A Life Less Ordinary

As cubicle neighbours come, this one is as peculiar as they get.

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.

Its official now, I've spent more time outside college than I did within it. Not that I attended too many classes and all that, but I guess I've been a Corporate Ho longer than I was an undergrad student. Four years have passed since I graduated from being a dorky engineering graduate to a dorky engineer who had to earn his living.

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.

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2004: First day of work. I was unwell, and I had worn a light green full sleeve shirt my sister had got me as a present. She had overestimated my shoulder width, my height and my girth and in the process purchased a shirt that was two sizes too big for me. I wore it nevertheless, because I thought it was important. My cousin, who's house I was at on the first day I was in Bangalore, dropped me to the office and I walked in through the doors into the room where we had our induction at 0859, one minute before proceedings began.

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 be normal 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.

*

2005: I was not doing too well at work, being torn apart between travelling to Mysore on weekends and attempting to work away on the weekdays, while trying to see if I could get a life outside of work, but failing to do so miserably. Whatever remenants of quizzing I had once thrived on in college had now been reduced to nothing, and things didn't seem to be going well.

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.

*

2006: Oslo. My second visit there in three months. Awesome place, awesomer experiences overall, and with a trip to Copenhagen under my belt, I was having all the fun I could in the available time. Work was also fun because it was challenging and hectic, and I didn't really bother much about anything else apart from calling family on occasion and telling them how I was having a blast all over the place.

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.

*

2007: It was three years of loyal service to le company, and for some strange reason, it was supposed to be a monumental occasion, given the attrition rates in the industry. I had put NED by that time to want to stay and celebrate at the office, so I instead took a few days off and chilled out at home instead, growing my beard, combing my hair, trying to figure out the best way to remove knots and having my respect for women go up tenfold because of how they were able to manage their long hair all their lives without wanting to stick their heads in a lawn-mower and be rid of it all.

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

*

2008: So far, I've put one post up on my LJ abusing badly behaved kids, been working away as usual, had a good lunch and am about to go watch Rock On with the band. Nothing out of the blue, just another day at work with the usual stuff taking precedence over anniversaries that don't really amount to much.

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 still get goosebumps when I recall Jeff Daniels' voice in the last episode of The Wonder Years - growing up does happen in a heartbeat, but sometimes, that ain't such a bad thing either. The important thing is to protect one's balls to make the most of what you can when you can.

Having seen the Dark Knight for the second time with Kodhi at PVR, I was thinking about the concept of social experimenting on techies to see how many of them get off their high horses if they're given enough incentive to do the same.

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.

Yeah, I decided to take a page out of the livejournal owned by purely_narcotic and let my meandering thoughts be compressed such that different ones could fit into the same post. The only difference is that, my posts, pretty much like all episodes in all seasons of Seinfeld are about nothing.

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Journalistic Forays:
Citizen Matters, I discovered, has its own page for contributing writers and here is mine. The awesome thing is that the 'about me' section can be modified by people that own the page, and unlike in the two social networking sites that I have content on, this 'about me' might actually be read by some people.

As an aside, my piece on the lack of public space for Sunday Jams is on the front page of the newsletter.

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Two Hit Wonder??:
Just this morning, I saw the video of 'Love is Noise' by The Verve on VH1 as I was cleaning up all the nose hair I had trimmed with a jumbo sized vacuum cleaner, and I could think just one more video of theirs that came to mind that everyone has seen and heard of. However, I could think of one other song of theirs that I have heard on the radio - 'lucky man' and I was wondering why VH1 was airing 'Rockstar' by Nickelback about eight hundred times a day and not putting any other videos. Usher's latest song, that I switch off as soon as I see his face, also features on that list.

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Peter has no Principle:
Yes. Woe is me. I am within a ten metre radius of an anomaly that has defied the Peter Princple and risen above to seemingly vertiginous heights and I have no clue why!!! Further elaboration (read whining / bitching) on said matter will be done verbally to people who will ask - 'How's life?'.

