon Road. This place was used by the army to screen movies over the weekends right from the days of the British Raj. Who knows, in some days' time this beautiful building might give way to a state of the art Metro railway station for trains to the new International Airport.

Over the last 10 years Bangalore has grown at a rate faster than anybody could imagineAt a rate even it was not ready to cope up with.A lot of things have changed during this time, some for good, some for bad.And a lot many things have remained the same.

Previously Bangalore was known as the Garden City of India.But now it has become the Park City of India.Parks as in Bagmane tech Park, Manyata Tech Park, Embassy Tech Park and so on.Bangalore also had atleast a hundred fresh water lakes in the early 1900s.Some of these lakes were encroached to form areas like Koramangala.And some other lakes were filled with tonnes and tonnes of landfill to form large IT tech parks.So the next time it rains heavily and the place you live or work goes underwater, you probably know why.

Bangalore was also known as the pensioners' paradise. Evidence of that could be seen whenever you spotted a Premier Padmini being driven by a senior citizen in the exact centre of the road at a leisurely speed of 20 kmph. Today, this has been replaced by powerful bikes and sleek cars which have the highest acceleration after the signal goes red.Their shrill horns could even wake up the dead.They can also cut through lanes faster than I can cut an apple into two halves.
In those days when I was a kid, a Sunday would mean a family picnic to Cubbon Park or Lalbagh, where kids played at Bal Bhavan or go on a ride on Putani Express.Now times have changed.Come Sunday and you can see almost all of the public getting compulsively settled in one of the many crowded shopping malls.Probably that explains why one ends up paying fifty rupees for a popcorn at Forum mall. And you can also see everyone from papa, mama and the kids gleefully digging into burgers and pizzas.
Bangalore was known for its pleasant weather all round the year.Summers were mild, with a bit of rain every afternoon to cool things down.Most parts of the year we never needed a fan.Winters were pleasant, and the monsoon always extended from June to November. But now it can rain even in February.
Thanks to the phenomenon of global warming, and also due to rampant urbanisation,pollution and cutting down of trees, there are extremities in weather patterns.Every time it rains, I feel that the best mode of transport in the city is using boats. But I'm a lot relieved that this year its already started raining, and its still April. The only downside about these rains is that it makes commuting a miserable experience, unless one is going by a gondola.

There were two aspects about yesteryear Bangalore that need a mention here.Something that not many people talk about.One, is the defence and space research related setup. Bangalore has been a key centre for the army, airforce, HAL, DRDO,ISRO and so on.Other than their contribution towards India's defence needs, their other major contribution is that they have preserved most of the green cover inside the city. If not for them, probably a lot of defence land would be encroached by the powerful land mafia for commercial purposes.
The second reason is the educational institutions in Bangalore. Institutions like IISc, more popularly known at Tata Institute and National Law School are rated amongst the best in the world. And if that's not enough,there were a lot of top notch engineering and medical colleges setup in the the 60s, 70s through the 90s.Unfortunately, many politicians saw this as a business oppurtunity. As a result, one could see medical and engineering colleges mushrooming out from places like factory sheds.
Companies like Infosys, Wipro and others made it big and in the process helped in putting Bangalore on the IT map of the world. But the civic authorities were not alert to the situation, and never planned for the years to come. They were callous then, and they are the same even today.If that was not enough then gross political apathy and mismanagement has brought Bangalore to a state that it is in today. Thanks to the Son of the Soil, we are getting an International Airport in some months from now. Had it not been them we would have had one by 1998 itself.
Many of you might be relatively new to this city, and maybe from other states too. Many might have been living in Bangalore for 4-5 years now, and still not have found it necessary to learn Kannada, because most of the people here try to talk to you in the language you know.Be it English,Hindi, Tamil or Telugu.Well, I'm not a jingoist who'd insist that everyone who lives in Bangalore learns Kannada.But I would definetely admire a person who would want to learn the language of the land in which he is staying. The people are good, friendly, amicable but that won't be the same forever.
Had I been in a place like Chennai or Cochin, then I would be compelled to learn Tamil or Malayalam.Going by the current trends, the day isn't far when some Kannada activist group would enforce that everyone living in Bangalore should learn Kannada, and maybe blackout all other language channels in Bangalore.
Areas in old Bangalore like Basavanagudi, Malleshwaram still have that old world charm in them. You can still find a lot of elderly people sitting around in small eateries, sipping their favourite filter coffee. A lot of men and women walking around in beautiful parks like Lalbagh and Cubbon Park.
A lot of us including me who work in hi- fi offices would be happy to spend 5000 Rupees at a swanky restaurant on a meal for two. But it still can't match the joy and satisfaction of a Masala Dosa at CTR or Vidyarthi Bhavan.It still cannot match the taste of Halli Mane's akki rotti ,or the jolada rotti oota at Kamath Yatri Nivas. And all this for under three hundred rupees for a family of four, tax and tips included.
Everybody loves many things about Bangalore.And everybody cribs about the traffic here.Gone are those days when areas in and around Majestic were considered to be the traffic hotspots of the city. The traffic in the rest of the city has multiplied tenfold, while the traffic in Central Business District has multiplied only twofold. People suddenly seemed to have become more competitive. And they want to show off this competence on the roads too, by breaking signals, honking another vehicle into submission and racing on the opposite direction of a one way. While the policmen try to control their ever enlarging beer bellies, and satiate their greedy pockets.

