Tuesday, December 28, 2010

For The Win!

To make new beginnings
and wish for fairy-tale endings

To overcome the roadblocks
with good old pals: faith and courage

To see the world once more
through purple-colored glasses

To stop wiggling like a caterpillar
and let the butterflies flutter

To follow what Ulysses says
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield"

It is time to arrest the fall
and usher in the spring!

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

A tale of two birthdays!

Two birthdays which did share the same day and year value. What differed was the month value. And the manner of celebration!

Birthday 1
Date: August 3rd, 2010
Birthday boy: ME!
Mood: Man, 28 years have passed and still no sight of that flying saucer!
Celebrations:  A lazy day at home with family, special home food, cake and a book (The Hobbit) set in virtual world. Add a 3 year old sweet kid from neighborhood who enthusiastically performs all the duties of cake cutting, candle blowing, etc on your behalf :). The remaining time was spent talking to the loving neighbors or to friends spread over nooks and corners of this world who still have the day archived in their memory cells. Everybody anticipating an invitation to the beginning of an unexpected adventure like the one Bilbo Baggins has in Hobbit ;). Ideal birthday eh? For me, definitely yes!

Birthday 2
Date: September 3rd, 2010
Birthday boy: My dad!
Mood: Man, I am turning 60 and I am gonna throw a party!
Celebrations: A pandal was erected in front of house along with a small stage for the birthday boy. The other stars of the show being a 5 kg cake and a bottle of champagne which I pretty much totally poured on the cake! Approximately 200 close relatives and family friends joined us and had a merry time laughing, singing, eating, revisiting old memories while making new ones and drinking, may be not in that particular order :).

The underlying pattern
Birthdays not only embark beginning of another free roller-coaster ride around the sun. They provide an ideal excuse for your family and friends to get in touch with you on a single day! No wonder you feel special on your birthday! :-)

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

One weekend that ruled them all..

A weekend, an empty house,  32-inch TV, a laptop and HDMI cable. The perfect infrastructure powered by laziness resulted in a weekend spent sitting in front of TV living in a virtual world painted in extended versions of all Lord of the rings film trilogy. The first one mesmerized me into the virtual world, the second one threatened to pull me out of it on occasions. But the third one was simply fascinating and breath-taking.

Favorite scene: Legolas taking down an elephant along with 10 warriors on it in a matter of minute!

Favorite characters:
1. Aragorn. The ranger who initially shuns his responsibilities but eventually returns to be the king!
2. Sam: The kind of friend we all wish to have by our side all the time.
3. Smeagol/Gollum:  Beautiful portrayal of the two sides within a human being.
And now I am inspired to read the book again! :)

Sunday, December 05, 2010

Nostalgia....

November 4, 6:30 AM: The Homecoming at Diwali!
The private bus travel guy decides to drop me at a place other than the expected final stop! And thus begins the ride back home on a road which has been less traveled after junior college days. The serenity of the Shukravari talav (a lake) ushers in heavenly silence in my mind. The small lane which led to the C-DAC center took me back to 3 idiots era. The bridge ahead gave a top view of the junior college building and the adjacent railway track where each passing train gave us a breather to discuss life, universe and everything in the middle of a boring sermon. A nearby restaurant reminds of the era when eating out used to be a special event which was cherished for months. 20 minutes later, I had reached home refreshed with this huge collection of leaves of memories collected on the way!

Sunday, November 28, 2010

The joy of work!

Inspired by the great response received on google talk to this article, publishing the same one on my blog to bring it back to life.
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-feeling-even-better-indexing-of.html

This is an article published by google on the work done by our small 9 member team in my last project at Adobe. And I will let the words of Anne Frank do further talking: "Earning happiness means doing good and working, not speculating and being lazy. Laziness may look inviting, but only work gives you true satisfaction."

Thursday, July 15, 2010

Bangalore diaries - Chapter 1

My memory begins with the crack of dawn on 31st July 2006 when Rajdhani express arrived on Bangalore central station. Being armed with a address of the Adobe guest house, phone numbers of some friends and the advice to take a prepaid auto only, I took my first steps in Bangalore. The handle of my bag broke up with me within couple of minutes to make the morning a bit more eventful. Though I had to give the auto driver 20 bucks extra, I was relatively happy with the way I had managed with the auto driver on my first day when I reached my first destination : Pai comforts, JP Nagara, Bangalore. I joined Adobe the next day and after 4 long years, my first stint with this city has ended.
In these 4 years, I have lived in 3 different houses with different sets of people. And ended up collecting memories whose binary value is 10+ GB. The jumbo prawns treat whose jumbo bill became the talk of the IITK kingdom, the n number of trips with either Mtech or office gang and the elementary Photoshop lecture I gave at IISC are few of the events whose memories I will always cherish. Some of the pictures which have been splattered on facebook or orkut depict the good times I had here visiting new places, keeping in touch with old friends and making new ones at office. And then there are some memories which can't be captured by your camera lens nor can they be memorized completely. The saturday morning conversations with Anna over the first few years we stayed together along with the nonsensical lunch or hallway conversations full of laughter and banter at Adobe will always be cherished among the good times . Ofcourse there were some rainy days, but then those are the days that make you appreciate the sunny days even more.
It's never easy to embrace change, especially when it's self-inflicted. But then in chase of a foolish childhood romantic dream, I had to move on. I can always take solace in the fact that there is this warm and sunny corner in my heart filled with wonderful memories to visit whenever some more rain comes along my way. The Bangalore chapter forms a significant part of this corner :-)

