Thread Ceremony

Mom is after me these days to perform my Thread Ceremony. There is a lot of high funda behind this ceremony. Once Threaded a guy born in a Brahmin Caste becomes a true Brahmin. No kidding ;-) But I don't think many young people know or care about that. What many do care about, is the fact that if you are not threaded, you cannot marry. That guy who mutters all the matras to marry you will kick you away if you are not Threaded. There are work-arounds of course. Bribe him, and wear a Thread at least during the Marriage ceremony, so that the ladies attending the marriage don't do Khusur-Phusur. You may simply lie. Afterall you don't get any certificate after being Threaded. But if your wife is overly religious and you do that telling-everything-true-true on the very first night, your marriage might both start and end up in soup.

Most of the Hindu ceremonies, and actually those of all the religions that I know of, don't give certificates of any form in the end. I think it is very important. I mean how do u know for sure whether Pados ki Mrs.Sharma is really "religio-legally" married to Mr.Sharma. I think all religions implicitly assume that a person who cheats God by lying to be something without performing the requisite ceremony will eventually be punished by God. Court marriages are a shade better. You get a certificate instantly. Even those who marry in "I do I do" style or in "Om Swaha" style have to get legal marriage certificates these days for a lot of reasons.

Well, Thread Ceremony is a very painful process. The scale and the exact procedure may vary, depending on which part of India and which subcaste you belong to. In one of them, lots of ladies are invited and they come and apply turmeric paste all over you and crack stupid Gharelu jokes and do LOL LOL and some do ROTFL too. Then you have to perform the long puja with the pujari. It's like sitting with him on the KBC Hot Seat, where he gets to do most of the talking. "Aayiye ham aur aap khelte hain kaun banega karodpati!!!!!! Dwiteeeaaaaya!!!" During the puja, there is one step where the being-threaded person's hair...that on the head...is shaved off. These days most guys get only a few strands cut off with scissors. That serves the purpose. It's easy to fool God. But still I am worried, coz each strand of hair on my head is valuable to me :-( However, it is definitely possible to avoid being touched all over by so many ladies. There are low-cost-less-maatha-pacchi alternatives available. Like go and get Threaded in a temple...don't invite anyone...just your family. People don't mind not being invited for such Thread Ceremonies. Just make sure you get some snaps and show them later. Otherwise...u know...Khusur-Phusur...

Life right now is already very heavily multi-threaded. One more thread will crash the application :-)

slapped on the road!

The funniest news item this morning: a guy slapped Greg Chappel in Bhubaneshwar to express his anger over non-inclusion of Oriya players in the Indian Cricket team. I have my sympathies with poor Greg. I can understand how he must have felt. Long back when I was 3 years old, I went to Tirupati with my family. I was a litil-litil small-small nanna-munna golu-molu baccha walking with small-small steps, holding mummy's hand with my left hand and a balloon with my right hand. 5 of us - Mummy, Daddy, Sister, Brother and I were walking side by side, heading for the temple for God's Darshan. As we were walking, I saw a mad woman coming from the opposite direction. She was definitely walking on the wrong side of the road. She was heading towards us. None of the biggies in my gang seemed to notice her coming. She was talking something to herself. I strained my neck and tried to look upwards. I saw that Mummy-Daddy were busy arguing over something; Brother-Sister were busy fighting over something. I was too down-to-earth to matter much to anyone. My smallness irritated and frustrated me all the time. There was nobody else of my size.

I grew more and more scared as the mad woman was coming nearer. And then, something happened which shook me to my core. The mad woman slapped me hard. She kept on walking, never stopped one moment. She just slapped me and went away, talking shit to herself. The balloon in my right hand flew away into the air. Still no one else from my gang came to know. I had to do something. I cried so loudly that it hurt my throat. I had to do it. It was a golden chance to attract attention and lots of ollelles from all of them. All of them bent to look at me. Mom hugged me, and asked why I was crying. I told her about the mad woman, and that she had slapped me. I'm sure the biggies in my gang must have felt like laughing. I didn't care to look at their expressions. I guess, whatever happened - I didn't consider it funny at all at that time. I cried for long after that. It was easy to cry in those days. I was taken to some restaurant and was offered something I liked. I ate it, and stopped crying. My left cheek was red for a long time, with marks of the mad woman's fingers. And for a long time, I wondered why the woman slapped me. Then we went for Darshan. I don't remember what I asked the God for. Surely not a first rank coz I hadn't joined school by then. Nothing, I guess.

is there a solution?

The racial abuse of Shilpa Shetty has been in news for a while. And with Jade Goody admitting that she made racist comments on the Indian actress, it is very clear now that Shilpa was indeed a victim of racial discrimination. Jade says "Sorry". But the question is, how much sorry is she of her thoughts on the whole issue of racism? She may be sorry for her behavior, coz that threw her out of the show. She may be sorry for having said all that, coz that made her infamous. But when are we humans going to attain the maturity befitting our claims of being the most intelligent living species on this planet?

