Notes About Nothing – The Gurgaon Chronicles Continued…
Back to regular programming.
Yomance: Yomance, a word I want to take credit for having invented, is new age short-term romance that a couple willingly gets into, knowing fully well that it will not / should not culminate in marriage. Its short term romance for the yo-generation. I am too old school for Yomance and I still feel like being head over heels in love with one person forever, the trials and tribulations that go with the search notwithstanding.
So the basic classification for relationships would have to be in the following order, just to give you a sense of where Yomances lie:
One night stand << Fling << Yomance << Long Term Relationship << Marriage
Delhi Airport Fundas: I like airports in general. I like train stations too. And airplanes and trains. I detest bus stands. That is beside the point.
The Delhi airport has had fond memories associated with it. On 23rd December 2009, I took a last minute flight from there to Hyderabad to attend my first job interview at B-school.
The flight cost me a bomb and I later realized that with a little more money, I could’ve made two (yes TWO) round trips to Singapore on Tiger Airways. Sadly Tiger Airways only operates from four South Indian airports and Chomland residents have no luck in this regard.
At the airport, I pleaded with all the airlines to give me a flight ticket to Hyderabad at the earliest possible and one ticket opened up on a Kingfisher flight at the last minute. I gave the ticket lady a big hug when she handed over my grossly expensive ticket and every time I end up at the departure lounge to head out of Delhi, I feel like dropping in and saying hi, except for that she’d have forgotten or felt that I was being creepy. Sometimes its nicer to let memories remain so.
Frantic phone calls to our placement department, to friends in Hyderabad and Delhi and elsewhere, shaving without soap / shaving cream / hot water at the airport after picking up a safety razor from some shady kirana store across the road and a random conversation with a guy who had Manchester United, Liverpool, Arsenal and Chelsea decals on his backpack (I told him he’d get beaten up in every major city in the UK) later, I was on the flight.
As I’d blogged before, I made it for the interview on time and did well, but the job went to a better candidate who rejected the offer, went onto win the Chairman’s award on campus for our batch and has since been elevated to levels of studness regular people like me can only dream of.
Weather Woes: I was in Bangalore, Mysore and Madras over the past fortnight, to attend two weddings and chill out in Mysore. The weather there is so beautiful and so pleasant that I am shocked at how I had taken what I had for granted. The complete absence of a miasma-like feeling that has stifled me up here in the NCR was extreme relief.
Mundu Madness: Wearing a is the best thing one can do in the sweltering heat of Madras. My friend’s wedding was being held during the time that the place was at its hottest and wearing boxers and a mundu with a belt tied strategically to avoid any potentially embarrassing incidents was the best decision. Ever. A certain Sangram Bhalla would no doubt strongly agree.
RSJ Fundaes: Its been more than three years since I’ve begun writing for RSJ and now, most saturdays when I am not traveling out of Delhi, which is most saturdays, I have time to get to the office here and sit and get some work done towards content for the magazine. The new initiatives for the year ahead as envisioned by RSJ are promising and will certainly do a lot for the music scene.
I had a few posts in mind, but they require a lot of time and a lot more contemplation for proper construction and presentation. In other news, I just read my last column post on RSJ only to realize that I’d made a mention of ‘Strategic Innovation Management’ in passing. I don’t remember writing this column because it was in between exams during my last few days on campus and I guess the content in the piece is a reflection of my state of mind then.
Notes About Nothing – The Gurgaon Chronicles
Anyway, the notes about nothing series continues to document my wonderfully mundane life up north.
Mobile Connection Woes: It is horribly tough to get a mobile phone connection here, unless one has proof of residence. As I had said on my previous facebook status, its thanks to these stupid stinky ass terrorist bitches that one has to undergo extensive address proof related problems and when the Airtel guy finally showed up at my place on saturday to verify my residential address, I was so overjoyed that I did not curse him for having interrupted me when I had just stepped out of the shower and was toweling myself dry.
Of Electronic Goods and EMIs: The other catch-22 level situation that I find myself in is with respect to furnishing the necessary local proof of residence in order to get the EMI schemes to purchase electronic goods (read superawesome flat screen TV and a 1.5 ton air conditioner). While the telephone connection operator idiots finally showed up and told me that I was who I claimed to be, these guys need additional proof and the fact that I am willing to make a down payment of 50% of the amount and furnish a letter from my firm’s HR department wasn’t enough to satisfy their stringent requirements necessary to make a sale.