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Breakfast at Tifanny's:
I now plan on growing a handlebar mustache and wearing a leather jacket that has a skull and crossbones on it. Additionally, I also plan to cut queues and eyeball everyone in sight. Maybe that will compensate for having received the Rough Guide to Chick Flicks as a birthday present in jest from a certain Simian, although said person will deny the jest bit in no uncertain terms.

To compound my misery further, I rented 'Breakfast at Tifanny's' because I heard Audrey Hepburn was such a babe, and ended up watching it. I think I should not trim my nose hair for all of next year, to compensate. Edit: I must admit, Audrey Hepburn is a real cutie.

*

This pretty much concludes the first of my many "Notes about Nothing", although there's few other regular lengthy posts that I do plan on writing once the mood does happen. Maybe NaN will be a one time only venture as well, only time will tell.

Whoever invented the term work-life balance sure spared no expense in trying to highlight how the two are different. While it has been something I've heard off and on during four years of work (yes, its been that long, although - you can take harithekid out of college, but you can't take the college out of harithekid unless you want to perform some surgery and dig into the contents of his stomach), it really hasn't been one of my favourite expressions.

Its true that being in the IT industry for so long ensures that one embraces jargon or learns to abhor it from the very core of her / his existence, and falling in the latter category, I am no exception either. This subject is definitely material for another post, in due time.

Nevertheless, work-life balance is something some of my BSchool buddies have also used in order to convey the balance between academics and extra curricular activities.

Now, the very essence of the term and its subsequent usage denotes that it is an oxymoron, which thus implies that work and life are two different mutually exclusive entities. Hence, applying the regular tenets of logic would lead one to conclude that if you have a life, you can't work and vice versa, which is why both of them need to be balanced out.

The implications are that work is not a part of your life, and this in turn makes even those who are 'meh' about their work to end up despising it merely because they now see it as something necessary but invasive.

I think the Indian IT industry is seeing a trend where the new poster boys are those that are able to juggle multiple things aside from work in their daily lives. It is a far cry from the times of old when the guy who'd spend ages in front of his comp working away was considered as a model employee.

Personally, I think the entire hoopla around the said term is stupid. If you can't make time for something, it isn't important enough.

Live Blogging:

This is happening as I type. Our workplace, which is a set of cubicles on our floor with each cubicle having a telephone extension, is under seige. Literally!

Each and every telephone in my vicinity has started ringing in synchronicity at the same time, since most of them have consecutive numbers, and this time, it is not the usual suspects in the form of credit card / personal loan salespersons who are causing megadeath (sic) level pains.

Everytime one chooses to pick up a phone, an automated message is being played with some subscription offer for something that I haven't had the patience to listen to. What I can say with absolute certainty is that this telephone ringing menace is getting on my nerves much more than I thought it would.

If I find out who was responsible for having come up with the first automatic telephone call and consequently appearing automatic telephone message, I would, if said person is not already dead, wring his neck with my bare hands and make him pay for all my phone bills until such time that I croak.

As I have been typing this post, all the phones seem to have fallen silent. However, it is not without a sense of foreboding that I am awaiting the next wave of the attack of the killer telephones.

I wish the phones, if rung simultaneously, could simulate different sounds of music so that it would atleast seem like some instruments were being played. Of course, to keep everyone at the office happy, it would have to be muzak, the likes of which even the most rabid music hater would be able to withstand.

Once again, death to those telephone terrorists.

Its been four months since my last birthday today, and I was just remembering the day and what transpired a couple of days before and after that.

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 Parkinson'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.

I have donated blood thrice over the past three years, for very specific reasons. Although I am not someone who personally endorses Corporate Social Responsibility fulfilling drives for various social causes, simply because the only intent with which most companies indulge in CSR activities is to get more media mileage and appeal to the sentimental side of shareholders, there are some circumstances where the ends would justify the means.

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.

There is this particular person who I have worked with at the office who has a peculiar way of greeting people. He says - "How are the things?".

