So, on Saturday evening, I left Bangalore for Mangalore via train and returned on Monday morning. It had been almost two years since I had visited Mangalore, and that was in January 2007 for the wedding of a certain friend named Vinayak Kamath, during which time, some of us had walked like Egyptians as the photographer was busy clicking photos of the newly weds.

In the interim thereafter, there were two trips each to Bombay and Chennai, a few to Bylakuppe (as a day tripper), one to Gokarna, one trip to Seattle and I hadn’t had the time to visit Mangalore due to that. My cousin was getting married, and I thought that it was a convenient time to go put ‘O Hai’ to all my relatives.

Little did I realize what was in store for me……..

Pretty badly.

Forget all the sugar-coating fundaes that Dr.Manmohan Singh has given us about how things are bad but will get better. If global trends are any indication, lay-offs will, like every other trend perpetuated by our western civilizations, hit Indian shores sooner than you think.

Question is, are we equipped to deal with it, with panache, with courage, and most importantly, with dignity like most seasoned laid-off people have done so?

In our country, a pink slip hasn’t yet reached the levels of acceptability that it ought to, considering we’re used to dollar equivalent salaries, tech infrastructure and benefits like the original silicon valley inhabitants. It is considered as a blemish on one’s record to have been laid off from a job, even though the employee might just have been caught inadvertently in the middle of an organizational restructuring plan.

Take for instance the case of the twenty four thousand people who will be searching for new jobs once Hewlett-Packard completes its merger with EDS, out of whom, some might be from our country, and might not take too well to this move, as compared to their counterparts abroad. However, since they plan to implement the merger in a phased out manner, most employees might be given enough time to desert the mothership.

However, employees of Xerox, Dell, Yahoo and eBay haven’t been as lucky. The axe is falling, and as Rajiv Gandhi said in 1984 in a completely different context altogether which we can extend to this present situation, “When a giant tree falls, the earth below shakes“.

We are but hapless ants, scurrying around, foraging for the best available deal, and if we’re caught under the tree as it lands on us with a resounding thump, such is life.

I don’t know if you know how it feels to be an Indian in the tech industry, and enjoy the somewhat uncomplimentary feeling of not being laid off that easily due to the relatively low cost incurred by the organization employing my services through my parent company, but once again, this time in the greater scheme of things, being a cheap fellow has its distinct advantages.

When I was in Seattle earlier this year, I had a few serious discussions, off the record, with people in the company that I was sent to,where I was to undertake the particular project I was working on until last month, and their views on being laid-off weren’t even remotely as vehement as I’d expected them to be.

In fact, just like we Bangaloreans are used to motorists coming at us with their high-beam lights flashing in our eyes, blinding us out, on the wrong side of the road no less, the Americans in their tech industry are used to being laid-off. Of course, such scenarios are unpleasant, but one has to, apparently, learn to live with them.

I percieved some sort of hostility from some people there, who weren’t entirely happy about the brown people invasion, and understandably so. However, I must admire those who were somewhat hostile for their professionalism and committment towards getting the job done. However, on the other hand, there were those who were extremely chilled-out and were good enough to hang out with, during the evenings.

From what I was told, these lay-offs are seen as an opportunity for getting one’s house in order, learn new stuff, take time to chill out and then regroup in order to renew their assault on the job market once it becomes more conducive for employment. The severance packages aren’t that bad either apparently.

But all this is hearsay, unfortunately. It does not, in anyway, make me feel less guilty about being indirectly responsible for someone losing his/her job just because I am willing to bust my ass off for that extra bit of time, and I come at one-fourth the price that the other person commands.

Sure, this makes business sense, and if one is to examine the entire scenario with the typical cold-blooded outlook of someone interested in making a profit, this is probably the best move that one can think of. But sometimes, just ever so often, I’m slightly unsure of how responsible I am, for someone else’s life being miserable, and the thought that I might be accumulating some negative Karma in the process is disconcerting.

Being thrown out of class was something I was supremely thrilled with, because it provided me with a grown-up’s endorsement to go out, play in the school grounds, sit and watch slugs move and leave their slimy trails behind, help the aayah in school in ringing the bell, a few minutes earlier simply because I liked the sound of it. This was more enjoyable than attending class on some occasions, and the propensity towards missing out on classes only magnified further as the years progressed.