Some things still remain the same.Even as kids, we were told to be careful of going out of home after 7 PM. Now the time limit has moved to 9 PM, especially if its for ladies.I wouldn't let any lady I know to travel by auto rickshaw after dark.Especially if she has to travel in and around the outer ring road, KR Puram, Marathhalli area. Some people might think I'm paranoid. Ask my sister, and she'll confirm that I am.
I wouldn't ever want to pick up a quarrel on the road with an autorickshaw driver or a cabbie.I once did and nearly got beaten to death. It was not so safe a city then, its not so safe a place even today.
In all this, I could see a sea of change in the people, our attitudes, our ways of life.
Money has been devalued like anything. For instance, a 50 rupee tip at a restaurant is more than the daily wage of many housmaids in Bangalore. Scruples seem to have no place anymore.I read someone having this sticker on the back of his bike, "Yes, its my dad's road!" But then I thought his dad bought the road and got the footpath for free, when I saw this fellow riding on the footpath to escape a traffic jam.

Sometimes I wonder, what's wrong with me? Why am I complaining?
No offence intended to anyone. But a lot of people in Bangalore, especially those working in IT, see this city as nothing more than a H1B/HSMP launchpad, from where they can go to the first world and never turn back to India.
I wonder, do such people really care a damn about Bangalore at all?
I don't expect the bureaucrats or the government to do anything about this. I feel the onus is on all of us, people who feel they are proud Bangaloreans, to change things. At this moment I'm clueless about how I can contribute in a big way to this. But atleast I've made a start by trying to be a responsible citizen to a great extent. Trying to respect the traffic laws even when there's no policeman around, paying my taxes on time, and of course, trying to pen my thoughts in this post.

How things work?

Appraisals are due for me shortly, and by the time I complete this post I'm pretty sure the annual story telling competition in my project shall be over.Whether or not my story impresses my manager is yet to be seen.But after spending close to 5 years in the IT industry, I have some views about our industry in general, that I felt like sharing. Let me try to be different.Instead of being a software engineer, I shall be the layman whose primary job is to put some bricks together, in the form of writing code.And the whole process can be compared to putting those bricks together to form a wall.
The wall building business in India is a service industry that runs on the man * month model. Now lets see what it is...
Say a large American building company Behemoth Inc wants to get a wall built from India, as they dont have enough people to build walls.Maybe that they simply don't want to waste time on mundane things like building walls, as they want to focus their efforts on bigger edifices instead.The marketing division of the Indian company, Patents Unlimited(PUN) somehow finds out about Behemoth's plan and now wants to take up the project.