Thursday, July 08, 2010

3 idiots - my story!

There are many people who walk in and out of your lives. Only few leave their imprints behind. And even fewer never leave! They are always there in that special corner of your heart from where you can always view the ocean of wonderful memories!
It was the summer of 1998. The 3 care-free enthusiasts(Me, Abhishek and Kaustubh) had joined a so-so junior college with the aspirations of any 16 year old kid i.e. to top all the exam charts to get into a good college. With all due respect to our aspirations, we also promptly decided to warm the backbench of a 120 student classroom to maintain sufficient distance from any educational activity happening in our vicinity. And it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship! Most of the daily classes were turned into a comedy show. They were duly complemented at our tuition classes which our parents paid for ;). And if that was not enough, we rode our bicycles to nooks and corners of Nagpur to explore the boundaries of the beautiful city. Distances are never an issue when the company is awesome right :-). And perhaps even god liked what we were upto! How else did we manage to get the tickets of a movie show for the current day which was fully booked for the next 2 days. It wasn't the age of cellphones or social networks, but still these million little things made us always feel connected. But the best part was yet to come..
We joined a computer course at CDAC to get some really basic computer skills while we were waiting for our 12th results. It was supposed to be a daily 2 hour course. But we made it into a day long activity. We sat in the lab whole day to talk about life, universe and everything while doing some super-cool stuff with MS office!(Remember, we were innocent 18 year old's then. Apple meant just a fruit!). Between the 3 of us, we topped all the exams of the course along with DAVE scores ;). We indeed had the time of our life!
And then life happened and we all went to different colleges. But we still "keep in touch" though not in the usual way. There are no hello's, no goodbye's. It just feels that you picked up the conversation from the same place where you left it the last time, which may be months. We call each other occasionally, atleast on birthdays irrespective of the fact that we may be on different continents! And we still can talk for hours about the million little memories we have of....those wonderful 2 years :-).

Thursday, June 10, 2010

Void to ......Voila!

How do you react when you loose something you never had? The illusion which gave life to your existence. The illusion which was a guiding star for you which never faded away irrespective of gloomy weathers.  Something which you had held close to your heart that its absence leaves a huge void. The void which can't be filled by work, activities, interests or friends. You try to walk away from this chaos. But each attempt to walk away only puts you back on the highway to hell. You heed to reality. Your friendly fate seems a lot ironic. You give up on your cherished dreams because they don't seem "real" enough to be accomplished. And once you do that, you end up losing yourself. The void seems to have grown out of proportion and encircled your complete life. Encircled in this abyss, you look up in the sky for the guiding star.....only to realize that it was always there! You realize that the illusion meant a lot more to you than you thought it did in the first place. It is a reflection of the determined, strong-willed yet sensitive individual who is willing to perspire for his lofty aspirations. And with this revelation, you find your dreams and the courage and faith which always kept you motivated towards them.

Perhaps, all I have done over a long period of time is just walked a full circle. I did not let go but still I have moved on :-).

Saturday, June 05, 2010

Friendships...

What do you feel when when what's going on in your head resonates with  somebody else's writings. The solace in the fact that you are not alone. The fact that it's normal to have some expectations from friends. And the urge to post them verbatim on your blog :P.


"In a certain way I am sticking to my subject with all that about friends and connections. You see, I've heard of a man whose friend had been imprisoned and who slept on the floor of his room every night in order not to enjoy a comfort of which his friend had been deprived. Who, cher monsieur, will sleep on the floor for us? Whether I am capable of it myself? Look, I'd like to be and I shall be. Yes, we shall all be capable of it one day, and that will be salvation. But it's not easy, for friendship is absent-minded or at least unavailing.
It is incapable of achieving what it wants. Maybe, after all, it doesn't want it enough? Maybe we don't love life enough? Have you noticed that death alone awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just left us? How we admire those of our teachers who have ceased to speak, their mouths filled with earth! Then the expression of admiration springs forth naturally, that admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all their lives. But do you know why we are always more just and more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple. With them there is no obligation. They leave us free and we can take our time, fit the testimonial in between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress, in our spare time, in short. If they forced us to anything, it would be to remembering, and we have a short memory. No, it is the recently dead we love among our friends, the painful dead, our emotion, ourselves after all!" -Excerpts from "The Fall", a novel by ALBERT CAMUS, Nobel Prize Winner

But does that make it a dark cloud without a silver lining? Most of the friendships sink with the tides of change. Some even when the geographical distances are literally infinitesimal. But the very few that have grown deeper irrespective of the geographical distances are the ones which still make me believe  in F.R.I.E.N.D.S!

