But now, after some significant introspection, I realize that the suggestions and steps I put forth weren’t really implementable. Hence, I’ve come up with another brilliant alternative idea that might be a little easier to implement.

Anyone who doesn’t drive / ride their vehicle properly, and has been caught and fined on more than N occasions (N : to be defined) should be tattooed on their forehead with something that will cause them to be the butt of ridicule for everyone concerned.

Maybe something like ‘traffic offender‘, or ‘I can’t able to drive‘ (works best for techies, some from my company included), ‘I can haz ambulance??‘ might just do the trick. It has to be just above the eyebrows, so that even emo-cuts (punk rocker style) cannot hide the tattoos. Further suggestions for witty stuff to be tattooed are welcome. Please to comment.

I like this solution better, no capital punishment involved. Amnesty International cannot issue a fatwa against me. At the same time, politicians and cops can still make a lot of side money by siphoning off funds to be allocated to the various tattoo artists who’d be involved in putting forehead tattoos.

I propose that someone draft a proposal so that we can submit it to our honourable Governor, who is bombed ad nauseum with stupid petitions anyway. One more will not really make a big difference.

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.

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.

This officially earmarks the longest voluntary relationship I have ever had in my life. Either party could’ve broken up at will, but both of us have weathered many storms together and have stuck on, for some reasons best known only to the both of us, while most other reasons for aforesaid situation remain significantly inexplicable.

This NaN is going to focus on the memories I have had of September 1st over the past five years, and for sure, it has been quite interesting in more ways than I could have previously imagined.

For the first ever time in my life, I fell asleep in something akin to a class, because the person who was giving us the corporate presentation could as well have been spraying valium through an atomizer four inches away from my nostrils. In addition to my acute somnolence, I had also been, as I had mentioned previously, unwell, and the medicine that I’d been prescribed had given me a light tremor in my right hand, and for one of the first ever times in my life, I was scared as hell about whether I’d ever benormal again.

The doctor’s reassurance about it being a reaction to some expectorant tablet did nothing to remedy the situation, and it was only after I got better and I was able to write properly did I heave a huge sigh of relief.

I had been to the office a fortnight prior to my joining date, on 18th August to hunt for accommodation that was close to where I had to work. Seeing the amount of dirt, dust, traffic and the accompanying madness and mayhem was too much of a shock for me, given that Mysore was diametrically opposite insofar as the state of affairs on the roads were concerned.

Three days after the entire rigmarole began, I had called my Mum up and told her that I wanted to quit and open a grocery store in Mysore, or teach in my college and I’ve had constantly recurring thoughts of quitting work ever since, but the idea has been mulled over so much that its now relegated to that part of me that tends to over-romanticize trivial situations and circumstances.

Its been four years, and, as is quite evident, I still haven’t quit.

Music, which was such an important part of my life, had also been relegated to oblivion.

In the last week of August 2005, I contracted bronchopneumonia, and as a consequence spent the first anniversary of my starting life as a working professional in bed with a fever of 104 F, getting more pale and gaunt by the minute, but sleeping like a baby and feeling happy about not having to work during that time.

Not the best of times, but not the worst of times either.

On the morning of September 1st, I saw two mails – one of them said I had my august salary credited to my account, and another one congratulated me for two years of work in my company. I said Meh to both, as I had said to some other formerly important stuff at the very start of the trip and continued to work, without those two mails bothering me much until a few days ago when I took a lazy stroll down memory lane.

In retrospect, that second trip changed my life for the better in more ways than I’d have imagined it would.

Nevertheless, this was quite a tame and incredibly lazy time for me, and this anniversary passed on without much ado either.

Even if I end up going home after work and just crashing after watching some arbit stuff on TV, I know that I’ll have had fun simlpy because I’ve reached a stage where I don’t give a damn about too many things, and am in a controlled free-fall mode.

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.

Let me illustrate this with a particular example that I was witness to the other day. This took place on a weekday morning at a busy traffic intersection on the ring road in Bangalore, when some buffoon chose to use his helmet to protect his left elbow instead of protecting his head.

Combined with the almost-reverential protection given to his elbow was the fact that he didn’t know enough math to discern that he was speeding at a place where he should’ve ideally breaked and waited for the red light to turn green.

Hence our man, let’s call him Raju, was guilty of two offences – jumping a red light and protecting his left elbow instead of his head with a helmet. What happened when he chose to move instead of wait is something that was predictable. He rammed into someone who was travelling in the purpendicular direction and hurt his hand, because the helmet got in the way.

I saw the whole thing happen, and I couldn’t help but grin at the fact that Raju was being a dumbass who deserved what he got. I don’t think it is bad Karma to laugh at someone who is being an idiot and breaking the rules. I’d consider it to be priceless entertainment instead and I must say that I look forward to many such instances in the future.