Surya who is a manager from PUN's R&D group, alongwith the marketing team unit is rushed to meet Dave at Behemoth's center in the USA to bid for the project.Behemoth Inc is primarily interested in getting the work done at the lowest cost possible.
Their discussion goes something like this.
Dave:"If 10 resources working 8 hours a day can build a wall 300m long in 20 days, how many men and how many days will you need to build a wall 600 m long in 25 days?"
Surya:"We shall need 16 resources." (after making some bizarre calculations)
Dave: "But your competitor quoted 12 resources."
Surya:"On second thoughts, we also need 12 resources. We had not accounted for the fact that you already built 300 m of the wall.We just need to extend its length and paint it in the colour you want. And we have experts in our team for all that."
And after many such discussions, PUN somehow gets the project.If that was the manager and the marketing team, then lets see who these "experts" that Surya was talking about : The Team Structure.
Surya himself is a very ambitious manager who has a very clear agenda : Maximise profits, extract the most by investing the least.He wants every member in his team to work only between 9 AM and 6 PM.But is actually a hypocrite when he insists that work is finished even if someone has to sit late.
Moreover, he knows as much about wall building, as much as you and I would know about the moons of Mercury.
In their recent campus hiring spree PUN hired a lot of trainee artistes from the top art colleges in the country, of which Anil and Sunil are alloted to work on the Behemoth project.In their pre placement talk, the HR makes them believe that their work is very similar to that of Pablo Picasso.So these two enthusiastic but gullible chaps are blissfully unaware that their artistic painting skills shall be put to use to paint a brick wall.
Ajay, Vijay and Sujay are three good friends who have about three years experience in the company. They're almost always found together. They come in at their own convenient time, take three leisured thirty minute coffee breaks apart from the lunch break in which they spend in the cafetaria discussing about politics, economic,sports, and of course, ornithology. They also know the golden rule,"Meetings - the best alternative to work." So they make it a point to schedule one meeting everyday in between the breaks.
How could team be complete without some girls in it. So there comes Charitha.Smart, intelligent, good looking but supremely lazy. Every twenty minutes she's on her seat, she takes a break lasting forty minutes, in which she has a cup of coffee and reads two sections from the newspaper.Everybody in the team thinks that she's superhuman, primarily because she makes even the impossible look trivial with her smooth talk.On her part Charitha knows that nothing's impossible for the person who doesn't have to do it.
If that was about Charitha then here comes Sunitha. A nice smile greets you everytime you meet her. A simple girls who minds her work, and doesn't mind going the extra mile now and then, even if means that she is doing Charitha's work.But Surya is oblivious of Sunitha's existence, mainly because Charitha succesfully takes all of the credit for what Sunitha did.
Then there is Anitha.Not a girl anymore.Approaching thirty, happily married and with a three year old kid. Nice lady, but has her own family priorities, and family problems too.Inspite of all these, she manages to do a decent job.
There's also Murali,the seniormost layman in the team.Vastly experienced and is very methodical in his approach, and of course as calm as a lake placid.Focussed and an expert on his job, but has a problem expressing his expertise because he's excessively laconic.He could be the next project leader in the making, only if Surya knew that he was so good.
Just as other Indian companies that build up several layers of redundancy, by way of heirachical designations.This project has a project leader in it, in the form of Sachin. A shrewd guy stuck in between the manager and the team. Leader of a team which he has no idea or intent to handle.That's mostly because he has applied for his H1 visa and is dreaming of settling down in the "first world".
This team also has a new joinee in Sameer who had a lengthy three hour interview, and a fruitful compensation discussion. He came into the team only because Surya supposedly committed him an onsite opportunity, to work at Behemoth center during the integration stage and also was given a handsome joining bonus.
Every now and then Sachin goes to Surya asking him for more resources as he doesn't have enough entry level brick layers.People who can get down to work and get their hands dirty.He also knows that to build a wall of that size in the time alloted he needs 15 resources.
Surya has a well rehearsed answer for this,"As you know we have already made some offers.Now, if the HR is able to convince them, we might have some new joinees within the next week or so."
But deep inside Surya has this devious thought..."The customer is paying for 12 resources.Now if I save on these new joinees, I might as well boost my profits. I can always rip off the customer with my itemised bills, in the form of weekly status reports."
So the project kickoff takes place and the entire team goes for a lavish buffet lunch at the Grand Ashok. Ajay, Vijay and Sujay even arranged a cab for this, ofcourse at the company cost. Except the freshers and the new joinee, everyone in the team is well aware that when working with Surya free lunches are found only in a mousetrap.
And then everybody starts off with their work.
