The Great Antithesis

Note: The names (of individuals and organisations) mentioned in this following text are fictitious and resemblance to any person living or dead or to an organization existing/acquired/merged/closed/doomed is purely by coincidence. The author does not intend to hurt the sentiments of any individual/organization in any way.


I stopped my car inside Sadanand lobby and waited for valet parking. The security handed me a tag and drove my car into the parking lot. I turned back to face the pedestal board and it read

2nd Floor : Three Point Tech (3.T)
1st Floor : Hughes

No way, agreed Wednesday is midweek and people do party, but what a coincidence. Same place and two companies whom I am/was associated with.

I quit 3.T five months back. I just didn’t like my work profile. They interviewed me on various technologies and the training sessions were really good. Techno-Functional insight into commodity trading was what we learnt in the first month at 3.T. Even the initial two weeks of the project were good where I got a chance to venture into new frameworks and tools. But this satisfaction was short-lived. I was shifted to a project which had a weird release date ……….”Tomorrow evening” and that too, everyday. I just did testing for weeks together. Query values of columns from different tables, put them in some formulae and verify the results with values in result tables. My messenger status read “Trying hand at Microsoft calc”, “Microsoft calc is not user-friendly for NAV calculations”, “Handheld calculator is better that WinXP calculator” and so on. I mastered excel yet again, last time when I accomplished this feat was when I was a trainee on Reliance project and that earned me an entire product development effort. Coming back, I felt as if I was a numeration, a three years experienced well paid numeration man, paid to tally.

The messenger status turned to “Outcast by choice, verge of annihilation, extermination…”

I joined Hughes and am very happy with my job here. Five months down the line, here I was, standing face to face with a board, which flashed my previous months like a nasty adventure. It was a welcome party for our GSS head who had come down from the US. As I started climbing the stairs I crossed my ex-mentor. We exchanged a few pleasantries and two stark antithesis gushed forth.

One, ours was a welcome party to our head and theirs, a sendoff party to the company’s director

Two, the director was the same person, who was interested in knowing the reason I wanted to quit, during my exit interview. Mebbe he picked some ideas from the exit interview!!!!

Outstanding Performance

It was one of the few nights that I remember. Our GSS head had come over from US and we had organized a small welcome party for him and there was a surprise event which we all were oblivious of.

After the introductory speech by Mike Wallesen we headed to the counter for a pint of beer. As the crowd dispersed into smaller groups our director announced the surprise event. As a token of appreciation for the effort, mentoring and going the extra mile, our department gave away “Outstanding Performance” awards to three of us. Aboli, Goutam and I were the honored ones.

I felt a sense of achievement when Mike read my name, a sense of satisfaction of being recognized after the efforts we all had put in during the past few months. As I shook hands with Mike and turned to face my collegues, I saw them smiling at me.

I came home excited and woke up the entire house, Dad, mom, uncle and granny, tube lights, computer, stereo, just about everyone. They failed to comprehend what was going on. I showed them the certificate and the greeting card with an appreciation note signed by our department head. My granny, who had studied from an English medium school during the British era as her father was a “Mamledar”, read through the entire transcript congratulated me and then nonchalantly asked,

“Who is Miki Walke?”

Jokes apart.

I would like to take this moment to congratulate each of my team members who have mentored me, helped me reach here and have extended all the support that they could in making AMAT and Target deliverables on time. This award is not only for me, but for all of us. Cheers guys, way to go!

Fortune Final

A good one from Nil .... now that he is getting married .... I guess ..........

A year back I picked up a job assignment to move ahead in my life, well that was what the fortune said.

It reminded me immediately of a long-ago summer--I think it was between my first job and a functional course in Pune. Mom and Dad were content to let me stay away from home and do to prove myself that my child can also achieve but I immediately fell into my natural pattern of staying up late and sleeping late. I overheard dad on the phone, a few weeks in summer. "I don't know what to do about him. He stays up till all hours and sleeps half the day. He’ll make himself sick."
Then, everything changed. We realized that my uncle, who suffered from Parkinson's and hardening of the arteries, could no longer live by himself, and we couldn't find a reliable person to stay with him. Besides, he needed more care than one live-in person could provide.
So he moved in with us, temporarily, until we could figure out what to do. But he was still very independent, and kept trying to get up in the night to go the bathroom by himself. He fell. Several times. No injury, but it was only a matter of time.
Dad and I worked out an arrangement. I stayed up all night, reading, watching television with the sound low, sewing, writing--anything I liked, as long as I stayed in the living room, within earshot. If I heard stirring, I'd go in to check, help uncle with anything he needed. At six or seven a.m., dad took over and I went to bed.
A few weeks later, I again overheard dad on the phone with a friend: "I don't know what he is doing. He stays up all night so that I can sleep.

What had been vice had become virtue. Yeah, it happens. That was one smart cookie.
So I'm looking around my life to see if there's something I've been feeling guilty about that really isn't that bad. Something I should be patting myself on the back about instead of beating myself up about.

Well my fortune on Orkut…. Today this gave me something to write.

One Nite @ Stand

Time: Friday 13th Apr 2007 1:37:45 am

Don’t even think about it, this ain’t on the similar lines like my previous blog. I know a post is due for a long time and the regulars (by that I mean the ones who frequent my blog space) list must have shrunk ………. But hey, it takes time for the experiences to thaw… to be more precise it takes time to experience something worth publishing here.

