Why not my blessed cycle that I’ve been raving about, you wonder. Yeah, it makes me wonder too. But the sudden onset of a bad cold, a cough, a chest congestion that has caused my phlegm to come out almost solid-like isn’t really the best condition to be riding a bicycle in to work. Discretion is the better part of valour and all that junk.

Turns out, I’m now humming ‘All I want for this year is sleep’, to the tune of ‘All I want for Christmas is you’, and it isn’t even sounding funny. I have three grand ideas that I want to blog about, but in the classic case of (and this is a new one) my head and my heart v/s my body, the latter’s fatigue and NED seems to be overcoming the former’s zest for opinion expression.

In line with my current theme for 2009, and my wanting to sleep, I have decided that I want some psychedelic coloured pyjamas. I’m not a particularly big fan of sleep wear, having slept in old t-shirts and miscellaneous pyjamas all through, and shedding some of those during the hotter months.

But now, as I sit at the office at 3-30 AM on Sunday, the 4th of January 2009, working to get the GStreamer code integrated with my code for some audiobook to run on a hand-held device, all I can think of is polka-dotted pyjamas that I want to fall asleep in.

The pyjamas should be red. The dots should be blue, green, yellow, orange, pink and purple. (Any resemblance to the rainbow coloured flag is unintended, though I am all in support of those brothers and sisters who want to wave it unabashedly) I want even Govinda and Dennis Rodman to avert their eyes from said pyjamas and say ‘chi-chi’.

I think I couldn’t possibly write an arbitter post. So much for the first great weekend of this year. Have a great remaining 2009.

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.

It is perfectly normal to be lazy, but somehow it is not looked upon as a desirable trait when you’re a student or an employee. An employer can afford to be lazy, on the other hand, simply by virtue of being able to write his own performance review and not having extraneous factors to point fingers towards, in case of facing any problems.

There have been times when I have wanted to take days off work, simply because I have accumulated leave and I’ve wanted to bask in the glory of nothingness, and this ‘have leave, will take’ policy has, in all probability, been put into use by other enlightened souls as well. However, I’d still have to justify it with having to finish personal work or something or the other that seems innocuous and raises no eyebrows.

However, if laziness is more accepted in our society, and the quality of sloth is removed from the list of seven sins (why have seven sins anyway, given that six would be cooler, with 666 and all that), I could as well say, “I’m feeling too lazy, and so I don’t want to show up for work / do whatever activity” and not have people look at me like I’ve just killed Bambi with a shotgun.

The Indian Medical Association should officially include laziness as a condition that can be used by people to excuse themselves from work, much like diarrohea, fever or a sprained neck. With official endorsement, offices, schools and colleges, and other places where one would like to turn away from due to the affliction of sloth would be more understanding of our total and absolute lack of inclination to go there sometimes.

This would ensure that I would be able to fill up “I’m feeling lazy” in the column where I am applying for leave, instead of having to fill up random mendacious stuff like “neighbour’s son’s thread ceremony” or “plumbing maintenance of house”. Taking time off for laziness would, in turn, foster better working relationships and as a result, would ensure that the employee works harder when at the office.

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.

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.

I confess to cheaply conforming to LOL speak in my post ‘Hai World’. Additionally, some of the tech offices of the more chilled-out kind in the US use this lingo in official communication or while checking in code into the version control repository. LOL Dogs and LOL Code are further spin-offs of this phenomenon.

I would encourage all those willing, able and enthusiastic enough to use LOL speak in their lingo, so long as they don’t mess with regular english spelling and only tamper with the grammatical aspects of the language.

Moving on, Tech Speak is a relatively lesser known malaise plaguing the Indian IT industry. Instances of Tech Speak have effects on virtually every IT office within the country, but incidents of its break out have been brushed under the carpet and despite awareness of its presence, no remedial actions have been taken to stem its growth or to quell it once and for all.

Examples of Tech Speak are too many to be exhaustively listed here, but some of the gems that one can come up with are as follows:

‘I can’t able to access the central server.‘
‘He is bad at communication. He can’t able to speak properly.‘ (Reason stated for turning down a person’s candidature during an interview.)
Our country national anthem are voted by UNESCO as best. I am having proud tears of joy.

Tech speak is prevailent in all IT offices, and is something that can be remedied among the nicer guys who ail from it by correcting them nicely and guiding them appropriately. The sad part of this is that there are enough bozos and clowns around who think no end of themselves and their ‘communication skills’, who are hit by this in an even worse fashion, and are therefore past the point of salvaging.

I am highly certain that ‘fraandship‘, popularized by Orkut, is also something that originated from Tech Speak.

The first step towards addressing this is to become self-aware of its presence and acknowledging it. One way is to embrace Tech Speak much like LOL Speak has been adopted. Now, if you feel that LOL Speak is cool and Tech Speak isn’t, you’re a prudish one-dimensional wannabe. When we make Tech Speak cool enough, more people will notice it, and those that are not lazy enough will try to remedy it.

Additional measures to keep Tech Speak in check can be put into place. I had come up with this idea of creating a simple software, appropriately named ‘Tech Speak, given to firangs who work with us Indians, for them to understand the nuances of our language.

This software will act similar to Babelfish and have two fields:

• What the techie says:
• What the techie means :

Filling up the first one and pressing enter will give out the corresponding string in coherent English, thereby eliminating all possible communcation gaps.

Lastly, I recently overheard someone singing a Kylie Minogue song in Tech Speak:
‘I just can’t able to get you out of my head….’

What can I say, Tech Speak rocks!