Sachin makes a plan for all the members in his team, putting unrealistic dates for each activity, in such a way that it fits into Surya's plans. But then he totally forgets about the actual blueprint for the wall, the height, the length,the quality of bricks,cement,etc.He knows that the customer had specified how long the wall should be,but not how high it should be. But now he's too scared to ask, as feels he's a bit too late for that .
Murli did everything that Surya and Sachin had missed out in their plans.But he didn't know how much time he had at hand.So he sets about doing a very methodical and correct job, but at his own pace.
Anitha and Sunitha know that Murli is a good guide and take his help to get started. But since they are not as experienced they take their own time, as they had to rework on some sections of the wall every alternate day.
The three musketeers Ajay, Vijay and Sujay lend their hand whenever they get time off from their breaks and of course, their meetings.But the progress is too slow.They even meet Sachin asking him for some training on building such walls.
Sameer is good at what he does, but is eagerly the infrastructure team to deliver his toolkit.They even called him saying they have placed an order with the purchase department, and that it shall take a while before its procured.
The two freshers are full of enthusiasm, but don't know a thing about how to paint a wall. So they start off with building a small wall, on which they plan to try their painting skills. But in the process use up quite a lot of precious bricks,cement and paint too.That's something that Surya has noticed.
Did I forget Charitha here? No I did'nt. Actually she's been very busy working on a patent on a new WOW technique.She convinces everyone that this technique will make them the industry leaders in the wall building business.
Everybody keeps working on their part of the wall for some days when Surya decides to check out the wall.He announces that the CEO of PUN shall be visiting in three days for a demo. This is like setting the cat amongst the pigeons.Everyone starts working like never before. Ajay, Sujay and Vijay start working late nights,and also order pizzas for everyone while Murli quietly murmurs, "Any Time Demo!!!"
After three days, Sachin walks in to find that the wall, is like anything but a wall, and realises that he's in trouble with his boss, the quality asssurance guys and of course, the customer too.In panic mode, he asks Sachin to get the blueprint and the plans of the wall to his office immediately. Sachin smartly says,"How can I have a blueprint before we complete the construction? We are an R & D unit.Even we don't know what the outcome will be."
The deadline has come and gone, but the wall is anything but complete.Sachin meekly prepares an email to Dave which goes something like this...
"We, at PUN are almost through with building the wall that you had asked for. However during integration and internal strength testing we found some loose bricks in the wall. We are working on it and trying to fix these issues. We shall have WOW inbuilt in the wall by version 1.2."
Dave waits for a while before he runs out of patience and decides to send his team from Behemoth to inspect the wall.Ajay, Vijay and Sujay play the perfect hosts and organise a grand party for the visiting customers.Only when the team gets back from their pleasurable "Indian trip" the truth dawns on Dave...."When you pay peanuts, you get monkeys" .He immediately decides to stop the funding for the project.Sameer's hopes of an onsite opportunity came down crashing down with it.
But still he has to pay for the man*month that PUN had worked for.That's where Sachin's good. But he ends up losing the customer, not just for himself, but for PUN too.
If you thought the story ended here, then you forgot the appraisals part of the story, where everyone was rated on a scale of 5.This is how each one fared.
Anil got a 3 because he was upto expectations.Sunil got a 2 even though he did the same work as Anil. If you think Sunil took more initiative, then you are wrong.Actually Sunil had a better rapport with Surya than Anil, and also he had used a bit lesser paint and cement.
Surya felt that Sameer had a lot of potential and gave him a 3,more so because he was a newcomer and couldn't give him anything better.Moreover, he had to help the HR in normalising his inflated pay package and also recover the joining bonus covertly.
Anitha got a 3 because Surya's opinion on her was that she spent more time on sorting out her son's preschool issues, than on building the wall. He even had the audacity to tell her to maintain a schedule for the 3 year old child.
Murli got a 2.When he told Surya that he made the blueprint and also did as much work as two people, Surya replied "We do appreciate that.But that's your job. If you had too much work, you should have asked for one more resource.I would have provided you with that."
The 3 musketeers all got a 3.It was split up as 1 point each for their cab and pizza ordering skills,customer focus during customer visits and of course, their competence at handling meetings.
Sunitha too got a 3 because Surya felt she didn't even exist.
Charitha got a 1.After all someone had to take credit for Anitha and Sunitha's work, and also for the patent on WOW.
Sachin got a 1 only because every manager has to give this for one of his leads, who is there to take all the blame and give all the credit.
As for Surya himself, the senior management felt that he had done a tremendous job at generating income and motivating the rest of the team.So he was given a 1, a promotion and also a new car as rewards.

