"Gone" Barack Obama

Barack Obama Countdown widget brought
to you by www.obamacountdownwidget.com

How Sekhar Anand got wasted, got dumb and never had a life

As I was looking through the JEE results a few days back, I couldn't help but reminisce those amazing days of my life. The preparation for JEE ... aah, they were the battlegrounds of the very best brains in India. (Well, at least that's what I thought before I came here and got wasted.) The exam became a challenge, and believe me I am pretty bad at them. As an avid reader of the fantasy genre, I came across the statement "Adversity and sorrow carve out a person's soul, so that he might have the heart to behold happiness". Was fantasy nothing but a different cloak on the thing we call reality, I wondered. It were these thoughts that led me to finally arrive at my life's motto, "Aim for the stars, you will atleast go sky high".

So I set out preparing for this exam with an aim of becoming the AIR1 and nothing less. The first year passed by in a blur. The masti was there, the shame was there and there was also a dissatisfaction. That summer something clicked in me, thanks to my mom. My holidays were spent in my study rather than outside it ... some might say that I worked hard, but for me that became a challenge and thus fun. The second year started with a bang. Pen-fighting was a matter of honor and organic chemistry was the new buzzword (thanks to rajnie sir). The second breakfasts I had at maurya with Akshay, pypa and Sid & the stupid book thefts of pypa that I took part in are the memories that will last a lifetime. The teachers this time around were even more cool. We had fun in the classes -the probability problems in maths, the quick fire organic in chem, and neelesh sir in physics. Then came the AITS, the moronic boards and finally the biggie.

JEE ... physics went average, maths was cool and I got to stare at the walls during chemistry. A stupid friend made me to believe that I was nowhere near the cut-off. I told of this to my mother, contemplated for half an hour("Shit maan .. Not again") and for the next month I prepared for the other exams with a resolve that become well proverbial in the household. Within the span of a week I gave AIEEE, EAMCET, BITS and ISI; and excelled in all of them. The day of IIT results - i was expecting nothing great out of it. I was drinking tea happily when my dad calls up to tell me that I scraped through. I didn't celebrate a lot. I now had all the
pride of an Ishkan knight burning in my heart.

The next time something big comes my way there's a small change, a small belief that I could draw upon my resolve once again and that the only thing that could ever stand in my way would be me.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Well, rather serious post,eh? Here come the fun trivia! My top five memories from those days:
1. The penfights, the farzi football games, the country waale antakshari game (heck noone named this game) !!!

2. The books Pranay and I stole, the samosas and the sweets Sid n I never paid for and finally the cool drinks that Ajay and I lifted for the whole gang!!! Damn I was among kleptomaniacs ..

3. The humiliating yet funny "stand up and ..." in English, French, Maths and Chem classes. (SK Rajesh was particularly into me with his "Sheiigarrr")

4. The second breakfasts at Maurya with Akshay and Sid ... aah the chutney there ...

5. The bus rides back home to KKP ... The whole dumbass bunch of teens (me, Yash, Harish and CPP) somehow magically again got transferred to the same place - IITG!!!

ys

And so it begins ...

Summer's back! And all the boredom in the corporate cubicles of an iit-ian is filled invariably with one past time - blogging. Hell, so here's The Dude's version ...

Some say dropping an intern at IBM is not a move a sane man makes. Hello ... I chose MnC with AIR 670; I could as well have chosen CS and tried to change the world from my compu using C++ and JAVA. I chose MATLAB and Bloomberg instead and I'm sticking to that ... well atleast now I am.
Well, my intern's started off like any desi industry intern ... instead of all the boring details, lemme share a few standout experiences here ... IBank Intern Funde ....

1. BEST suxx man ... Matter-of-fact, Mumbai traffic suxx man. The moment you enter the city the first thing that stands out about Mumbai is the amount of fly-overs in the city and the traffic congestion, inspite of them. It took me 3 hours to get to my office in a bus !!! and hell i wasn't even living in the farthest parts of the city!!!

2. (1) => Local trains ... And man, they are awesome. Get a first class pass and then the travel's just cruise mode ...

3. My office's filled with football fans .. I mean there were discussions about Paul Scholes and Munaf Patel, Liverpool and their title draught,et al.. And seriously, does anybody out there like Chelsea except Usha Kiran?

4. Bloomberg's legen ..... dary !!! I mean you feel like the God of the Financial World sitting on it.Every single piece of info including the address of Paul Scholes is in it!!! The analysis and the freedom it provides is mind-blowing. Figure this, my first day at the internship. A nervous bloke, who just spent half an hour outside the building to put on his tie walks in.

Guide: "Hi maan"
Bloke: "Good morning, sir"
Guide: "Yaar aaj HR waale nahin hain. So, here's Bloomberg and Reuters ... Fiddle around with them!! Chill maar yaar"
Bloke (in his mind): Wtf .. Hell yeah !!!

5. Well in an Asset Management Centre where crores are hedged everyday, phrases like "I don't give a f%$#", "Chutiya", "Gaand maar le", "Chillax dude" aren't as uncommon as they seem to be ... :P

6. Had lunch at INOX foodcourt for a week (which is just next door, btw) and then corn maggi at the canteen. Corn maggi ... who the f adds corn to maggi? Dumbass ...

