Author: SK

Tendulkar (fan_2000) pulled out of the tour at the last moment citing Lateral Placement Interviews. So it was just the five of us who were going now. All our well-laid out plans for team selection for different quizzes were now wiped out. It was simply decided that sumo yet so far (Sehwag, Dravid (kodhi) and Yours Truly) would be one team kaif and yuvraj (udupa and ) would be the eternal sunshine of the spotless behind.

Sehwag is too pseud to travel in second class so he didn’t join us in the train. So the four of us it was that took the ardous journey, via madras. Howrah Mail ended up a whole seven hours late, which meant that the quizzes had started by the time we reached.

Indian Railways has this irritating concept when it comes to late trains. They minimize the NUMBER of trains that are late rather than the total delay across trains. Hence, once Howrah Mail becomes late by even half an hour, it is pushed down the priority order and consequently loses further time. There were numerous times when we had to wait in order to make way for a goods train! And there was this occasion when the train started from this vague station in Gultland and I thought it was moving backwards because someone on the platform was walking faster than the train!

Speaking of Gultland, it is one neverending landmass. We would have spent close to 24 hours just traversing the Gult coast. Dravid even suggested that there might be a thin strip of gultland across orissa all the way upto Bengal, when we were wondering when Orissa would start! And contrary to my expectations, most of the landscape were green. The fields looked well irrigated and I see many farmers tilling the land. My only other train journeys through Gultland have been through Rayalseema, which might have given me the impression that all of Gultland is one dry arbit landmass.

Food was a bit of a problem during the journey. Didn’t find decent stuff in a lot of places and subsisted on biscuits and lays. Had some idli-vada at vijayawada (for which they hardly provided any chutney) and some arbit pooris at kharagpur. Somehow got a kick out of drinking chai out of a khullar in kgp.

Then, as one would expect in a second class compartment, there were the usual irritants in the journey. Beggars, peddlers, dirty loos and the like (thankfully no eunuchs though). However, the single biggest irritant was people singing on the trains and demanding money for the “service”.

Recently Abhishek Thakore had come up with the novel business plan of training beggars to sing in trains. This way, they are no longer beggars, he said. Rather, they would be providing people with a “value added service”. In effect, he seems to suggest that by making beggars “sell products” such as their music, everyone would be happy.

However, the whole problem with this is that this service is uncalled for. In fact, it can be jarring at times and can in fact be a pain. Whoever said that music is a universal cure, especially when it is sung by a handful of street urchins accompanied by a drum or cymbals! I would rather pay a couple of rupees to a sad-faced bugger who just sticks his hand in front of me than to someone who would pain the shit out of me for a few minutes.

To put it in milder terms, I would see it as a “service” only if the following points hold:

– The product or service offered is not a pain
– I solicit the product or service rather than it being offered first and me being asked to pay later.

Anyways, despite these irritants, the trip on the whole to Cal was good. It had been a long time since I went on a long-distance journey by second class. I can probably say that the whole thing was a nice learning experience. 🙂

I know I’ve ended this abruptly but I’m way too sleepy now to continue. You can expect posts soon regarding my experiences AT cal and my way back.

During one of those deep introspective sessions yesterday evening, i started wondering which sportsperson i could be like. here are the characteristics I listed out.

— I am highly talented. At least in a lot of stuff I am good at.

— I am extremely lazy. I hate working out (haven’t yet seen the inside of a gym). I hate exercising. I hate running around. This applies to the mind also. I hate studying for exams. I hate spending a lot of time on assignments. I hate practicing stuff. I feel I’m so talented that I don’t need any of this kind of work to do well.

— I am extremely arrogant. If i don’t like someone/something I’m not afraid to give them a piece of my mind.

— I am extremely straightforward, and can sometimes border on the undiplomatic.

— I like footage. I like getting a lot of publicity. And while interacting with the public i can be prone to shooting off my mouth.

— I think I can be a good leader if I am given a dedicated team. However, when there is some bit of dissent, my quality of leadership drops.