Don't you think the Indian industry works similar to this? In most aspects All companies are equal, while some are more equal.Don't we see one of us in the characters above? No one's a hero, no one's a villian.But we could do better. If only we knew how to. If only we knew what to set right.If only we knew how NOT to work...If only we knew how to stop worrying and start living.


DISCLAIMER : Characters that appeared in the above post are purely real and many of the events are not at all coincidental.
Oops, I think I jumbled up some words in the disclaimer. You'll figure out the right words anyway.

Comfortably Numb or Romantically Challenged?

Quite a lot of my friends must have read my post on crushes.I got the maximum number of comments on that.Some said it took them down memory lane, and for some it was something that they could relate to.Something that might have happened in their lives too.

Five months after I posted that, I thought let me write something more about things similar to that.I must have had a few more crushes during these five months, but I don't want to make this one a Part 2 of that post.That's because I hate sequels, unless the movie is Godfather ,and the director is Francis Ford Coppola.

Recently, I was having a coffee time chat with a close friend of mine at a corner of the pantry. He announced that he'd be getting married soon. And he did ask me one simple question,

"Why did we try to desperately have a girlfriend all our lives, there can be love in an arranged marriage too?"

The discussion went on quite intensely till our cups of coffee got over. After that it was back to R&D(Regression and Debugging) at work, and we conveniently forgot all about that topic.

And this friend's atleast a hundred times more emotional than I am.I'm sure he must have had something in his mind when he said that. And this thought of his made me think what's wrong with guys like us.A lot of girls might get offended by what's written in this post, but I wish to clarify that this post's not against girls.I'm pretty sure that 'Very few girls' too think like this about guys .

In my last post on crushes, I came up with Sudipi's theory of crushes,

"From all these crushes, I am able to conclude that every girl that I'm interested in, is one of older than me,married,committed or all of these.If its none of these, then definetely that girl's not interested in me."

In reply, my buddies at office promptly came up with their own GOF (Gang of Five) theory.
"Any girl who is decently good enough and is of our age group, and is not yet married, is always committed."


That's the reason why I typed the words 'Very Few Girls' in bold in the paragraphs before that.

For the uninitiated, Gang of Five here refers to Joshi,Manju,Shivaji,Chethan and me. People who take the tables on the far end of the cafetaria during lunchtime. And by the way, Shivaji is a married bachelor, for he thinks like us, and Chethan is planning to buy a few sites in Suwon, South Korea.

There's a funny thing that I noticed.Suppose a guy has a crush on a girl.When a girl says that a guy is behind her, it means she doesn't like him.But she'd proudly declare that a guy is in love with him if she liked him too.