This particular train of thought veered towards what the future generations would think of us, the first generation of bloggers. I can only imagine my kid reading about my ‘Dorky Guffaw’ adventures, or about how strongly hippie I have allegedly been, and wonder whether his/her image of me many years hence will be the same as what I’ve portrayed now through my online content.

Our generation has been simultaneously privileged as well as encumbered in some ways due to the revolutionary changes having been brought upon us due to the internet. While communication channels have been made so easy, and long lost friends separated over space and time-zones can still stay in touch as if they were only in the next room, and information of all sorts is available to us within a few clicks, I am led to wonder whether we’re really better off compared to previous generations.

The internet has also brought about a significant invasion of our privacy, and a lot of time is spent on the internet instead of in getting a first life. The future generations might be even worse off than we are, or might ridicule us for our extreme involvement with the net. Nothing exemplifies it better than the constantly changing arbit facebook status messages.

For instance, my current facebook status is as follows: “Hari is astounded at how make-up can make the prettiest women look majorly scary.”

While I might think it is funny right now, or at least, somewhat vaguely relevant, this is just going to be arbit nonsense once I end up saying something else.

While those bloggers who have a defined intent which leads them to blog, and have something topical to write about will have their work appreciated over time, those who use their websites as a means of unleashing arbit (case in point being yours truly) might just as well be better off covering their tracks, lest our children get inspired to do crazy stuff and then conveniently state how their folks’ blogs provided them with the inspiration.

In any case, such an eventuality is quite a long way ahead, and we shall cross the bridge, if it shows up, when we come to it.

Drinking on a Sunday Evening: Most people tend to drink on Friday or Saturday evenings, once the working week has come to an end. Thereafter, uncontrolled alcohol consumption eventually results in hang-overs on Saturday / Sunday mornings and screws up most of the weekend.

However, I propose that people who want to drink to their hearts’ content should do so on Sunday evening. This is because one can conserve precious time on weekends, and since Monday mornings are shitty anyway, the presence or absence of a hang-over at work doesn’t really make a difference.

Plus, most watering holes are less crowded with riff-raff on sunday evenings, but that is a moot point, given that you can drink anytime and anywhere in Bangalore city.

It was the cheap Monkee who spoke about this again last night, and made me think about blagging about it.

The Alcohol Buddy Theory: An alcohol buddy is someone you hang out with in order to have a drink. The surest sign that a friend is an alcohol buddy is if you are unable to hang out with this person unless alcohol is involved in the equation.

If you can’t figure out who your alcohol buddies are, hang out with them even when alcohol is not part of your meet-up and see if you end up having a good time regardless. If that is not the case, then you’ve got an alcohol buddy on your hands.

If you’re a social drinker, and you want to kick the bottle, all you would have to do would be to stop hanging out with your alcohol buddies, and all your problems would be solved. Voila!

At the height of the virus scare, the person who was given said nickname didn’t share my enthusiasm or my sense of humour, regretfully.

The saga of giving random nicknames began in college and has continued ever since even at the office. However, there definitely have been instances where I’ve brain-farted with my nomenclature, as can be illustrated with this example.

In college, there was this girl who was a year junior, and I did not know her name. Nor was I on speaking terms with her. But some of my friends and I thought she was cute. Hence she got the nickname – ‘cute girl’. Quite fairly obvious, and intuitive and easy to remember. Right?

A few days later, she was joined on a regular basis by this other friend of hers, who my friends and I thought was cuter than her. Initially, I chanced upon naming her ‘girl with cute girl’, but given that it sounded quite stupid, I changed that to ‘girl cuter than cute girl’ and so it stuck.

Now, those nicknames, I am not proud of. Not one bit. However, those are merely illustrative examples to indicate how despite having come up with names like ‘Lech Paaji’, ‘Doob Doob’ and ‘Lubdubi’, I haven’t been consistent all through.

Now ‘Lech Paaji’ was, as you can probably guess, a Surd who used to lech at women. His leching was, in fact, so intense that he embarassed most of the guys in his vicinity, and his supreme abilities to have his piercing stares zero in on certain aspects of the female anatomy didn’t leave absolutely anyone in doubt regarding what was on his mind.