Te same applies for all the morons who travel the wrong way in a one way to save a few paise, instead of going further ahead along the road and taking a U-turn to get to their destination. Skimpy and I once had a discussion and he pointed out the following logic to me made a pertinent observation, which I wish was something that people could come up with intuitively instead of putting themselves through such peril.

Assume that you save 10 paise petrol while going the wrong way, and that you face a 1% risk of injuring yourself. Consequently, the value of your life is INR 10. If these people have such a small value for their life, should those that don’t break the rules bother much about them?

The traffic rule breakers in Bangalore should have their own section in the Darwin Awards, so that they can go ahead, and literally knock themselves out. For good.

Although Mysore will always be city no.1 so far as I am concerned for the rest of my life, I’ve grown to love Bangalore so much more after a weekend trip to Chennai. Three days in Chennai on band related work and within twelve hours of landing there, I was pining away for Bangalore and its weather.

Although an inefficient public transport system, bad traffic and moronic motorists and too many IT junta show up as some definite downers against the city’s name, the positives are way too many to discount.

I’d initially taken Bangalore weather for granted, given the fact that Mysore shares pretty much similar weather, although it has been the trend over the past few years to have hotter summers and colder winters in Mysore, but three days in Chennai has made me realize how awesome this city is.

I’d never ever spent more than 24 hours at a stretch in Chennai, and in the absence of air conditioned hotel rooms or an air conditioned studio, death would’ve ensued.

On returning to Bangalore, after getting off the train and heading back home, the cool breeze that kept messing up my short hair in the auto, the familiar Kannada abuses that the auto driver was heaping on other motorists that were navigating the roads as badly as he was, the fact that I could map out the entire route to my place from the railway station (as opposed to not being able to do such a thing at a new place) just made me feel so good.

True, Chennai is slightly more ordered and the infrastructure seems to be in place in a much better manner vis-a-vis Bangalore, and Anna Salai is everywhere in Chennai, but Bangalore just rocks. Period.

This follows soon after Dorky Guffaw has also made his debut and has had three episodes and another one in the offing within the next couple of days.

Traffic Boy’s origins can be attributed to the on-road crimes committed by the people around on vehicles and the pedestrians, and hence, with the noble intent of rectifying what he felt was seriously wrong with society, the hero, whose name as yet remains a mystery went to the Heavenly Bodies gym (where another prolific LJ guy is a regular visitor) and developed his entire arsenal of super powers that now aid him in making the roads a better place.

Traffic Boy has various super-powers, and here is a list of them that follow. Do keep in mind that this list is not exhaustive, but will be updated, if the author decides not to be too lazy. Fat chance of that happening.

1.Traffic Boy can, with sheer will power, silence errant horns of vehicles parked at traffic signals, or of vehicles plying on roads where horns are honked despite there being no space for any movements to occur. A quick glance towards the source of the offending noise, and voila, it is like someone has pressed the mute button.

2.Traffic Boy has the ability to lock the handle bars and steering wheels of vehicles hell bent on violating the lane rules, thereby preventing them from cutting in on other passengers driving in a straight line on a wide road.

3.Traffic Boy can create a forcefield at signals so that util there is a green signal for the go-ahead, vehicles don’t move. Nobody can cut red signals after that.

4.Traffic Boy can make high beam lights go dim, or in the very worst, burst with a resounding clink should someone use it without reason.

5.Errant riders, who drink and drive and also those that go on footpaths will suddenly find their vehicles punctured and also find themselves out of petrol in a desolate place. Traffic Boy’s ability to engage in multi-person teleportation as and when such offences occur shall hold him in good stead for that.

Traffic Boy shall remain anonymous, riding amidst the sea of vehicles and performing his reconnaissance missions, undetected, unseen behind the visor of his helmet and unheard of, unless he manages to let out an occasional loud fart or screams “I am wanting to break free” at the top of his voice while on an empty road.

More power to Traffic Boy.

After that vitriolic tirade that involved my wanting to kill four different types of people with irritating habits which, if implemented would cut down Bangalore’s IT industry workforce by half, I have returned in a short span of 48 hours with another post, lamenting the state of traffic in Bangalore city, and on another fatwa imposing rampage.

Proper implementation of these fatwas and the corresponding punishments shall result in the other half of the IT workforce being eliminated, giving us a dual advantage of providing employment to those people that are seeking it, while reducing the population of our country by a certain percentage at the same time. Less traffic, easier to ride bike in these crowded streets. Hooray!

A friend of mine had made an interesting observation about how traffic in Bangalore suffers from an identity crisis. Two wheelers seem to think they are pedestrians, with most of them treading along footpaths rather than on proper tarred roads. Cars and other big vehicles on the other hand seem to be under the impression that they are two wheelers with the ability to manoeuvre through the tightest of spots while turning at awkward angles. Pedestrians, on the other hand think they are like trucks – huge and indestructable, as is evident from the way they tend to walk on the roads.