His inclination towards adopting an expression that he's probably heard when abroad and making a totally bastardized version of the same has had me in splits every time he has asked me this question.

In fact, I've upped the ante by giving a straight faced reply, saying - "My things are fine, how are your things?".

I am sometimes led to wonder as to whether this guy was one of the translators for Zero Wing, and the inclusion of "How are the things?" into modern day pop culture references of bad grammatical errors in the lines of Engrish would do ample justice to the absolute mayhem that this statement could cause were it to fall into the hands of those capable of propagating it all across the world.

I have no qualms about poking fun at this particular person for multiple reasons, including his ability to put Harvey Dent to shame.

My blanket good moods notwithstanding, I have this strong inclination to do a 'Kill Bill' style sword swooshing head decapitating thing with the morons in the next cubicle, who are shouting ALL the time!

Alternatively, I wish some humans came with mute buttons, so that my team and I could work happily and properly, putting those inconsiderate ignoramus inane irrational idiots in silent mode and going about our own devices thereafter.

However, rather than the mute buttons, I kinda like the Samurai approach better because it is a permanent one, just in case the batteries of the remote that enable the mute button would conk off, thereby bringing about a re-emergence of the noise.

This is more arbit a post than most, and if you do want to read through and try and make sense out of it, trust me, you will not.

You have been warned.

A Stonkey (pronounced pretty much the same way as a donkey, but with an 'st' prefixed instead of the 'd') is a unique species of animal that is a cross between a stegosaurus and a donkey. Created at Auroville, and packaged in cute little cloth bags to be given out as souvenir presents to friends, these Stonkeys are sold incorrectly as mini-horses simply because the creators of this species felt that such a move would make their products sell better.

Now the Stonkeys do look like stegosaurii with distinctive blades running symmetrically along their back, whilst also looking like a donkey, with an 'adorable meh' look to them, an expression the Stonkey gifter concocted to impress those she gifted it to.

The Adam and Eve of the Stonkeys have been christened 'Rahul' and 'Priya' respectively, and they met for the first time on the lunch table cafeteria in our office. Rahul fell for Priya at first sight, but then told her he was gay when she asked him out.

Now, its funny, but in Stonkey land, roles are reversed and the womans have to chase the guys, and hence Priya is trying to get Rahul to not be gay, for this would result in the destruction of their newly created species.

The female is more intelligent than the male of the species among Stonkeys, and this is an established fact which requires no extrapolation due to the limited number of data points available. Jargon jargon jargon.

The Stonkey saga shall continue at lunch time tomorrow and other lunch times thereafter unless NED kicks in, and there is a plan to catch them on camera, with an apt photo essay to depict how the Stonkey love games shall unfold.

The term corporate whore is something that most of us would be aware of. Selling your soul to the CEO and forsaking one's rebellious nature and one's principles to tow the line insofar as one's assimilation into corporate life is concerned is the way that most people in the tech industry can live an indigenous version of the American Dream, and this conformist behaviour, albeit not undesirable for it is after all a means to achieve an end, is nevertheless a compromise to the ideals that one might have set.

Why am I spewing all this nonsense? Because I want to, and because I can.

However, a friend of mine and I, in a fun discussion came up with a new term that sort of takes the sting away from the term corporate whore, by ascribing it with a name that adds a new dimension to the entire term altogether.

A Corporate Geisha is, surprisingly, a unisex term used to refer to someone who has been so mired into corporate life that he's willing to forsake his soul to the devil, but is still holding onto his Mizuage, with the fervent hope that someday soon, salvation and redemption will both arrive simultaneously, riding on a golden chariot to save the day.

As a pertinent aside, a Corporate Geisha is different from a Geisha because the latter is a Maiko until after the Mizuage, whereas the former is a Corporate Geisha as soon as he/she lands up into the corporate world.

My friend gave me this example out of some Manga to help illustrate things better:

A businessman walking along on a busy road in Japan was enthralled by the variety of ladies clamouring for his attention in return for his money, and he was having a tough time picking someone who'd be his companion for the evening.