I am sure a stupid MBA grad thought of this process in order to ’streamline orders’ and ensure a strong reduction in write-offs that companies would otherwise have to resort to in case of errant customers. The fact that I would chase them down to make the monthly payment, thanks to my being the owner of a conscience that works overtime is unfortunately not something those retards are privy to.
This situation was what I experienced when I went to some electronics store. When I went to Big Bazaar to pick up a TV, the salesperson categorically informed me that unless I have stayed in the NCR for a year, I was not eligible to purchase items on an EMI scheme. I wanted to ask him if it was a rule that people can’t watch TV as initiation into living in Gurgaon, but he looked like a chap whose response to sarcasm would be physical because his that part of his brain allocated for coming up with witty responses died even before he was born.
Bacchus Worship Overdrive: On the other hand, the Haryanvi equivalent of a ‘wine store’ in Karnataka is referred to as a ‘Theka‘. A good friend of mine told me that you could die of not receiving medical attention due to drug stores being closed during certain times of the day, but that you would never ever ever ever ever be able to die of alcohol deprivation in Gurgaon. Alcohol is slightly more expensive here than in the booze stores in New Delhi, but is available round the clock sans any problems from the cops.
Friends and Acquaintances: While I am living alone and have no problems with extended periods of out-of-office solitude (read months), I’ve had a decent time here in terms of how many friends and acquaintances of mine are living in this part of the country. As more people from the ISB class of 2010 restart their professional lives to join the earlybirds like yours truly, the office complex where I work in could as well have its own ISB alumni chapter.
Power Situation: There have been times when I lived in Mysore and Bangalore when I would complain about how KPTCL (formerly KEB) was such an inefficient organization because of daily load-shedding for a couple of hours and would lament the absence of electricity in our living spaces. I am sorry for having done that. KPTCL, I love you. Please forgive me for all the times that I called your assistant executive engineer as a teenager, pestering him about how many minutes it would be before I could get to watch the rest of the cricket match.
The electricity situation in Gurgaon makes me realize what luxury I used to live in.
Having said all this, while I do maintain that most of my post has comprised of major cribbage, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t having some fun times in the heart of Hindi heartland! More to follow in the days ahead.
Stooping to New Lows
Winning this competition gave one of the participants considerable pride and props in the eyes of the other person. Think of it along the lines of a slow cycle race where the participants battle it out such that the last person to cross the finish line wins. Its not quite the most competitive of head-to-heads, but a reasonably entertaining one for both participants nonetheless.
Back in 2008, I had won the competition by telling my friend about the fact that sometimes I’d wake up late at night if I got real hungry, discover that I had absolutely no food to chomp on and then eat jam from a bottle thereafter. Heck, I even finished the jam bottle one night when the hunger pangs were particularly intense.
I did something to top that last night. I firmly believe that between the two of us, I will now be the all-time champion. I was flipping through channels on the TV in the temporary guest house accommodation provided to me in Gurgaon while waiting for sleep. While channel surfing, I saw this channel named “PTC Punjabi” and I sat and watched it for 30 minutes continuously.
There were some cheesy low production Punjabi music videos that didn’t make any sense, but I was so mind-numbed in the first place that I sat and saw it all anyway. I don’t think anyone can stoop to any lower than this, unless I am able to come up with newer stuff when I move into my own place that I have zeroed in on in a quaint little location about 2 km from my office.
Let’s see, only time will tell.
Additionally, I have more stuff to write about regarding my first visit to Gurgaon and living here, but that will happen once the initial settling has been dispensed with.
ISB Class of 2010 Sign-Off?
But this blog post is not about that. I realize that I haven’t been writing much on this blog for a while, but I do want to promise myself that in due time, when I begin work in a few days in the NCR, that I will have done enough or felt strongly enough about a few things here and there to document it and keep this blog alive.
The one year hiatus of sorts that I took in lieu of pretending to work my ass off at B-school officially comes to an end. I am now back to keep on rocking in the free world, with all apologies to Neil Young.
However, I must admit that there’s been some stuff that I have written and this includes the sign-off post on the official ISB weblog of which I was one of the admins along with Amit Kumar Goyal.
Figured that since I was feeling a bit lazy to write stuff here for a few more days, that I would cheaply cross-post what I had written on the official weblog here. Pardon some of the references that only those who studied at the ISB would get. Annotate them, I’m too lazy to.
But that walk down memory lane will invariably end up being a long one because of the huge amount of memories that are created on campus. To begin listing them would take a long time and to get an alum (darn it, as I write this I realize that I am an alum!) out of flashback mode would require really strong incentive. The only other thing that would be higher up on the pecking order would be alumni giving out knowledge (a.k.a gyaan) regarding various things students would ask of them.