Sunday, May 16, 2010

You thought it was all over. It seemed that all the good stuff that could happen had already happened in your life. What lied ahead seemed dull, boring, routine... mundane. And then it happened. It entered my life like a breath of fresh air. And within few seasons, I was swept off my feet and landed into a world full of timely witty remarks and high quality sarcasm. The world of Frasier. What makes Frasier special is the awesome chemistry between the 5 main characters of the sitcom despite the diversity between them. Especially the manner in which Niles's silent love for Daphne has been directed and the witty moments whenever Niles and Roz demean each other. Being a true fan of Frasier, this post can't end without me being it's central character. So let me emphasize on the diversity between the 5 characters by trying to depict how they will comment on this wonderful picture of mine taken last week at the balloon bursting event in office.
 A brief description of the characters so that you can understand the paragraph below. Frasier and Niles are the pretentious snobs who can't leave psychiatry out of any aspect of their life. Their dad Martin can't live without TV and Beer. Roz can't live without having a new man in her life every 2 episodes. And Daphne, Frasier's house servant rocks with her English accent. 


Frasier - Look at him Niles. He looks so confused. His eyes depict that he is totally lost in life at this moment but still he can smile about it.
Niles - O Oh! And the balloon suggests the only way he knows out is aiming for the sky. All he needs is a point in the right direction and he will fly right out of this mess.
Martin - Believe me. The guy is a freak! Why else will he have a pink balloon tied to his feet?
Daphne (out of this analysis) - Roz, are you staying for dinner?
Roz - Well, He is so cute. I can eat him for dinner ;) :P

Saturday, April 24, 2010

Happy birthday Sachin!

One billion cricket-crazy people are celebrating the birthday of batting maestro Sachin Tendulkar today. Writing something which has not already been written about the little genius is almost impossible. The 30000 runs which encompass close to 100 centuries and many more milestones have been talked about and discussed in many articles written about him over a period of 20 years now. But what strikes me most about him is his amazing work ethic. For 20 years now, he has stood up and done the job assigned to him with utmost diligence and passion every single day. Be it a ordinary opposition like Bangladesh or a strong opposition like Australia, he always gives his best. All the success and fame he has achieved is a mere byproduct of his hunger and passion for cricket. (Ofcourse the fact that cricket is a religion in our country helps.) Perhaps that is the biggest lesson one can take from this living legend. "When you are in it, you gotta aim to win it!"

Happy birthday Sachin!

Friday, March 12, 2010

The mood these days :)

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

T'was Grace that taught my heart to fear.
And Grace, my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed.

Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come;
'Tis Grace that brought me safe thus far
and Grace will lead me home.

The Lord has promised good to me.
His word my hope secures.
He will my shield and portion be,
As long as life endures.

Yea, when this flesh and heart shall fail,
And mortal life shall cease,
I shall possess within the veil,
A life of joy and peace.

When we've been here ten thousand years
Bright shining as the sun.
We've no less days to sing God's praise
Than when we've first begun.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Love Aaj kal

Love and Logic never go together! Imtiaz Ali wrote and directed a beautiful movie based on this fact(?). The way he has blended the so-called practical modern love story with the mad intinct like old love story is simply superb. A beautiful script! The break-up scene early in the movie, the honest interactions between Saif and Deepika throught it, Rishi Kapoor's dialogues on the madness component in love were all so beautifully written and directed. Kudos to dialogues like "Senti ho gayi main" and "Dekho main pile on nahi karna chahta".
Perhaps, the best album of 2009 when it comes to music and lyrics. In "Chor-Bazaari", it has given Bollywood the first break-up song in its long history. Other songs also go along with the script rather than allowing the audience to empty their bladders in the middle of the movie.
And when it comes to the movie climax. Whether being practical about long-term relationships is possible? Whether the happiness you get after fulfilling your most cherished dreams in life will be incomplete unless you have that special someone to share it with? This stuff will always be open for debate. But THE Hero has to get HIS Heroine at the end of movie right? Otherwise how will phrases like "When everything feels like the movies" be true!

Friday, January 15, 2010

Confessions of a Programmer!

Today afternoon, the whole world around me was focused on the longest solar eclipse of the century. Amidst this chaos, I was busy using Eclipse to unravel the mysteries of a small C++ project sitting in one small corner of this world.
And that's where my solace comes from. Although my life continues to be in a state of deadlock, I still love what I do to earn a living!