— I tend to rely on past laurels to see me through. I am prone to entering bad patches frequently and point out a few of my good performances to justify that i’m good.

— I am not averse to repositioning myself in order to have my way.

— If I want to, I can be quite shameless at times.

And I can think of only one sportsperson who seems to fit all the above characteristics. Of course, I’m not elegant. I’m not too politically inclined. I’m not bong. Well, you must’ve guessed it by now; the sportsperson who I am most similar to seems to be Sourav Chandidas Ganguly.

When I started writing this journal, I used to write around once a month. Each post use to be long-drawn and by itself a complete story. I cared a lot for the quality of writing that went in.

Then, after I wrote my first short post, the frequency suddenly increased. Now, not too much effort was required for putting in a post, so I managed to easily increase my frequency of blogging. However, typically I left a couple of days between posts, so that people would get the time to “absorb” and “assimilate” it.

Internship happened and I would be jobless for long hours. Gave me ample time to write three posts a day. And my classmates who were also interning had enough time to read the generous crap dished out by me. If you see my archives you can see that the frequency drastically goes up for April and May 2005.

Anyways, I then remember this marketing concept called cannibalization. If I put up two posts too close to each other, the second will cannibalize the first, and take attention away from the first, thus in effect killing the first post. So I bring down the frequency to around once a week.

Then I come up with a couple of posts which have a huge readership. One of them gets linked to by desipundit and indiauncut. Now I’m get conscious about quality and reduce frequency further. After a point of time, i see no point in this blog.

Wait till I come up with a “masterpiece” before I publish it? How will I know that a particular post is going to be a “hit”? That is not the way I live life. The only way I know to do it is to just publish as soon as I think I have a piece ready, and let the people decide. It is like the way I play football, or basketball for that matter. Get free of the defenders, make space, collect a pass and kick it in the general direction of the goal. And pray. On a given day, I do this 20 times. And manage to get 3-4 goals in the process.

This is my way of life. This is how I play my football. This is how I play basketball. This is the philosophy I followed in the CAT. Guess the same should apply to blogging also? Anyways, you can expect more frequent posts by me in the next two months.

i’m incapable of complimenting someone if i don’t fully appreciate the magnitude of his/her achievement and believe it is really good.

i’m incapable of apologizing to someone if i think the fault lies with him/her.

i’m incapable of calling up someone and making my point over phone.

i think because of all this i’m losing out a lot in life

My ‘professional’ chess career got off to a start in late 1994 in a state level age group tournament. I became a regular on the ‘circuit’ and by mid-95, won my first packet of money from chess. It was a princely sum of Rs. 80.

Chess requires a really huge amount of mental concentration. You’ll have to simply forget everything else in the world and concentrate on the game at hand. This extreme concentration can be a little taxing at times. It can put immense pressure on you. Even a small deviation can result in nothing less than a loss.

It was towards the end of 96 that i formally retired from the ‘circuit’. yeah, i had attended a couple of rounds of formal chess coaching by then. my parents probably saw another anand in me and had invested a considerable amount already. and then i decided to throw it all away. to show my face only at a couple of inter-school events after this.

The amount of concentration can lead to a huge amount of stress. You start putting too much pressure on yourself. You start losing games from obviously winning positions. You cannot even think or dream of anything else when a tournament is on. You spend loads of time reading books. And at times you develop a really high fever at the end of a tournament and have to take a few days off from life.

IIT sparked off a new beginning to my chess career. On the very first day, I met Ranga who also said he plays chess as a hobby. The rest of the ‘orientation’ was spent playing “blindfold chess”. (there is no chessboard; we both imagine a board in our heads and communicate moves using the standardized international notation) The first game i played with Ranga as we toured the Central Workshops is one of the best ever I played. with hundreds of twists and turns until we agreed to a draw with a bishop and pawn apiece.