The one year MBA program will be good for many and bad for some. Different people will derive different benefits, but the overall net result is positive and the learning that one derives is immense in terms of knowledge gained, time optimization, being able to charter a preliminary course for one’s future (notice I say preliminary course because we’ve been told that our first job needn’t necessarily define our career), interactions with peers who are probably the most ambitious bunch that you’d have spent time with and being able to find out for yourself as to where you stand. The bit about finding yourself becomes more important as the year progresses. Trust me on that.
B-school is a great leveler and James Shirley might’ve written a different poem altogether if business schools existed in the seventeenth century. Everyone on campus, without exception has done something unique or different before joining the school and that would set them apart from the pack. So uniqueness is probably not a differentiating trait, obfuscating as it might sound.
The obligatory bit of unsolicited advice that I can give as an alum would be to spontaneously make fond memories that you can cherish and treasure, but don’t spend too much time on trying to capture them as the late Susan Sontag would no doubt have you know in her own words.
Finally, here’s wishing the class of 2011 a smooth registration process, a fun orientation week and enough strength, courage, cojones guts and determination to get your act together for what will hopefully be the best year of your illustrious life.
PS – Not sure if we’re signing off fully until the GSB elections are held and the new MCC Director officially takes over the ministrations of the official weblog management. Hence the question mark.
PPS – We’ve been told that ISB is like Hotel California. You can check out any time you like….yada yada yada. But please don’t play that song on the guitar unless your life is in danger and the only way you can weasel out of it is by a rendition of said song.
PPPS – Do show enthusiasm about the weblog and get in touch with me during O-week.
PPPPS – Throw us alums a good Solstice this year. Yup, end of post!
Summer Storm 2010 – Lamb of God LIVE in India!
After much speculation and debate, the next big live concert in India will play host to Lamb of God.Come 15th May 2010, our very dear Palace Grounds in Bangalore will have Lamb of God performing to a packed audience.
This event is being brought to you by Overture India, a brainchild of Arpan Peter and Vinay Venugopal.
My good buddy, Prasad Bhat, who recently started a graphics design firm, Graphicurry is responsible for the cool design of the Overture India site.
For further details related to ticket prices, news, updates and other exclusive information, watch this space!
Edit: Rolling Stone India is the official magazine partner for Summer Storm 2010. Exclusive information, news, updates and such are, as a result, not privy to owner of this blog. My bad.
WishMobile!
If my mobile could also double up as an air conditioner remote, I wouldn’t have to sit at my laptop to write this down. Come to think of it, I wish my mobile would also double up as a TV remote, a DVD player remote, a car radio remote and also serve as the remote controller for multiple devices.
I remember a time when I wasn’t able to watch TV for a while at my house in Bangalore because the remote control wasn’t working properly. I later realized that it was due to a loose connection in the batteries, but until then, all the repeated beatings that poor remote took could’ve been saved had the WishMobile been invented.
I am too lazy and technically incompetent to work on coming up with this device. Plus I have a huge educational loan that hangs on my head like Damocles’ sword. But if someone chances upon this idea to come up with an integrated device that can serve multiple purposes as described above, you have my eternal admiration and respect.
However, considering I am strongly gravitating towards the minimalist lifestyle thanks to my being congenitally parsimonious, I don’t even know if I will have enough remotes around me in the first place to warrant getting a WishMobile!
A for Aardvark
It is brilliantly surprising as to what one can perform simply by being aware of the right sets of tools for the right kinds of tasks. Some of them might be old and heard of, but should you read this and chance upon something similar and interesting, please do leave a comment.
- Bill Monk – http://www.billmonk.com is a website that allows for you and your friends to spend all the money you want respectively on collective purchases. It keeps track of who spent how much so that people are then able to pay the actual amount at the end of the month, rather than sit and calculate how much each person owes the other.
Sure, a cleverly written excel sheet should help do the trick, but when this feature is offered on the go and someone else is able to do it for you without you having to write VB macros to program it, it is the shiite! - Gliffy – http://www.gliffy.com is an online diagram software that will help jazz up your presentations beyond your wildest dreams. I learnt the hard way in B-school that in some cases, good content is not the only thing that will do the trick for you to make a sound impact on the audience and that anyone who is sitting through a presentation also needs to be aesthetically catered to, even if that need of theirs is merely subconscious.