A close friend of mine whom I was "behind" for five long years told me that I was a very intense and emotional person, for someone to fall in love with me.Maybe she was right about me.For, the effect of my five year misadventure was so profound that, amongst other things I gave up all kinds of creative writing for five years.Till one fine day when sheer inspiration from the Deep Blue Sea made me start blogging.

Being single all my life till now, I had to ask myself ,"Why don't any girls fall for guys like us?"

Maybe we're too dumb to steal, and too proud to beg.

Maybe most girls prefer much more jovial, flirtful guys who would ask the girl out the second time they meet, but would hardly give a second thought to hurt in more than one ways that they could.I got so more rejections for an offer of a date in those five years that that I decided that I've completed my quota for a lifetime. Taking a girl out for a date is a far off thing considering that I have to muster courage to ask a girl for a harmless cup of coffee with me.

I don't have great pickup lines too.And having those military draftee like looks;a short haircut and a prominent moustache don't add to a lot of charm either.And perhaps the fact that I dont smoke, drink or socialise in pubs and discos, or even frequent perfectly decent places like Forum mall add up to the negative score.

Maybe its written somewhere on my face, that guys like me are best kept at a distance.Or maybe a lot of girls are subscribed to alerts on their cellphone that sounds an alarm whenever guys like me talk to them.

From experience I figured out that understanding what girls think about guys like me,is a lot more tougher than rocket science.An old time proverb has it that Experience is the comb that life gives when you got no hair on your head left. As of now, I got as far as having a few grey hair on my head.And not willing to risk baldness, I recently gave up most of my rights to find a life partner to my parents.

I even figured out that I could not even manage having a good friend who is a girl in recent times.I thought, "Hello, hi, how do you do ? Isse kabhi aage badh saktha hoon?" suits me aptly in my case.But I must admit, I didn't try really very hard too.And being an overly committed workaholic who spends a good part of twelve hours a day in office, doesn't exactly give me a lot of time for making friends either.Though while in office I share a good rapport with most of my female colleagues,most of whom might be trying to run away from my next PJ, a caustic comment or one liner that they might be coming their way. If having a good rapport is one thing, then making good friends is entirely another.Somehow I tend to think that we are professionals at a workplace and not classmates in college, so maintaining distance becomes second nature.

Over the years, I've found that I'm very slow to lend my hand out in friendship to anyone, more so if its to girls.But I'm very quick to take it back too, if my handshake's not properly acknowledged.Maybe the past history of facing rejections makes me do that.I'm only as interested in a girl, as interested as she is, in knowing me.So if any girls think that I'm giving a lot of bhaav, not speaking to them properly, chances are very high that,I'm also giving back the what I got, with interest though.

All these thoughts made me think that belong to a big group of people called "The Romantically Challenged". Its just that not many are as hypercritical and overanalytical as I am.

Maybe a community on Orkut with that name will show how many more of those exist in this wide world.Members anyone?

When I posted this, I also thought of putting this song from Aerosmith. The song is a story in itself.I loved everything about it.

Are We Any Different?

I was searching the internet for some old funny animation strips. Thanks to Youtube,I found two of my old time favourites.One was about how not to drive.


Bruno Bozetto, the Italian cartoonist must have done this keeping in mind how driving's done in Italy. The first 60 seconds of the animation were enough for me to ask,"...as Indians, are we any different?"

The most striking part of the animation read something like this, "Show me how you drive, and I'll tell you what kind of an idiot you are!"

And there was another animation strip, which was titled "Italians vs Europeans".


If the first animation strip made me ask the question, the second one answered my question quite emphatically.

Italians are perceived to be different from the rest of Europe.While we Indians perceive ourselves to be different from the rest of the world though.

Practically every example in the animations hold good in the Indian context.Not following traffic rules,the highly imaginative queue system we follow, the scant respect we show to pedestrian safety, not respecting No Smoking boards, all are just examples that we are just Same same no Different.

