The first one is the usage of the term ‘Geography‘ as a noun to refer to a particular region of the world. I’d remained blissfully untouched by this apparent misuse of the word until the completion of engineering college. Until then, geography was what I fervently believe it should always be – describing and writing about the earth.

Now, it is being used to refer to continents / countries on earth, such as the ‘Asia-Pac Geography’ and the ‘Europe Geography’ and so on. Whatever happened to using plain and simple ‘regions’ instead of saying ‘geography’?

The next thing that had me in splits the first time I heard it was the usage of the term ‘based out of‘. During campus recruit assimilation in 2004 at the only company I’ve been employed at so far, some big cheese spoke about how he was ‘based out of’ many locations during his career and ‘worked out of’ many important sounding places.

The little Hari inside my head was conjuring up images of how a person would be able to work, logically, in every place except the one he mentioned, if one were to take him literally. So, if someone were to tell you that he/she worked out of Bangalore, you’d assume that he/she would work every other place EXCEPT in Bangalore, but you’ll unfortunately realize that this is not the case.

Somehow the regular usage of ‘I am working at’ such and such office in this city has been discarded in favour of a seemingly complicated utterance.

Mercifully, these are two instances where TechSpeak is used blatantly, but doesn’t defy grammatical boundaries beyond a certain measure.

And to think of how I am accused of being sesquipedalian, when I just use big words instead of small without trying to alter the fundamental meaning of the sentences.

People were stranded for hours, and many missed out on their flights. That evening, I had to head to Total Mall on Hosur Road for a farewell treat, and I was thanking my lucky stars that I lived so far away from Palace Grounds, though I rue the day when someone decides to have a similar meeting in South Bangalore.

Initially, when the RJ on Radio Indigo annouced that people should avoid Mekhri circle to get to the airport, and instead go on the outer ring road, I thought it was random exaggeration until I realized later on that it was due to the stupid rally held by HDD and HDK.

Details of the chaos and mayhem caused by this meeting can be seen in the following links Times of India and Deccan Herald.

When you see how the father-son duo seem to be unapolegetic of their actions, and how they seem to justify their actions with hollow words, one can’t help but be consumed by rage. To make matters worse, they’re doing a volte-face to blame the BJP government as well as the police for their inability to address the needs of the citizens of Bangalore in the light of such a massive event.

I hope they burn in hell. I’m ok with it even if they just burn. Period.

Being a cheap and lazy guy who doesn’t want to spend all his time at home online, I have consciously avoided getting another internet connection at home, after a previous TATA Indicom wireless modem connection outlasted its usefulness and was therefore unceremoniously discarded.

This meant that I did not check email / update my website / surf arbitly for seven whole days, and this has led to much rejoicing because it has shown me that I don’t depend on the net as much as I had previously assumed.

Nevertheless, despite the past seven days of my life having as much content as an entire season of Seinfeld, there were some random things I did manage to do, and one of them was to check out the new Swagath Garuda Mall in Jayanagar, after having written about it a few days ago.

Right at the outset, let me tell you that this building is an excuse for a mall. In fact, I would go on further to say that even a big bazaar in its place would’ve served a far better purpose, despite being among my least favourite establishments. At least the latter stacks up on half liter packets of Nestle Goodlife milk and Oreo cookies, combined with attractive discount offers on the purchase of Real Activ juice containers.

There is no common area in the mall like you have for most malls that you might’ve seen. There are only two entrances – one to climb the stairs to get to the third and fourth floors to reach the food court and INOX, and the other entrance to the Westside store, which occupies the entire ground floor.

The Landmark bookstore has no direct entrance and one has to get in through the Westside store to access it, and the entire roundabout way of accessing the few stores in that ‘mall’ would lead anyone to believe that they skipped the entire design phase during the making of this mall.

The ‘multiplex’, on a Monday afternoon, was screening three movies, one Telugu, one Kannada the other one being ‘Hello’. I’d rather have watch the same episode of ‘Hum Paanch’ six times in a row, than sit through any one of those three movies being screened at that time.

At 1600 on Monday, I think I was the only person not employed at that mall who was present there, and although I was totally thrilled about the absolute lack of people, it was quite evident that the lack of people was due to the lack of anything worthwhile to do at that place.

I wish to apologize to anyone who wants to take this apology for having gone out on a limb to engage in premature celebrations with regard to how this mall and the multiplex and bookstore within would change the face of south Bangalore as we knew it. To my immense relief, PVR isn’t that far away from this mall in any case. Maybe south Bangalore doesn’t really need a mall because we aren’t mall rats per se.