As a result, evolution towards the corporate ho life led to the quest for newer graphs and better diagrams and more jazzed up looking stuff that was brilliant to see even if it was utter garbage, used only to confound rather than clarify. Gliffy is the answer to all your prayers and then some! - Aardvark – http://www.vark.com – most of you that keep yourself up to date in the social media space would’ve heard of Aardvark to some extent. I don’t have enough patience to sit give a detailed explanation about what this site does, and so I’ll just provide you with an illustrative example.
I am moving to Gurgaon in April this year to begin working there, and I have been scouting for convenient and affordable accommodation options there. Google searches, searching for blogs with relevant content and other such queries led to more advertisement than content.
However, Aardvark let me sign up for an account and let me post my question regarding “good accommodation options for a person wishing to stay alone in Gurgaon”. Of course, once I’ve got a preliminary set of answers to my query on this website, I can further distill it down to more specific details such as proximity to my new work place, proximity to shopping centers and to the metro station, availability of car parking, rent range, furnishing and so on.
I am hoping that my questions get answered and that I get a good place to stay in a short span of time, especially considering the fact that summer will begin in full force and the NCR is not the most hospitable of locations to be in during peak summer time.
This isn’t too different from Yahoo answers in theory, but the interactivity, response time and the ease of use and convenience afforded by Aardvark beats Yahoo answers hands down.
If you do stumble upon interesting websites that offer certain unique features, please let people know about it too. It adds to what I’ve learnt is called the ‘one-sided network effect’. Heh.
Of Youtube, South Indian Cinema, ARR and Language Proficiency
When I do invest in a super stud laptop, I think I might as well kiss my TV viewing goodbye for the most part, since all viewable content is generally being uploaded on youtube simultaneously. There are many situations wherein a lot of content put up is being taken down on the insistence of production houses and such, but then again, most production houses are also putting up their own official and verified youtube channels for public viewing.
Over the past week or so, after the end of term 7, I’ve had to stay back on campus to partake in the job hunt and it is during this break that I’ve managed to admire and respect youtube even more. When I was much younger, our family used to view or at least talk about some of the more popular regional language movies in Kannada, Tamil and Telugu and we’d also made visits to the cinema theater to watch a few of these movies.
As the years have gone by, most of my movie viewing has gravitated strongly towards English movies and to a small extent, to Hindi movies and other foreign language movies ranging from Iranian cinema to Korean and Japanese flicks, to those made in Eastern Europe.
However, thanks to youtube, my interest in south Indian cinema has now been rekindled. The features on the website, combined with some kind soul’s generosity has led to playlists being created that can now stream entire movies. Our internet speeds on campus are like a dream come true and as a result, movie viewing has been taken to a new level altogether.
In the past four days, I’ve seen movies like Billa, Kadhalan, Boys, Chennai 28, Alaipayuthey, The Angrez, Sivaji the Boss completely over youtube. Some of these movies have been seen previously and some others were viewed for the first time. But its nice to not have to run to the video library looking for older movies, since youtube, in all probability has them all. I wasn’t able to locate a complete movie playlist for Thiruda Thiruda however.
The kind souls that have uploaded said movies have also been generous enough to include subtitles in the movies to make life easier for those that don’t know the language completely. My extremely limited knowledge of Tamil and Telugu have been somewhat supplemented marginally over the past week due to these movie watching binges.
Not only that, I’ve also been reintroduced to all the A R Rahman tracks that I’d been crazy about when I was a kid and had then abandoned later on for other music that took over mindspace. The more I listen to ARR’s stuff, the more I think that his older work was more melodious and representative of his musical genius and that the rest of the world in general that has gone bonkers over his work in Slumdog Millionaire would have tears of joy in their eyes if only they’d listen to his entire discography.
I can’t really pick a favourite, but the music from the movie Thiruda Thiruda would definitely rank highly among the works of ARR.
I strongly admire people who’ve mastered multiple languages and I wish I could’ve done so myself too, though with 4 + 2 (partial knowledge) languages that I know, and a few words here and there in the others, I’m way behind where I’d like me to be.
If youtube were around when I were a kid and I’d been allowed movie binges like the ones I’m enjoying currently, I’d have probably been a true blue polyglot! What’s gone is in the past, and in the present, I have the second half of Alaipayuthey to watch before I go to sleep. So until next time, here’s hoping you are able to unleash the power of youtube to make life more fun.
PS – I swear google didn’t pay me for writing this post, although any gifts in cash or kind would be most welcome. I’m game for accumulating some good Karma as well, seeing as how much it might help in the afterlife.