Sometimes, when you play a game competitively you lose the love for it. You stop enjoying the process. You start focusing too much on results. You think you have a reputation to protect everytime you play it. You unduly put pressure on yourself. In effect, it stops being “fun” and becomes a chore.

So many classes of Basic Electrical Engineering and other courses were spent in the backbenches playing blindfold chess with Ranga. Used to be great fun. Sometimes we used to carry the games back to the hostel and continue to play it on a board. Glorious days. And then there were these inter-hostel events and some “open” tournament. As I had expected, I didn’t do too well in them.

Once you’ve stopped loving something or someone, its really tough to restart. On a few occasions, with great effort you can convince yourself to give it that one more chance. However one or two jhatkas can be enough to dash all your hopes. You would need an extraordinarily long streak of good luck to have even a remote hope of restarting on your lost love.

Today I went for selection trials for the IIMB Chess team for the upcoming IIMB-IIMK sports meet. I seem to have totally lost my power of concentration. I have this tendency of rushing things and try to get over with the game quickly. And my mind keeps wandering towards other things. Needless to say, I lost both games I played today. Made really obvious mistakes. Felt like kicking myself. And for the record, I’ve been picked as a reserve player.

When I started playing contract bridge four years ago, i made a conscious effort to keep away from competition. I wanted this to be a hobby and not a profession. I didn’t want to kill my love for the game by way of excess competition. I just wanted to be able to enjoy the game whenever I wanted to play it. So far, I’ve largely stayed away from tournaments except for a few at the Tamil Nadu State Level which I took purely as a learning experience. And I still love the game.

Is there a lesson in this?

of late i’m having frequent bouts of extreme depression. sometimes i get afraid that i might do something drastic to myself during such times. and to think i have so much to offer this world 🙂

the thing starts with seemingly arbit reasons and then i’m reminded of a hundred incidents in my life when i’ve made mistakes, including some a couple of hours or minutes back. and crashing down i go.

sometimes just telling this to someone can make me feel a lot better. however, there’s the feeling of embarrasment. it’s not the done thing to crib about. people don’t want to see you cry. they want to see you all happy and healthy and share your happiness. i think of half a dozen people i want to talk to. then feel embarassed (for a different reason) regarding each one of them. and somehow keep it to myself.

i guess similar is the case with the readers of this blog also. a lot of people read this blog probably because they like the way I write and then to feel happy about the stuff i’ve written. hence, a depressed post has NOTHING to do in here.

a couple of times before, I’ve written this kind of depressed stuff here. then somehow try to sleep and in the morning wake up to sanity and make the entry private! however, this time i’m determined to let this stay a public post. let readers form whatever opinions they want about me.

and, for the record, i’ve been on a psychiatrist’s couch once. midway through my BTech. a combination of depression and what my parents called “underperformance in acads”. i’ve been through the 100 question questionnaires that they administered. i’ve interpreted the whatever cards and tried to identify patterns on them. don’t remember much of it except that in one particular card i identified ghosts dancing round a fire! at the end of it all, there was nothing conclusive. was put on some arbit medication for two months. had no effect whatsoever.

PS: they say shopping cures depression. thatz exactly what i did yesterday and bought myself a Kodak C330 Digicam. 4 megapixel. Cost Rs. 11000 inclusive of accessories. pity no shops are open at 2 in the night!

something seems to be wrong with me nowadays. my blogging quefrency seems to have been decimated. and the stuff i churn out is also not the kind i can call “good”. in general, creativity seems to have disappeared from my life.

pretty disturbing trend, i must say. wonder whatz happened to me.

the other day i started writing a post on why my BTech project is not fraud. then i realized i hadn’t been able to explain the technical stuff too well. Cancelled the post. then there were a couple of other posts i wanted to put but cancelled.

anyways, have you ever faced a situation where you’ve been offered job A while you covet job B? And you have to decide about job A before you sit for B’s interview? well, as part of my project, i proved that there is no algorithm/heuristic to get you out of such sticky situations. profound right? and the examiners said it was the worst project report they’d ever read!