Well, lemme relinquish the excuses and continue …..

Time: Friday 13th Apr 2007 10:30:00 pm

This Friday I hit the lounge again. What was supposed to be a celebration for my friend's engagement, resulted into a ‘Lets have a drink to forget it’ melodrama. To top it all, I met a number of my friends who had tagged along with different groups in the same lounge. The evening started rocking as never before and after a pint, my cell screamed intimidating of a SMS arrival.

Temp = Time
Time = Time – 1 hour == 9:00pm

I put the car in fifth gear and increased the volume to step up my momentum and crazy frog shrilled in my ears.
‘Alkuuuuuuuuu, heyyyyyy, whatz up’
‘Hi AB, what are you doing?’
‘It is Friday nite lady, the weekend starts today, heading to Apache to meet few of my buddies’
‘I thought as much, well I had an offer for you but now that you are already game, might as well let it go’
‘Offer, huh? Try me …’
‘Well I was thinking if you could meet us and we can catch a movie and then you can drop us to Shivaji Nagar where we can catch a bus to A’bad’
‘You need to watch a movie before catching a bus? Thatz weird ..And who are these us?’
‘Well I am with my friend here and we both decided to go back home at eleventh hour. Now it is pretty risky to be there at such wee hours, so I was thinking if you could give us company till we board the bus?’
‘Mebbe you both can catch the movie and I will meet you after that, does it sounds workable?’
‘Yeah thatz fine, I will text you the movie timings and you can come accordingly’
‘Don’t you think it will be more risky to be with a guy who is just out of a lounge high on music?’
‘AB, you are the last guy I will be scared of’

Dunno whether that was a compliment of a sarcastic remark, nonetheless I am least interested reasoning out statements when I head to the lounge.

Time = temp

The SMS read ‘mu v : the shooter. v ll b out by 1:00. meet u by 1:15’. Shoot, I had expected them to catch a movie that would finish by 12:30am. That was the reason I even changed my plan to hang around in the lounge for an hour and half max. Well there were lot of my friends already in there and we decided to continue till the owner drove us out. I text back asking these two weirdos to come out by 12:30 so that I could drop them at the station and they could manage to get the 1:00am bus.

Time = 12:30am

Now there are two things I wanna make clear for the gals; first, “If you want a guy to behave like a gentleman, then even you ought to behave like a lady; not like some weirdo or ‘I know everything’ kinda gal and second, “When someone comes alone to pick you up in a car, you need to occupy the seat next to him/her, you don’t scramble into the rear seat.”

Man …….. and people expect me to be a gentleman …….. balls, I dunno wanna be one.

We reached the bus stand and I was zapped to see the crowd. There were so many travellers … so many of them; similar to ants near an anthill or prawns in a shrimp farm. We scuttled through the crowd and ST’s to reach the A’bad bus terminal. Juxtaposed between other terminals, which were under construction, this looked the best. So many people …. some with small hand bags, others with haversacks; some with their families, others with their friends or all alone. We stood amidst all of them, the gals nonchalantly waiting for the bus and running unit test cases on the nearby weighing machine intermittently.

The 1:15am arrived at the exactly 20 mins before departure time. The cacoethes that followed left me stumped. People were trying to get inside the bus through all possible vents; leave aside the door, which was clogged by salad of arms, heads, shoulders, bags, sweat and what not. The conductor continuously shouted of the 12 odd seats which were reserved, but the hyper chose to act deaf and the madness continued with some dropping kerchiefs onto the seat from the windows while few other trying to scramble in from the drivers seat to catch vacant seats; a complete pandemonium with babies crying in their parents arms and they struggled to get aboard

The gals smiled away to glory reading the expression on my face. ‘Welcome to the world of survival of the fittest’ was the message I could make out from what they were speaking.

“This is the way it is AB, we have to go through these hassle” she snorted as if to say “You have the luxury of not experiencing what we have to”

It left me thinking …. Even I have been through such experiences. I distinctly remember that nite when Nil and I were left stranded at Panvel bus depot for two full hours before we got a bus to Pune. It was a nightmare journey as there wasn’t a single part of the bus that did not make noise. Thanks to the rains, the roads were so smooth and the driver was more than determined not to miss any of the potholes. But I learnt something from this experience as I always do. I follow a simple philosophy, you always have to keep the learning eye open under any circumstances; pleasant or not; good or bad.

Time = 1:37:45 am

I have had my share of terrible travels and experiences and they have motivated me not to accept them as they come but to grow above them. An inspiration I derive after such events to do better in life; to climb up the ladder; to succeed. I wouldn’t be proud to tell anyone that look at the pains that I go through; rather I would appreciate myself when I rise above it.

That nite as I headed back in my car, I had mixed feelings. Whether I was right to feel contempt towards the life that I saw at the stand; whether I was right to smile knowing I wasn’t one of them; whether I was right to reason that I deserved the luxuries that I enjoy; whether I was right not to feel complacent with till date achievements; whether I was right to have ‘I want more’ attitude to life. One nite @ stand, one nite @ so many thoughts and the ride to my home was one of the best drives I have had with myself .......