I haven't seen people being discriminated based on color in India. Though physical affinities tend to be pretty biased to a very large extent due to natural instincts; but other than that, we normally treat everyone alike as far as our color differences are concerned. That's one breather because with the kind of diversity we have in terms of religion, caste, financial-status and geography, discriminations based on color would have added fuel to an already strong fire of various other kinds of racial and social discriminations prevalent in India. However, one very strange thing, and I don't know the reason for this, is that something makes us treat whites(the western whites) with more respect than we treat other foreigners. May be there is something genetic that reminds us that they ruled us for centuries and so are above us. Most white nations had the Industrial Revolution, which we sadly didn't. They are rich and powerful. They made colonies out of black and brown peoples' nations. Some white nations ruled on some other white nations as well. Is that the reason why we revere them?

Interestingly the Japanese were categorized as "Honorary Whites" in the ages of colonialism and were never treated like other non-whites, because Japan was a very rich and powerful country. That made even the Japanese claim to bear the White Man's Burden and start trying to set up colonies elsewhere. It's hard to imagine what the world-order would have been if Africa had been a rich continent with all the money and power. It might happen some day...

I think there is a serious problem with the basic human nature. I fear if all brown-skinned are treated as "Honorary Whites", they will only join the white gang and will start trying to rule the blacks. That's shameful.

Human thinking is quite screwed. No matter how much the human knowledge grows and how much we prosper technologically, the common man is never going to be so intelligent as to understand the bull-shit behind the dividing factors viz. race, religion, color, sex, etc etc. And it's the common man who really drives the world and its order. When I say common-man, it includes our leaders and rulers as well. They are experts at assuming and excercising power. But they come from among us, and lack the intellectual wisdom which the learned and the thinking people possess. The irony is that the latter, being exceptionally high in their thinking, knowledge and values consider power and everything else that's material as futile and worthless. And the common man, inspite of all his deficiencies, is the one who shapes the world.

The current world-scenario is a proof of this human weakness. These problems and dividing factors have been there for centuries now and are not really going away. Some of them have become more grave and ugly with time. As our knowledge and technological advancement are making us more and more powerful, we are increasingly becoming a danger to ourselves and our kind. Sometimes, it feels like we are on the brink of disaster...

I don't know if there is a solution. I even don't know if solution is possible in the first place. It's like a matrix. Rather, there are many matrices. Some of us who've come out of some matrices need to pull each other out of all of them and then start thinking...May be, we can change ourselves and change the world, thereby.

Mind and Information

I don't know if Managers think in terms of images. But I often end up with a spinning head after corporate presentations by Managers. Powerpoint - their best friend always turns me off. The most interesting thing about powerpoint which I have seen is that if you change the extention of a Powerpoint file from ppt to pps, it automatically becomes a slide-show file. I mean if you open a .pps file, it opens as a slide show. Similarly, change .pps to .ppt, and you can edit the slides. That's amazing.

The reason I talked about Managers thinking in images was that in most presentations, most Managers end up describing some image which they drew on powerpoint with great effort. The most favourite image is of a Pyramid. Most Managers would slice a pyramid at various leves and may be, cut it vertically too. And then they label all the blocks. Then they will describe each block, and its significance, Why the pyramid tapers, why we are at the 3rd level, why the vertical cut is a bottleneck for a syngergistic operation of the left and right blocks, why we should move up and what are the factors we should concentrate on so as to rise up. I don't know to what extent this imagery adds to clarity in understanding for others, but I often end up getting confused.

I think whenever there is a trend involved, we all have various ways of storing that information in the memory. When something increases or decreases, it may be remembered as a Pyramid. But one can also remember it as a downward or upward sloping straight line on rectangular coordinates. That has an added advantage of also telling you about what the x is with respect to which the y falls or rises. There could be many other ways people store information in their minds. Some may not use images at all. Some remember by relating the information to something else. Some may have videos...moving images. It may be sound for some. That's wonderful isn't it? The brain seems to save files in all formats. For example I can recall Shahrukh's voice. And as I recall it, I can feel the voice as if I am hearing it...yet I know I am just thinking about it. I can even think more about it and try to copy it by saying something aloud in my best imitation of that voice.