My Samsung X600 was declared dead yesterday. I had taken it to the service center for what I thought was a routine battery change. However, it turned out that there was considerable water-logging in the phone and the circuits were FUBAR. The guy at the service center said that nothing can be done to save it.

The phone was “born” on the 7th of August 2004 when I won it for winning a quiz. The people at BBC World had organized this “launch quiz” as a build up to the impending University Challenge TV Quiz Show (in the very first episode of that quiz, we got mothered by IITM). Anyways, in this launch quiz, one team from Bangalore was to take on SPCE, the defending champions of the University Challenge.

We had maxed the prelims and qualified and then beaten SPCE in a nail-biting finish. Got this phone as booty. I now had a camera phone! I could peacefully put off my plans for buying a digi-cam! And the phone, too, was used liberally. Probably everyone in Section C of batch 2004-06 of IIMB was caught napping in class by this phone. It was also used to take many an incriminating photograph.

Tragedy, however, struck at Shivasamudram (bluff) where we went for our class picnic a few days after the phone was born. We had crossed the Cauvery on foot to reach an island in the middle of the river. The view of the falls from this island was simply breathtaking, with a rainbow to add color to the waterfall. Mine was the only camera to have reached the island (most people had left their cameras behind fearing damage and the one other normal camera which had tried to cross the river had drowned and gotten damaged).

Then, on the way back, shit happened. The level of water in the Cauvery had inexplicably risen since the time we’d crossed to the island. What was knee-high water earlier, was now waist high. The phone was in my jeans pocket and took the brunt of the water. It fell unconscious. Thankfully, it regained consciousness later after a day in the sun. However what I didn’t know was that irreversible damage had been caused to its health by this illness.

By the time the phone fell silent around June this year, I had somehow started hating it (it was tough to SMS from it; sometimes I couldn’t hear clearly; It was very fragile and would break open every time it fell; The ringtone was irritating). I borrowed my dad’s unused Nokia 3310 and consigned the samsung to the cupboard. Yeah, I did miss it when I wanted to take snaps, but that was about it. It had slipped away from my life as easily and effortlessly as it had come in.

The phone came out of the cupboard a couple of days ago when my mom asked me to get it repaired so that she could use it. And then, as luck would have it, it was declared “dead on arrival”. DOA these people call it.

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May its soul rust in peace.

Wanted to write this for a long time, but never found the patience. On the first day of my just-concluded vacation, I went around town with a couple of congresspeople. Both of them belong to “political dynasties”, with their fathers having being MLAs or MPs. The entire “session” threw up a number of insights. And before going around with them, I had told them that I used to be a member of the RSS and hence might not share their political views.

I’ll cut the story and just put the insights here:

– Understandably they couldn’t fathom why people are so opposed to dynastic politics. In fact, one of them went to the extent of saying that in this day and age, politicians have to be “born” and not “made”!!

– The land reforms act has led to corruption in politics! Apparently, earlier, politicians had enuff land holdings that they didn’t need to make any money from politics. Now after the act, the land is not enough to sustain the politician and his family and he thus looks to make money from politics!

– They also couldn’t understand how sonia gandhi can be a foreigner! And true congresspersons they were, they worshipped sonia. “She slogged her ass off for the last election and definitely deserved to be prime minister” (in response to my “why did you guys have to have that much of a drama in parliament? manmohan is any day better than sonia. i think everyone watching it on TV was hoping sonia wouldn’t become PM”).

= They were also not ready to believe that people don’t like sonia

– They didn’t mind bitching about other congresspeople. They were pretty open about their dislike for a few congresspeople and just hoped that they weren’t on the record!

– Taking this forward, they also bitched about some of their allies, notably the RJD! The feeling I got was that the congress is actually happy that Lalu lost in Bihar.

– They believed that playing the secular card would easily get them the minority votes (at least in Karnataka)

Many more insights were there but this is all i remember now, 3 weeks down the line.