‘Doob Doob’ and ‘Lubdubi’ were nicknames given to people who seemed ostensibly dumb, much as their counterparts in ‘Tinkle’ magazine, and were named so to continue the trend of naming people after characters from the ‘Tinkle’ universe.

However, some friends of mine at the office have hit upon a novel way of nicknaming cute women women they think are cute here at work. It has been based on the colour of their attire on the first day that they spotted one of said women.

Hence, nicknames such as ‘purple haze’, ‘black dahlia’, ‘simply red’ and ‘brown sugar’ keep being thrown about with gay abandon whenever I end up spending more than ten minutes with them, although that doesn’t happen often.

I must say I admire these guys deeply for their attempts to keep using these nicknames despite the fact that it is quite evident that these aforementioned women would keep wearing different coloured clothes on different occasions.

This has led to some pretty interesting conversational snippets that I have over-heard. “The one in pink is purple haze, dude! The one in black is the green lantern!” “No you moron, the one in blue is the pink panther, while the one in red is the black dahlia.”

Right. Go figure.

It was sometime in the first week of August 2006, when I was supposed to fly to Oslo for the second time in three months and had landed up at the HAL airport in Bangalore about four hours before my flight took off. Unlike the first time, when some six friends of mine showed up to see me off, there was absolutely zero fanfare this time around.

However, in this trip I had plans of utilizing my weekends better, since I had explored Oslo as thoroughly as one could in a month and a half, and it was time to check out other cities and Bergen and Copenhagen were on my list. My friend, who lives in Copenhagen had asked me to bring him ITC King and Old Monk Rum while coming along.

The recent liquid scare at Heathrow had taken place a few days before my departure, and hence I was unable to carry the rum, but I was going to buy him the cigarettes anyway and I was planning to buy cigarettes at the airport.

I picked up a trolley and placed my heavy bag on it, and proceeded towards the shop just outside the airport building in the parking lot where I could pick up cigarettes from. The shop was at an elevation and I was not able to bring my trolley around to the shop, and had to leave it someplace behind out of my line of sight to go and perform the necessary purchase.

I asked a couple of people who were standing there to help me watch my luggage for a short while, so I could run along, buy the pack and then head into the airport. I suspected that only high-end international brands were available in the duty free section. However, nobody seemed to want to help me with it, and understandably so, considering this was borderline suspicious behaviour. No amount of putting Bambi eyes and pleading seemed to work, until I spotted this cute girl who was standing there, drinking tea.

She was wearing a Jet Airways flight attendant uniform, and I just walked over to her and asked her the same thing, and after a long pause during which I guess she was thinking of what to do, she relented. I was quite happy, and even offered to buy her another cup of tea while she waited.

I remember saying the following to her:

“I’m no terrorist and I WILL come back for the bag, I’m just not strong enough to lug this monster bag till there and back, and risk losing this trolley, since I’m too lazy to go get one more. But I’m not so lazy that I won’t walk till that shop to buy you tea/coffee. Its lighter to carry, you see.”

“So, your name is Blanche. Isn’t that French for white? Are you from Pondicherry?” (I make horrible starting conversation, I know.)

“Are you given Carte Blanche to do what you want wherever your flight halts, so long as you get back to the airport on time?” (Covering up for Pondicherry gaffe with some idiotic wordplay)

I wanted to say this, but I thankfully didn’t – “Yours would be a nice name if you were born in a white-supremacist family.”

I narrated this incident to a friend of mine, who told me that I might’ve put borderline blade on her (meaning I might’ve almost hit on her), although that wasn’t my intention.

In any case, it was due to her help that I wasn’t beaten to pulp by my friend in Copenhagen, and she did say that it would be cool to bump into her if I were to fly Jet Airways, though I didn’t ask which sector she flew in.

I hope she wasn’t one of those 1900 people. Considering she would’ve worked for more than two years by now, it seems unlikely that she’d be on probation. Much good Karma to her, nevertheless for having helped me out.

In turn, on receiving that link and having seen it, I was labelled a woman for forwarding links that contained pictures of cats, and this has subsequently cemented my reputation in various other aspects including that of being a chick-flick God and so on. The point of the extreme absurdity and the horrendous language that those pictures contained that made one laugh at it was totally missed by those otherwise observant people.