The first time I got my voter’s ID was when I turned 18 and was gung-ho about getting the indelible ink put on my left index finger after having exercised my right to vote.

Having had a change of address when my family moved to a new house circa November 2003 resulting in a consequent change in both the legislative assembly constituency as well as the parliamentary constituency, it was time to get another voter’s ID done.

However, I had to miss out on getting my ID issued when the rest of my family was having theirs done for the same reasons as I missed out on gatecrashing RJ Malavika’s wedding with Madman Aadisht (comments should indicate why such an action wouldn’t be undertaken even if I were in town).

When the electoral officials declared that there would be another round that would take place on 19th September 2008, I decided to get my card for it provided me with the ideal opportunity to play hooky from the office and not feel guilty about doing so.

When friday morning dawned, I was in for quite a surprise, because the government school where I was to get my ID done was not the one in the vicinity of my house, but one that was about two kilometres away in a village named maTTikyatanahaLLi.

Just as backgroud information, the place we live in is quite far removed from Mysore city, for unlike in Bangalore, if someone lives outside the Ring Road that surrounds the city, they are considered to be living on the outside of the outskirts.

Hence the place we live in is unblemished by the ways of the city life and is a peaceful and quiet sub-urb of sorts. Unmitigated bliss are there.

This explains why the whole hoopla of having to go to some random village transpired and now, I can actually get on with the narrative.

The walk to the village from our area was quite a pleasant one that afforded quite a few opportunities to take photographs, some of which I’m going to put up on my flickr account if I don’t feel too lazy later on.

When I got to the school after cutting through some fields and seeing a live mongoose cross the road without a care in the world, and also being witness to what I can only term as two buffaloes making out in a shallow pool of muddy water, I was quite surprised at how I enjoyed myself completely during the entire unplanned walk across semi dried up lakes and farmland, rendering me oblivious to the large distance I walked in order to get to my destination.

At the school, it was absolute mayhem as some lucky class was given the day off in order to accommodate this particular exercise. I saw kids peeping into the room where the photo IDs were being issued and giving all the assembled adults furtive glances, some of whom they were no doubt related to.

The queue was quite long, and the villagers were cutting in without any heed being paid to the protests by those behind them, who weren’t entirely overjoyed at the prospect of having to wait for longer than was necessary. So much so that some woman cut right in front of me, and stood her ground despite my repeated protests, which I realize in retrospect sounded more like polite implorings than anything else. Also, I Wasn’t keen on picking a fight with someone from the village because I was in unfamiliar territory and I guess I have to thank my lucky stars that I knew to speak the local language and have myself understood.

There were two main things that happened that morning that will remain in my mind for a long time to come. The first thing was not so funny, despite being superficially so.

The photo station was manned by some guy who had some basic expertise in operating a laptop with a webcam, and he was in charge of getting people’s photographs clicked. Most of the villagers that came to the school had no clue about their dates of birth and thus were not sure about their age. On being asked to provide their age / DOB, they were quite clueless. Some of them managed to give out a rounded off number while some others were assigned a number (usually a multiple of five or ten) by the guy behind the laptop.

A woman changed her age from 30 to 45 to 40 and finally settled on 37 because some guy was kind enough to calculate the mean of her maximum and minimum age. While this might seem quite funny, with the villagers having a hearty laugh when someone who was 50 saying he was 35 and all that, it showcased the basic issue of illiteracy among those in the villages to a large extent. While we monitor our ages, wait for our birthdays as occasions to celebrate and cherish, most of these people just struggle to make a living and are oblivious to regular things that you and I would take for granted and this particular incident was quite an eye-opener in this regard.

The second incident, which was quite funny was something I had anticipated. With three names that comprise of a family name, a given name and a surname (out of which I generally tend to drop the first one off), I knew that the probability of some fudge up taking place with the spelling tended towards one, and my fears were not unfounded, for the laptop guy, despite my having given him my old voter’s ID, mis-spelt two out of three words in my name, and made them all as part of one word.

(Turns out that the same mistakes were done for my folks’ voters IDs as well, but quite unusually, despite being highly vocal in their protests towards anything under the sun, as opposed to their easy going offspring who say ‘Meh’ for most things, they didn’t bother getting a correction made.)

After I recovered from the initial shock and shook myself off all the painful memories I’ve had since I could spell my name, when I found out much to my continued disappointment that others couldn’t, I launched into a vehement protest to get my ID done the way it was supposed to be. The official was not used to this, given the fact that he’d randomly assign ages and spell peoples’ names the way he wanted to, and after almost twenty minutes of arguements, I was finally given an opportunity to get a duplicate ID done.

Much to my disappointment, they took the misspelt ID from me and said I could keep it only if I could provide them with INR 25. Stupidly, I hadn’t carried any money with me and by the time I returned home, I was too lazy to go back to get it from them.

All in a day’s work. Whoever said getting a Voter’s ID card done is a cinch should be made to go through what I did on that fateful friday.

However, in a discussion with a friend, we came to the grand conclusion that Ramzan is the time when Muslim call center employees end up having a gala time since they can sleep fitfully during the day when the sun is up (depending on their shift timings) and then wake up later on and chomp on food like nobody’s business all through their working day.

This raises one question about how the devout ones adjust their need to pray five times a day with a disrupted circadian cycle. I don’t want the answer if I have to hunt too much for it, needless to say it is somebody else’s problem.

Voice breaking during high pitch singing is quite embarassing for whoever is in front of the mic and quite funny for the spectators, regardless of circumstance.

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.

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.