He walked along, to notice how a pretty, well dressed lady was sitting in a small hut of sorts, far away from the madding crowd, not bothered about whether she'd have a client for the evening, and this intrigued the businessman no end.

Finally mustering the courage to walk up to her, he went over and asked her why she was not out there along with the other women, to which she replied -

"It is the bee that comes to the flower, not the flower that goes to the bee."

Maybe, just maybe, this new system of classification will help assuage those that seem to have lost faith and think that they've sold their soul. All is not lost.

I'm kidding. You've crossed the Rubicon a long time ago.

I consider my gtalk status message as one of the ways in which I am able to put my message out there. I usually attempt to say something sarcastic, or something downright absurd, and what is on the status bar is usually a reflection of what is going on in my mind.

It has been an effective, but under rated tool for catharsis that I've taken for granted, as I am sure most of us have.

Now, there was this one instance when some friends of mine and I at the office decided to use our employee IDs and create something funny out of it, by prefixing convict no. ahead of the actual number, and my entire gtalk list, after having blocked the others temporarily, was then filled up with people whose status message was pretty similar to mine, but unique at the same time.

I should be having a screen shot of that somewhere in my mail server archives, but I am too lazy to fish it out for now.

However, it was one of those cheap thrill things that has become synonymous with everything I do that I can't give a justifiable explanation to, and what I am about to propose is just another one of those.

What if all of us, just for a short duration of ten minutes, chose to have the exact same gtalk status message, at a time and day that we could all be online?

I have a limited list of people on my friends list (who I have not blocked), and you could propagate this information across to your friends' list and they could do it for their list and so on and so forth. The potential ripple effect, given the six degrees of separation phenomenon would mean that everyone connected to everyone through a computer and influenced by the blogsphere could potentially be privy to this pointless experiment.

I don't know what it will achieve, but I am hoping, being in a utopic frame of mind, that it will bring people closer together, help reconnect with people that we've blocked or just get cheap thrills out of doing it, like I am getting out of proposing the idea in the first place.

However, given the amount of influence I possess, I don't think more than three people would want to have the same status message. However, I must confess that the idea seemed as nice when it was in my head, as it does now that I have posted it.

Having been in the IT industry for a certain period of time, I've been a passive bystander to a sizeable number of events and occurrences that baffle me beyond any level of comprehension, while providing me with ample fodder to sit and write posts about, simply because I get major kicks out of using my keyboard for purposes other than sending out official mail or writing code.

Today, while having breakfast at the office cafeteria with Chettie (which is Malayalam for 'androgynous pronoun'), we both noticed that people take friday dressing at the office too seriously.

Our office has a dress code that requires people to wear 'business casuals' from monday through thursday, with friday being the day on which employees are given leeway to dress up in 'smart casuals'. Proper guidelines have been laid down in our policies available onlinet that document what items of clothing would come under the purview of the aforesaid classifications.

Personally, I don't think too much of the dress code. I'd rather be wearing casuals, so that I don't have to change into another set when I go out in the evenings if I do, after work. It saves me a lot of trouble if I can appear slovenly in a cool way rather than to do so while attempting to dress formally.

I've been adhering to the dress code stipulated because I am a corporate sell out, and because it doesn't make sense to be noticed for the wrong reasons. There have been times when I have blatantly violated the dress code and worn jeans and walked around like I didn't care who was bothered about my attire.

However, when nobody raised any relevant objections (irrelevant objections from arbits are discounted here) over an extended period of time, some sense got drilled into my head as I voluntarily began towing the line and sticking to the dress code.

Maybe I got bored of breaking the rules, or maybe I thought this rule was too meh to be broken.

But I digress, as usual, once again!

The friday dressing down stipulation has had people dress in the most garishly freaky way possible, as if to compensate within one day for four days of repression for having had to wear formals. On certain occasions, I couldn't say for sure when I saw a bunch of people sitting and having lunch as to whether they were fellow employees or a bunch of junior artists sitting down to have a break before they resumed shooting on the sets of some B grade movie with scenes being set in a shady college.