Now that we’ve eliminated the irrelevant back-history out of the way, I wanted to speak about LOL code and the potential impact it could have on our tech industry.

Most IT firms in our country keep a close watch on the development of technology all over the world, in order to have a jump start on their competitors when the technology hits the market newly. Building expertise in the same is financially viable for said companies in order to bid for projects involving these nascent technologies, and to establish themselves as leaders in this area.

I believe that companies that face the prospect of laying off employees who were previously employed in capital markets projects should instead focus their attention towards having them learn and prefect working in LOL code. LOL code is the way to go for the future, and here is why:

• It is new ‘technology’, and everyone likes new stuff.
• Most techies are already experts in Tech Speak. LOL speak and consequently, LOL code employs the same deviation from the normal standards of coding as do Tech Speak and LOL speak from the conventional ways of english grammar and syntax. Learning curve will not be very steep. Basically, techies will take to LOL Speak and LOL Code like fish to water.
• Companies have an excuse to retain employees it might have previously fired, and thus seem more humane in their dealings, while actually making them work towards the time when the next big wave will hit the tech industry.
• Being in its incubating phase, the potential for developers to make modifications to LOL code and customize it to make it compile and run on virtually all platforms is immense.
• It is amazingly funny, and all those who appreciate its attempt at humour would have a good time coding, thereby improving developer morale.
• How can you NOT code in a language that says – ‘CAN HAS STDIO?’ for file inclusion, ‘KTHXBYE’ to indicate return and ‘AWSUM THX’ to indicate that a condition check returns true? 

If someone who is in a position to implement this absolutely genius level idea chances upon this post, please do take it up on yourself to bring about the attack of the gramatically incorrect developers. Who knows, with the kind of expertise we already possess, the world might be our playground!

KTHXBYE.

Not knowing what to do, I had previously linked my domain name to my blog, which most often than not received random traffic from search engines due to reasons I’d rather not be too proud about, for now.

I was additionally maintaining a livejournal wherein I had initially started putting in any arbit rambling that I wanted to pen down and preserve, and this sounding board then turned out to be the one that I used with greater frequency compared to my blog, which I was afraid I was going to abandon.

In the midst of maintaining a blog and a livejournal, I chanced upon a few blogs that were hosted on their own server spaces and had exclusive URLs, and this, combined with the need to customize what I spew out in writing prompted me to purchase server space and host this website on wordpress, which is what you are seeing right now. In this regard, I have to thank Aadisht and SKimpy, for their random tech support level assistance on gtalk as well as for having guided me to Madhu Menon, who provided me with the necessary server space, and deserves to be thanked as well.

Thanks also to Monkee, the cheap guy that he is, for having been the first person to subscribe to the RSS feeds of my new website, much before I could do so myself, and for some invaluable inputs and constructive criticisms that prevented me from doing some things that I realized in retrospect were stupid.

Shrenik Sadalgi, friend, colleague and photographer extraordinaire provided me with his old camera – a Canon powershot A620, which is super enough for my face, to shoot the pics that you can see in the header. Refreshing or clicking on other links will switch the header image, thanks to a php script written by Matt Mullenweg.

The wordpress forums are stud level so far as resolving issues related to everything under the sun is concerned, and it is a result of their assistance that I’ve been able to put my site in the current shape that it is in.

Clicking on the bars on top will take you to the different categories under which I’ve posted, and I will update and add new stuff to it. Currently, if your office’s internet proxy isn’t benevolent enough, you will not be able to see any media under the music category.

The primary intent of the blog is to fan my already bloated ego, and also to serve as a means of providing me with more freelance writing opportunities, the likes of which I have engaged in for a few print as well as online publications. I have managed to import and include most of my blog and LJ entries into this site, but I haven’t been able to tag and categorize all 400 (approx) of them for now, which means that you will still see that ‘uncategorized’ label on the top bar until I’ve had enough time, patience and enthusiasm to remedy it.

Feedback is most welcome, just leave a comment, and do subscribe to the RSS feeds of my site. This new blogging journey will be awesome!

I wholeheartedly intend to Rock you like a Haricane.