I have noticed that while I can talk about any leave plans I have with some manager that I have already worked with for a few months, if I have to inform a manager about my prospective leave plans at the very outset when I begin to work with him/ her, I am met more often than not with a WTF expression that makes me want to do this thing again and again, cheap guy that I am.

The trouble with switching managers and working with different ones for different projects / accounts, aside from the adjustments required to make towards their working styles is their approach towards the whole leave issue.

Some of the people I have worked with have been awesome enough to just ask me to go ahead with my plans, while some others have had the chutzpah to ask me why I need the time off, and where I was headed to and so on.

As far as I know, I don’t need to provide justifications for asking for holidays within the limits allocated to me annually, since I am entitled to them in any case. It is sort of like being asked why I eat how much ever food I do consume.

There have been a few instances where I have been asked to re-think my leave plans due to some situations that have come about, and I have been shameless enough to go ahead anyway, comforted by the fact that crisis situations can be mitigated by clever and able project management, and my time to address such situations isn’t yet on the anvil.

In retrospect, the attention paid by teachers in school to students on leave strikes me as ironic, since it was the student’s loss if he/she played truant from school for whatever reasons and the teacher did not stand to lose anything in the student’s absence.

However, I feel that it is the dedication exhibited by most teachers and their committment towards ensuring that their students were taught properly, that led them to be as strict as they were in these matters.

In any case, I am glad the festive (read:leave) season is upon us.

There is someone who sits in my proximity at the office who has a dialogue from a Gult (Telugu, for those woefully uninitiated) movie as his cell phone ringtone, complete with background music and all. The ring tone begins with some female talking in a flirtatious voice, followed by some randomly absurd piece of synthesizer music followed by a male voice, which I haven’t heard most of the time since the said person mercifully picks up the phone by then.

This morning, I’ve been hearing him speak non-stop Gult for almost two hours, with the only discernible parts of his speech being ‘Hi how are you?‘ (repeated about seventeen times already before I got bored and lost count and had to do my own work) and something about ‘cute cute puppies‘ and something else about ‘Korean lovely ladies‘ thereafter (unless there is some expression in Gult which sounds like that, which I’ve buffalaxed into English).

I’ve ever so rarely heard said person speak to anyone in his vicinity, but I guess his is the only loud cell phone ringtone that I could possibly tolerate, simply because of its extreme absurdity.

Plus I’d rather not get my “Meh” t-shirt or my “Security” t-shirt torn in any fracas that ensues from a retaliation to my righteous moral indignation.

I’ve ranted about virtually everything I can survey, including announcements at the airport loud enough to wake the dead, about cell phones and people who stand way too close to you when you are in a que.

This recent TOI article which put Madman on the front page has sought opinions from a bunch of people who’ve been strongly vocal about being all for child free zones in the country, and are willing to cough up some money to ensure some peace of mind. This particular set of posts makes for interesting reading, if this topic has caught your fancy.

I want to go watch Wall-E in the theatres shortly, but I am scared of going because of the noisy irritating kids, their noisier and more irritating parents, that will kill the movie for me. Sundays, in particular, are a bad time to hang out at a mall, which, by itself is a bad place to hang out in, in the first place.

Also, the presence of pesky badly behaved children on flights is is probably a reason why all international flights serve free alcohol, so that people that want to can drink up and crash. (Funny how using the word crash on a plane makes people cringe. It is one of the best ways of unfriending the person(s) sitting next to you.) In the absence of said free alcohol, twelve hour flights would be agonizingly painful, since the presence of kids guarantees a lack of absolute silence at all times, except during turbulence (which is quite fun to experience in retrospect).

An interesting incident that took place yesterday further fuelled me to write this post. I had been to Big Bazaar to buy chocolates to satiate my urge to gorge on sweets, which has lasted for more than a fortnight now, and alarmingly so. The chocolates counter was closed as a result of which, I picked up the next best thing, Hide and Seek Milano biscuits, and was standing in queue patiently, when some random kid who must’ve been four or five years old just walked past me, walked back towards me when she spotted the biscuit packet in my hand, and held into it and tugged it.

The shop was closing, and I had been sleeping all day and needed my sugar fix, and there was no way I was going to let a badly behaved kid snatch the pack from me. I did what I thought Wolverine would do in such a situation, I bared my teeth and growled at her in a menacing way, and since I hadn’t combed my hair after having woken up and was dressed in my favourite pair of horribly torn jeans, I could’ve passed off as a junkie who’s food shouldn’t be messed with.

The growl made the kid run for cover, and she hid behind her Mum and was taking a peek at me occasionally when she thought I wasn’t looking. The guy standing behind me in queue, who was standing too close initially saw the incident from up close, and then respectfully stepped back some distance when I went ahead to the check-out counter.