More to come as the days go by ... Well, the work's cool and have a bunch of IIT-ians beside me.

PS: Read "The Witch of Portobello" by Paulo Coelho .. a nice read if you have a day to kill and are in a mood for a bit of senseful arbitaapa.

PPS: Check this out -
Office 7:30 - 8:30 13 hours
Sleep 11:30 - 6:30 7 hours
That leaves me with (24-20 =) 4 hours in which I have to eat, bathe, wear a formal dress and figure out the intricacies of tieing a tie knot!!!! Insane maaan ...

The Golden Cage

1. A few weeks back, I came across an article of a temple built at Varadyapalem in Andhra Pradesh. It is worth around Rs. 500 crores. The creators say it has been built to unify, energize and evolve all of humanity. crap load of s**t. There are temples like these being built in every nook and corner of India.

2. Some elite few have donated to the Balaji temple in Tirupati various things ranging from golden crowns to LCD screens, from holy vastrams to air conditioners. Does the lord need AC's to stay kewl? Or are golden crowns the new in-thing in divine fashion? Would he have been unhappy with them if these men had donated a few essentials to the kids in Dharavi?

There are countless more examples by which enormous funds are swindled in the name of charity and welfare. Funds are being spent to beautify these sacred places when one could make the detestable slums more inhabitable. Does a 'statue' of God need more comfort than the life he created? God's got heaven to have fun, the young kids I see on my way back home have a mud hut. Arent there enough temples in India? Aren't the so-called holy places not holy enough that we need more temples, religions et al? Do we need these newly sprung hi-fi temples to wash away our sins? Do the gods we build them for need them?

Give these a thought. And next time you visit a place of worship, be compassionate towards the beggars who line the pavement, leading to the stairs of divinity rather than the stairs. Halve the amount you drop in the collection box. And if someone's trying to build a temple in your village, try to make them see the light of things.

There have been many babas who sprung out of nowhere. Let me share with you an anecdote, that I recently heard during my intern. A new baba suddenly came into existence in the Telangana region of AP, promising to make barren women fertile (Thats how I heard it, :P). He was a good PR guy, I believe, for during the start of his career there were a few cases who spread the word that they had been blessed with children. Truckloads of people went to the baba. It was a costly affair - one had to pay for the lodging, for meeting the baba and take to him coconuts (whole coconuts, without tearing it out). After an year, the baba and his whole institution vanished. The baba had apparently made crores out of commissions, and selling the coconuts back to the hawkers. Now thats one successful b-plan, you know !!!
Anyways, except a select few, most of these saffron robed men are fakes. Discourage any superstitious lot you know and get them to donate to the needy rather than to these con men.

India has the potential, the brain and the brawn to become a superpower. Let us not thwart the process, but contribute to it. Provide the needy with a new hope and bring forth the humanity in you. Let our country not be caged by these golden temples.

PS:
(i) The word temple was used as a generalic term and means all places of worship.
(ii) Well just because Arjun Singh gave away reservations like candies, it doesn't mean he is helping the nation move forward. Make things happen, but think about them first.

When's wall*e coming to India?

Hmm .. in the last sem, there were great movies that I watched, and then good movies, passable movies, telugu movies and there was 10,000BC. But one movie stood out among them all. A soft french movie which tugs at your heart strings. 'Ratatouille' (rat-a-too-ee, the french have a weird way of spelling things). Animated movies - most of the them (with the the exception of Lion King, Antz and shrek) are childish. Even the three mentioned have rather subdued climaxes. Until this, I considered this genre 'funny' at best and never close to the 'moving stuff'. This movie changed that once and for all, and now seeing the review WALL*E's getting, 'funny' will most surely get changed to 'satisfying'.

The movie is based on an ace chef, Gusteau's principle "Anybody with enough zeal and desire can cook (and thus succeed)". Remy, a french country rat with great taste for fine food and a knack of combining flavours gets blown away to Paris due to a twist of luck. There, he gets into a really unexpected relationship with a young cleaner in Gusteau's restaurant, Linguini. Together they overcome their natural shortcomings, dish out magical recipes and taste success. The movie's high point is definitely the food critic, Ego. A man, who holds utmost dislike for Gusteau's morals, visits Linguini for making his report. The scene and the narration that follows is arguably one of the best in animated film history. It moves you and if you listen to it with an open mind, one shall discover a really profound meaning.

If The Incredibles earned Brad Bird a good reputation, this one will firmly establish it in the reamls of the greats. The movie is visually bright and the colors used are soft and easy on the eye. The humour is light and enjoyable. The best aspect of this movie are the charatcers itself. A loser that everybody likes in the form of Linguini, a scheming boss that people could associate with (not me though, :P), a sensible lady love who isn't the perfect beauty attainable only by the tom cruise's and a chef with a cheery disposition. If one can bring oneself not to like this movie, the person gotta be a retard. There shouldn't be a need to mention that this movie won the oscar for the Best Animated Feature Film, but as it's a review there you go. All in all, I enjoyed the movie thoroughly.

Ratatouille is a classic from Pixar.