I am not casting aspersions at the purchasing power of the individuals in question. I am merely questioning their sensibilities in a way that I can, without offending them because this is purely my space and I can say and do what I want here.

Not just the guys, even the women dress quite arbitly, leading to me coming up with a rule which would ensure that I consider only those cute women as being really cute, that don't bother going the extra mile in wearing outfits that even their engineering college would probably have been up in arms about.

In my defence, this is not an indication of me growing old (with the whole post 25 thing looming over my head), because I have been dressing pretty decently even in my hippy with ponytail phase as well to the office. (My brightest t-shirt would have to be my number 11 Jersey that I wore the day Man U had clinched the Premiership last season.)

I think its more a question of being professional and coming to the office to work rather than to put up a wardrobe display. But then again, I don't really care.

Meh.

I like the company of women. Who doesn't?

Sure, I like hanging out with the guys, and talking about random stuff and generally being goofy and stupid, but you can't open doors for other men, among other things. You wouldn't want to. The funda of respect and of maintaining one's dignity comes into picture more often than not while being with women, rather than with guys. Plus making women laugh gives one super thrills, much much more so if she is the uber woman. In that case, the joy levels achieved multiply exponentially till it almost becomes asymptotical.

Of course, like everything else, there is a time and place for everything, and this equally applicable to the kind of company (guys / women / mixed company / the company of self) one chooses to have at a certain point in time.

However, the one place where the company of women is not really desirable is in one's cubicle. My office cubicle is the place where I spend the most of my time awake, and I would like to get as comfortable as possible.

I should be able to take my shoes and socks off, and just relax as if it were my second home, simply because I would be able to work better in environs I am most comfortable in.

However, this whole bubble of comfort that envelopes one is rudely shattered as soon as feminine presence makes itself evident in the cubicle.

Despite the fact that I change socks daily, and wear different socks to the office / gym / general outside visits (which means I have a whole lotta socks and thankfully I know which ones are used where), and as a result have clean shoes / socks and feet at all times if not for which I'd feel weird, I still have the notion that womens would turn their nose towarde some apparent odour, even if one's feet would smell of Chanel No.5 or Axe Deodorant, the denim variant.

Plus guys (the normal ones) like to burp, blow their noses (into handkerchiefs), scratch, clean their teeth with toothpicks, fat guys like to rub their bellies, and all these activities are done in places where one is comfortable at. As a standard disclaimer, (I presume that) even the most gentlemanly of men do it, its just that you don't see them do it in public.

A cubicle space is like a TV room where I would be able to watch football or some war movie, except for the fact that I would be watching time slip away in hopefully productive work, and the only kind of wars I can see are the ones which involve toned down versions of heated email exchanges across different people in which I have to be in CC inadvertently by association.

I pray that my cubicle space doesn't turn out to be one where I have to be anything but myself.

My initial plan was to start this post with how living alone for most of my forty months in Bangalore has affected my outlook towards the time when I actually have to interact with people either at the office or outside.

But then, as I sat and thought about it, I figured out that this post should be more about the things that I have had to experience when NOT at home, that have significantly prompted and further reinforced my decision to live alone, rather than with company.

As a standard disclaimer, this post doesn't intend to offend my former flatmates, because they've been, for most part, the most awesome company that a guy could ask for. Nor does it indicate that I have adopted permanent Bhramacharya (by choice, although it might have to be adopted by compulsion if circumstances in the future deem so!).

My office cubicle location has never been constant for more than four months at a time. I have changed places seven times already, while having worked here in this particular office for twenty eight months or so, and I have always felt this sense of having been uprooted from the place I made myself most comfortable at.

Thankfully the floor on which I have worked hasn't changed at all, and some cold comfort lies therein.

It is in my current situation where I am sitting and typing away on notepad in front of my system as two or three people behind me are vehemently arguing about the merits and demerits of some 'cross-complier tool used for a particular UI framework' like one would argue vehemently about whether Shiites or Sunnis are the ones who have the correct ideological bent, so far as choosing the Prophet's successor is concerned.