Growling and baring one’s teeth works. I’m sure if I had been even remotely badly behaved like said kid, my Dad would’ve given me a roundhouse kick. Thankfully, such instances were few and far between.

BTW, I vote in favour of child-free zones.

I am targetting techies because I like making fun of myself.

There, I just absolved myself from all vitriol that I might receive from anyone at all.

**here be Dark Knight spoiler**
Moving on, I was thinking of how the Joker effectively manages to make people think along the lines of killing another bunch in order for their own survival, thereby ensuring that all societal norms and regulations go for a toss.
**end of Dark Knight spoiler**

Now I’m not as evil as the Joker is, and I wouldn’t dream of killing people and all that, but it would nevertheless be fun to see how people would react under different situations, and provide the rest of us with some quality entertainment.

For instance, techies use lifts to go from one floor to another, and the lunch time rush is when the lifts experience peak traffic. Junta are usually orderly, except for in some cases when they crowd onto it like people would into a BMTC bus*. Breaking wind at such times would make for some classic candid camera moments.

What if someone were to sponsor lunch to the person who got on to the lift first, before everyone else who was also waiting in line did? Would a techie succumb to the prospect of having free lunch over the need to maintain discipline and decorum? I don’t know, you tell me.

Cubicles are closed spaces, and sitting in close proximity with people should provide people with some sense to not wear strong odour perfumes. What if someone were to not have a bath to counter this assault on one’s olfactory senses?

What if one were to immerse into a glass of water, any cell phone that rang during a meeting DESPITE having insisted on putting cellphones on silent mode at the start of the meeting?

These are questions whose answers I don’t want to find, I just want such situations to be created in the tech environs to shake things up a little.

* Notice I said BMTC bus and not Mumbai local train.

PS – I honestly don’t see the need to have put in a spoiler alert, considering even Monkee has seen the movie. That makes him the last person on the planet to do so, and Christopher Nolan has promised to insert an Easter Egg dedication to said person for having seen the movie finally. Watch this space.

One thing that stands out in my mind is worth documenting here, for posterity. Our office has a splendid intranet portal which has all sorts of things to keep oneself preoccupied should blogging / LJing / trolling on flickr /wikipedia and engaging in other trivial pursuits not suit one’s fancy.

It is on this very page that there is a link which redirects you to a page which shows the birthdays for the day, and it is only on one day of each year that I click onto the page, see my pale, gaunt face (I was ill on my first day of work due to some side effects to an antibiotic that I had taken for a chest infection, which resulted in my hands being shaky – I thought I had Pakinson’s and wanted to email Michael J Fox and all that. Thankfully that did not happen.) on the birthday page and close the window.

On the day of my birthday, I invariably end up getting arbit happy birthday mails with flowers, birds and some gooey sappy messages from unknown people and it is at this point in time that I don’t know whether to praise or abuse them, simply because I am not sure whether to appreciate the fact that they’re trying to wish some rank stranger or that they are so jobless that they are in a position to gladly do so.

Should most people adopt that approach which would give heed to the ends, the channel through which said activities are performed would not matter much. This is one of the reasons why I had been donating blood for the past three years.

Blood donation is fun. Especially if it is at the office. You get to take time off work, and sleep while blood which you can spare is emptied from your veins and you let a part of yourself go for a good cause, and get something new in return. Well, the sleeping part is the most vital there.

This year, I thought would be no different fromt the rest, and I sauntered across to the makeshift blood donation camp at our office, only to discover after having had my blood grouping done that my donation had been deferred this time around due to the fact that I use the salbutamol inhaler as a remedy for my wheezing problems yesterday. The doctor refused very bluntly, and I figured that if they didn’t want my blood, it was not my problem!

So much for wanting to donate blood and fall asleep. The inhaler rocks and does wonders to your breathing if you’ve inhaled too much particulate matter, though.

I put one search on facebook for ‘Elisha Cuthbert’, the hottest woman alive, and all I found after some stupid fan page created was a whole set of users with the names – ‘Ankit Dixit’, ‘Zubby Raja’, ‘Rabbi Kalra’ and so on and so forth.

One of them had a Kurt Cobain pic in his profile. One of them was a fat surd with a stomach so wide I could hide within it while passing through airport security and nobody would notice!!

I wish I had gone blind before I saw these things, although the way the power on my glasses seems to be going up, that is something inevitable that is just waiting to happen.

Why in the name of God do I have to see such things when all I am searching for is Elisha Cuthbert on facebook???