All that I wanted to say, was very well animated in those strips, so I shall spare everyone the ignominy of going through hundreds of lines of pedestrian prose.

Life's a journey, enjoy the drive!

Every year, we, as a family somehow find time to go off on a vacation.And the most likely place that we visit is Melpal.For the uninitiated, Melpal happens to be my mom's hometown.Or rather,its a small village in the midst of the western ghats of Chickmagalur district.
This time, we planned to do a bit more than just laze around in the midst of nowhere, far away from the din of city life. So we decided to go on a small tour from there, using Melpal as a base camp for our adventures.This time around there was a lot more exictement for me, for more than one reason.First, it was my first really long drive in my adorable red car.And second, this time I had decided to take dad's good old Pentax film SLR.At the end of the trip I was thoroughly impressed by the performance of the car, as well as that of the Pentax.
But post film development, I was a lot disappointed by the dullness of the photos when they were converted from film to digital format.But on paper, the photos looked really crisp and neat.

To get a good photo of nature, I didn't have to look around more than 200 metres radius of my grandmom's house.And this shot, of a rose just exemplifies it



We had planned a pligrimage of sorts and hence,set out to Dharmasthala, which has a very famous temple, about 3 hours drive from Melpal.The roads were twisty and ocassionally bumpy too. In some places the acclivity of the slope never seemed to end. As we reached Charmadi Ghats, the roads seems to disappear all of a sudden.In that part of the world, I figured out that they built roads in the middle of potholes.The pots being bigger than the wheel that makes it.If the roads were bad, the scenery and grenery around made up with their picturesque beauty. The only trouble was, I wasn't allowed to get down or stop the car as mom's absolutely terrified of heights and wouldnt want to look down at the deep valleys around.

From there we went to Karkala, to visit my good old friend Sunil and his family. Then I remembered that he's so fond of birds, even of the winged variety.I managed to get a good shot of one perched like this.



From there on, we went to see his family owned cashewnut factory.This, I was reliably informed by his dad, as the largest in Karnataka.I was simply awestruck to know that a single cashewnut goes through a process lasting seven hard days, before it gets to satiate our tastebuds.

The next place on our route map was Kundapur, via Manipal and Udipi.If I was simply astounded by the town of Karkala, which had a lot of shopping mall like complexes,I was even more impressed by Manipal. It looked just like another upper middle class cosmopolitan neighbourhood of Bangalore. I also got to spot a sleek Porsche Cayenne on the road too, something which is extremely rare even in Bangalore city.

Around Kundapur, we visited a couple or more temples and also got to meet some really old relatives. During this time, we went through one of the best roads and as well as one of worst too.I was surprised and very happy to see a small village road laid out with grand prix circuit like bitumen under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana.At the same time was disgusted to drive through what they called National Highway, where it was the car's underbody getting scraped at 20 kmph.I guessed they must have built that highway under the National Highway Ka Paisa Khao Yojana.

Nevertheless, we also got to enjoy a nice sunset that evening by the Arabian sea on one side and the Souparnika river on the other.


Souparnika river looked so calm and serene, giving little idea that it once used to be the habitat for huge wild crocodiles, a hundred or more years back.

We then got back to our base camp Melpal via the Agumbe route. Though the distance was just 135 kms, it was very challenging, as the slopes were so steep at 2 of the hairpin bends, that they had caused the axles of 2 jeeps to break.We also got some time to spend around in the midst of the tea estates close to Melpal, doing photoshoots at will and parking the car at will in the middle of the road.Something like this...




And I also managed to get a pretty decent photo of the coffee beans too...




The next day we had to return back to Bangalore.In 6 days' time, we had covered 1200 kilometres.Each and every mile presented its own challenge, its own pleasures.As I approached Bangalore I was saying to myself that I could do another 300 kilometres in the twisted roads of the Agumbe Ghats, but not many more on the chaotic roads that led to Bangalore.