The loud noise of conversations, combined with the somewhat horrible 'scent' or 'perfume' that some inmates in my office wear, is enough to drive one nuts. I have discovered at an early age that I am allergic to most perfumes, and in this regard, I must thank God that I am a guy, because I have heard that women have a heightened sense of smell and this fact has been scientifically proven.

Now, noise, weird odours and generally intolerable quirks of people makes me want to run away from all the madness, and a general dislike for prolonged exposure towards all but a small set of people just reinforces that further.

Office space and the air-conditioned comfort that it provides is something that most of us seem to take for granted. It is a blessing in summer, especially. However, in winters, it is not really necessary and the fact that it is a closed environment for both odour and sound just makes things worse.

The only solution for such issues reeks ominously of the suggestions put up 'for the greater good'. Otherwise, it only seems pertinent to ignore or blank out such occurrences and live and let live.

As a post script, the guy in the cube next to me is playing some soft santoor and sarangi music, which is quite welcome, actually!

Uploading resume onto a job search portal, only to see one's unofficial ID being bombarded by the very company which you would possibly like to escape from, if circumstances and the future place of work are propituous enough for one's liking.

Dammit, woe is me.

Being anti-social is cool. To a very large extent.

The realms of anti-social behaviour entitle me to come up with snappy answers to polite bullshit conversation, and make sure that those who try and make random chit-chat are kept at bay.

I don't want to answer people with stuff like - 'hey, how are you?' or 'did you have your lunch?' or something as random, until and unless the person was a real nice guy (or superhot girl) or it was someone who was a good friend of mine, though the latter would know better than to come up with random conversational fillers.

Imagine my indignation when I am just about to stand in the loo to take a leak, and some guy comes and says, 'Hey, how's it going?'.

I decided to make sure he'd never ask me, or possibly someone else this question later on, and said, 'I just started peeing, its not yet going!' and subsequently, chose to give him running commentary with stuff like 'Now there is even flow, must be all the bottles of water I drank till now' and lastly saying, 'Its not going anymore, I think it stopped!'.

Betcha our man is not going to ask me again.

The HCL Technologies ad (wish I could embed it here through youtube, but alas, almighty proxy doesn't deem it worthy of my viewing) showcases the company's expertise to the layperson watching the telly.

What it doesn't realize is that in the course of the entire ad, everything is shown in such an absurd and unrealistic fashion that those within the industry would either marvel at or completely ridicule the very concept that drives the ad.

Sure, the ad extols HCL's virtues in the areas of banking software + life sciences + healthcare and other stuff, but its so stupidly vague that you'd wonder why they're so gung-ho about something so mundane.

Take the example of the poor HCL guy working within the company. How many times would he have been able to hitch a ride in an investment banker's car to get to a place where a chopper would be waiting eagerly for him to 'go overseas for a life-sciences project'? The employees within the company must be smarting with anger at the fact that they're not being subjected to such treatment, while the TV goes on to show, with gay abandon how some model types guy goes on and on about how there seems to be no other company in sight that does anything relevant while these guys slog their asses off working away at some cutting edge technology.

Bah.

I have ranted on hajjar about the lousy internet proxy policy that our company follows, and the same can be revisited on this post as well as on this other post.

This one colleague of mine had mentioned how google caches pages that can be seen on the google search page, and though it contains an older version of the page, will still serve its purpose nevertheless.

Uncyclopedia is this rocking portal that contains the most arbit of shit on everything under the sun. Wacky contributors whose sole aim in life seems to be to contribute to beating away the ennui blues are responsible for making this such an amazing site to visit regularly.

But alas, like I mentioned before, jai happened and uncyclopedia access has been denied for quite some time now, but the cached pages still have trace remanents of what the page could've been like the last time google stored it in one of its wonderful, lovely servers.

Phew, I am sort of happy.

PS - the ion charger mentioned here has arrived and is in use. Seems like good stuff.

Touchwood.