But traffic Fatwas are pipe dreams that will be relegated to oblivion once I churn out three more blog posts, rendering this particular post to the archives section that those normal people that are lazy wouldn’t bother clicking to view, being content with reading the first two lines of each post, determining that their IQ levels are much below the cut-off levels desired to read, appreciate and truly enjoy the content s of this post and subsequently navigating away to some other blog that might be infinitely boring but one that they can connect to.

In any case, for those of you that have still stayed on despite reading the build up to yet another tirade, here is a list of traffic offense related fatwas I wish to issue when I become the Supreme Dictator of the country.

1. The first set of people that deserve to be abused are the traffic cops themselves. Just day before yesterday, I was travelling towards somewhere in Koramangala and had to stop at the traffic signal at the forum, for I had to turn right at that T junction but missed the green by about three seconds. Normally conscientous, I stopped my bike, much to the chagrin of some other junta behind me who weren’t as conscious of following the rules while those idiots on my left whizzed past even as the signal had turned red and traffic from the other side was revving up to move.

   Amidst all this chaos, our honourable traffic cops chose to cut the signal to get to the other side, from another lane, proving to be such a pathetic example for people who have no qualms about not following the rules.
   Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

2. People who use high beam lights within city limits are candidates for the guillotine. Their indiscriminate bright lights cause the unnecessary generation of iodopsin in the eyes of those that are unfortunate enough to travel in the direction opposite to the ones where said fatwa receivers are headed.

   Cars of the future should be equipped with some standard equipment that automatically disables the high beam button within city limits and will ensure that it can be used only under circumstances pertaining to flashing lights so as to engage in overtaking manoeuvres. The highways are good enough for those random sound and light shows.

   (Inclusion of bikes with wolf-horns as well as other shrill horns is strongly being considered for inclusion in fatwa issuing edict)

3. A fatwa needs to be issued against those lovely people who honk randomly when traffic is at a standstill near a signal, with about sixty more seconds to go for the light to turn green. What in the name of the Lord are they trying to communicate to other people standing around them when they go about on their horn blaring spree is something I fail to understand.

   We need snipers stationed near signals so that these people can be dealt with appropriately enough.

4. The fourth category of people are those that jump signals at night or when they think nobody is watching. If you don’t want to follow rules, then your friendly neighbourhood sniper awaits you, failing which you should move to some other country where traffic rules are more lenient than the ones in our land.

   It is shameful, the way these idiots in fancy cars or on fancy bikes (and EVEN in non-descript forgettable vehicles as well ) go about jumping signals, while their full family is in tow, just because it is past ten and the probability of traffic from the other junctions crossing at the same time that they do has diminished significantly, though the possibility still hasn’t been reduced to nil completely.

5. The fifth category of junta to make it to this superelite list are not those that ride on vehicles, but those on foot. This issuance is targeted at the new type of creature out there that I would like to call the ‘nonchalant pedestrian’, who deserves to be run down, if anything.

   If you’re Indian, jaywalking comes as naturally to you as being a polyglot would, if your mother tongue is not Hindi or the local language of the state you reside in. It seems as though we have, as a collective people grossly misinterpreted the concept of the zebra crossing and that, to date in Bangalore seems to be the one stretch of road on the roads I’ve travelled where I have seen the least number of people walk across.

   Interestingly, apart from the total lack of usage of the zebra crossing path, the number of pedestrians that tend to cross the road is also in direct proportion to the speed at which one would be travelling on the said path.

   We all are used to jaywalking, and I have no hassles or grouses against those that run across the road after looking carefully and do their crossing swiftly. The nonchalant ones, who ostensibly want to be run over, are those that amble across slowly even in the face of oncoming traffic, without a care in the world, as though navigating through the significant number of vehicles that constitute Bangalore traffic is like a walk in the park are the ones that make me want to run them over.

   If life was like a Roadrash game, you’d know what I would be up to! The idiotic college kid wanting to impress some random chick, the former beauty queen who still thinks she is a traffic stopper in looks though she would be in girth and gait and (my favourite) the idiotic techie looking busy on his cellphone chatting up with someone who is trying to sell him a credit card with an ID card dangling around his neck to prove his superiority over those that aren’t doing what he does for a living are the top 3 candidate types for being run over.

If anyone reads this, and also wants to help add to this fatwa list, it would be fun. Volunteers for snipers invited. Candidates who have had work experience in the MARCOS, Sayaret Matkal, SAS or Delta Force would be given preference over others, though enthusiasm from all quarters will be appreciated and suitably rewarded.

Kindly reply within the comments for your opinions as well as applications.

Drive / ride safely and if you’ve read this piece, maybe there is something you’d like to do if you don’t follow traffic rules and ride your vehicle or walk on the streets the way you are supposed to.