I don't think it's a good idea to avoid showing images altogether in presentations, because these are some standard images that make sense to a majority. And some people, mostly Managers, may have programmed their minds to understand or think in terms of those images. Possibly for this reason, all managers seem to understand each other. And others who have different ways of visualising data and trends tend to take time to grasp information shown in pictorial formats other than their own. So they end up taking longer time to process the information in their minds, convert into formats that their brain likes and end up appearing slow and confused. For me, not looking at the slides but just hearing to what the speaker says helps on some occasions. But as I said, some speakers go on describing their diagrams with all the pictorial details and I have no other option but to try to understand that figure. But then there could be people who understand diagrams better than spoken details. There could be people who are not good at reading and forming pictures in the mind. They may understand better if the picture itself is shown to them. Or there may be some people who remember in formats we cannot even think of. They just do an input-output...it just works. Even not all our data is in the form of images. It is a mix. It is far more complicated than that. How mind stores all the information is a mystery in itself.

It is definitely not possible to be well-intelligible to all. Better to follow standards, I guess.

One Monday Morning...

It was Monday morning. I was waiting for the red Pune-Station-to-Hinjewadi PMT bus. I had missed the company bus as usual. And just like on most Mondays, I couldn't find my access card on that day. It hid somewhere below the mattress or the two pillows. Everyday, before leaving for office, finding it is a painful task. Another is finding my comb. I can't go out without my comb. And that wretched thing always goes and sits at wrong places when I throw it after coming back from office. My Chemistry teacher Mr.Khan had developed a theory about hairs and combs. He used to say that if you ever happen to need a comb, just look around for a guy with the least amount of hair on his head. The probability of that guy keeping a comb is the maximum out of all those who are present. I used to laugh with everyone 7 years back whenever Mr.Khan gave us this funda. I had a lot of hair then...on the head and elsewhere...though I was secretly apprehensive about losing that on the head. Now a lot of people ask me for a comb. Particularly when I stand at bus-stops. It irritates me. I just give them an angry look and they don't dare to ask again.

This PMT bus never comes on time. Often it comes before-time, and I miss it. If it is not before-time, it is sure to be late. And I hate to wait. However that gives me time to check out some chicks at the bus-stop and form opinions about the standards of various Software companies around in terms of gals. It is important to be aware of such things to look cool in a Software company. Some call-center gals also wait for the PMT bus. But most call-center gals go by company-buses or company-cabs. We Software people are not pampered to that extent. And we don't get such hot gals as the Call-Centers do. Anyway, I don't complain. My IIT Education has taught me to be happy with what I have got.

As a timepass till the bus comes, I buy some chikki from a grocery shop near by. One small chikki for one rupee - the cheapest and the sweetest timepass in the whole world. I love chikki. No wonder it has a huge market in Mumbai and adjoining places. Lonavla ki chikki is very famous. Everyday I promise myself that I will start a company that will make chikkis and make it popular all over India. Lately, I have started seeing a Business Plan in everything. I have to quit Software at any cost and start a company very soon. Not that I have any exceptional business acumen or something. It is just that everyone talks of starting a company nowadays. So I also started thinking about it. It will at least make me look smart and ambitious.

Just as I was having my chikki, I remembered that I had to do Kapaal-Bhaati...Mom's order!!! She had asked me to do that every morning to get rid of my tummy. Baba Ramdev rocks!!! I forgot to do it as usual in the morning soon after getting up. I tried doing it some 20 times standing on the road...breathing in and out fast enough. I knew this was not the way to do it, but then...something is better than nothing. After the 20 ins and 20 outs, I ran my hand over my belly. It felt better.

Just then a chik in light blue salwar-kameez came walking and stopped at the bus-stop. I took a deep breath to pull in the tummy...pranayam...my friend Abhas calls it. Then I walked a little around the girl looking occasionally at my watch pretending to be getting restless because of the bus getting late. I flashed one tirchi nazar at her tag. HMMM...Infy Gal! Infy gals have good dressing sense - I make a mental note. Then I stood by her side, at about 5 feet distance. I moved closer, 3 feet distance now...breathing out more air than I was taking in. I looked at my watch again. The girl moved a couple of steps behind me. I hate standing or sitting in front of girls coz if they are tall enough they can see my chaand. It is so embarrassing. I spend hours in front of the mirror to get some hair right there, on top. It is not an easy job pulling upstairs all the hair from the sides with a mirror in one hand and a comb in another and looking at another mirror in front. You may set that to perfection, but light and air are a bald man's biggest enemies. Both expose his tragic reality to the cruel world. As you can make out, I am pretty emotional about my hair. I can go on talking endlessly about how sad my life has become from the moment I discovered that I was going to be bald...and believe me, I didn't discover it long before I was almost bald. Heredity played it's part, though a little too early for my age. Like all bald-men's sons, I was always confident that I was not going to be bald until I discovered that I was almost one.

I took 2 steps backward. I looked down, and found that my right shoe's lace had come off. I needed to tie it. But how could I bend down? The girl would see my bald patch. I decided that I was not going to tie the lace, come what may.

My office is just near Infy. So it was sure that the girl was going to catch the same bus as I was. I decided that I'd sit by her side if possible, i.e., if she sits on a seat with no one else sharing it. Normally 2 people sit on a seat in buses in Pune. And the bus to Hinjewadi is normally not very crowded.

I tried to smell myself by pulling up the collars of my T-Shirt to my nose. Shit, I forgot to spray the deo. I am fed up of myself. Whenever I feel I need to smell good, I find that I have forgotten to spray the deo. This was not the first time. I punished myself by throwing the half-eaten chikki on the road. A part of me was almost about to cry. Thank God, the other part constitued my UI.

Just then a Thunderbird came and stopped right in front of me. It had a guy on it - a muscle-man wearing a cap. I wondered whether he was also bald. He smiled. Not at me, but at the girl. I turned to look at her. She smiled too. They seemed to know each other. Her dupatta was hanging backwards about her neck. She pulled it down a little from her neck to cover her assets. He was looking right there. Kutta Kamina! I was raging in fury. 'She is mine. How dare you?' I shouted in my mind. That guy waved his hand at her. She walked 4 steps to the bike and sat behind that guy. She was struggling hard to fit herself on the small back seat of the Thunderbird. It is really not designed for ladies. The girl should rather buy a Honda Activa and get rid of such guys. I decided that I'd suggest this to her if she comes to the bus-stop on Tuesday morning.

She was gone with the guy. The Thunderbird took them away. I sat and tied the shoe-lace that came off. I tightened the other one too. Just then the bus arrived. I waved my hand to stop it. As usual, it stopped 20 feet ahead of where I was standing. I ran and enetered the bus through the rear entrance.

I reached the office by about 10.35 AM. My office is in a nice building. If you see from the outside, you will see all glass walls except for columns which are of concrete. It shines brilliantly in the sun. Once in a few days you can spot a man hanging by a rope and cleaning those glass walls. I observe him as I enter and tell myself 'That's a nice job :-('.

I was stopped at the gate by the security guard as he could not see my ID-Card-cum-Access-Card hanging by my neck. I had come without bringing it along. So I got a special visitor pass which gives limited access inside the company. In simple terms, it means that I can open a few doors and cannot open the others. So for the others, I have to run after someone who's going through.

Unlike companies like Infy and TCS, my company does not care about what its employees wear. It is work that really matters. Sometimes even that doesn't. Sometimes you can manage without working for months. Welcome to the IT Industry!

Aishwara Abhishek Engaged

Finally Ahishek Bacchan proposes and Aishwarya instantly says yes. And the very next moment they get engaged. I can imagine how all this must have happened. First the B and R families got together and decided let's do it publicly, it's time to declare. Abhishek, Aishwarya and Amitabh must have rehearsed some fundoo dialogues and expressions etc. Jaya aunty must have practiced some crying and hugging. Sad she got no dialogues.

Then in the middle of the party, when everyone was talking about Gurukant Desai, Abhishek got down on his knees and shouted loud - Aishwarya, I love you...will you marry me? And Aishwarya said YES instantly with both her palms covering her nose - Miss World Style. She tried to cry, tears were not coming out. Then Abhishek pulled a ring out of his pocket. Amitabh laughed a big HAHAHA. Jaya aunty also put both her hands on her nose, trying to copy Aish, and then cried loudly without opening her mouth EEEEEEEEENNNN. Luckily, she managed some tears. Then Aish held her hand forward to Abhishek. She first showed him the ganda finger which she had showed to 2 other guys previously. Abhishek got scared. He was about to cry. But he hadn't practiced this scene. So he was looking at big-B to get some tips on how to go ahead with this. Then Aish smiled and gave Abhishek her ring finger. He quickly pushed her finger into the ring. And he had clean-shaven today for what was the next to come. He kissed Aish right there. Aish was thinking ki Hritik was better. And Abhishek was thinking ki did she have fun? Was he better?

My blessings to the nav-engaged and soon vivaahit jodi. Kuch baatein ho chuki hain, kuch baatein abhi hain baaki. Bauchaar ek padi hai, barsaatein abhi hain baaki!!!

Women drive the Markets

According to a survey 93% of the youth in the cities prefer arranged marriage. I believe that everything in the market, right from what sells to the hottest trends, is driven by what women want. Though it is never very clear what women want, and it is also not possible that all women want same things, the market is definitely driven by a section of females. It may not represent the views of the majority, but it creates an environment where most others would want to follow. And women pull children and men with them. So if you please the female customers, the rest come automatically. That explains why Ham Aaapke Hain Kaun was such a big hit. During my childhood days at Bilaspur I noticed that a popular advertizing punchline for any movie or a sale was Mahilaaon ki Vishaal Bheed. I used to shift words and say Vishaal Mahilaon ki Bheed and laugh to myself.