Category: general

It’s been ages since i put a crib post. So here goes. Enjoy!

Tomorrow is the seventh of may. exactly seven years to the day since I made what I think has been my biggest splash. it was on the 7th of May 2000 that I wrote the IIT-JEE.? and a few minutes back i was sitting with my mom and recounting the events of that day.

thinking about it, and i’m thinking about it quite often, i somehow feel that i’ve stagnated. and lost it. for a year now (yeah it’s more than a year since i joined ATK) I’ve been in two jobs, both not exactly exciting. at one, things became really unbearable quickly, and I fled. at the other, things are not yet so bad, but enough to set me thinking.

maybe i was doing too much in school. maybe i was making too many splashes. but having spent more than a year with little on my report card is extremely frustrating, when I think about it. it’s not about the footage. it’s not so much other people’s adulation. it’s more about my own satisfaction. not having done anything to my own levels of satisfaction doesn’t feel good at all.

sometimes i feel i’ve stopped thinking. sometimes i feel i’m not thinking as well as i used to. a year of corporate life has made me much less sharper. and i can really feel it. a few months back, I used to see something and get a hundred ideas. they are not happening now. maybe the circumstances are different. maybe it’s not my fault. however, things are just not happening.

i sometimes wonder if corporate life is like this. if every job stifles you so much that you can’t think independently. whether doing somethign you don’t exactly enjoy for so many hours a day has a major impact on you. and if there is some place where I can continue thinking naturally. and get back “to form”.

i think i have a problem in slowing down. i remember going through a similar crisis for most of my stint at IIT. i simply wasn’t doing anything, and that was building frustration, which meant i didn’t do anything further! and in my opinion, completely wasted my four years there.

i don’t know how to handle it now. all i want is to start thinking again. and i don’t konw how to go about it!

As I had explained while seeking help a while back, my car stereo plays only tapes. So my response to that was to find out where tapes are available. So i go and raid Planet M and Calypso (thanks,

) and Odyssey. And spend fifteen hundred rupees to get a handsome collection of eleven tapes.

Now, some people are replying to that post suggesting I upgrade my car stereo system. One doubt to that, however, is what do i do with my tapes! The only reason I bought all of them were for my car! As for my music in other places, I prefer the pirated MP3 format. Reason being, except for a couple of albums like the wall or DSOTM, I don’t want the song to play in deterministic order! I want the excitement of trying to guess which the next song will be, and hoping it’s something i really really like. And I like to suddenly switch to some other song, either in the same album or otherwise. All very infeasible with tapes.

Hence, the solution is that in order to preserve my tapes, I need to keep the old car stereo system!

Don’t you see an analogy between this and say our PSUs? They had outdated machinery, so to make do they recruited huge numbers. They recruited and recruited, so as to make the old machines work. And soon faced the same problem I’m going to face soon. Even if i replace my stereo, what do I do with my tapes? Even if I get new machinery, what will I do with all the extra people?

And before I forget to mention, people are much more difficult than tapes. If not anything, they are harder to discard. Even if you decide that you won’t use them, you need to pay them. And if you are a PSU, you need to pay them all their lives. And even after that (there is something called family pension). And if you put a foot wrong, they can go on strike. And shut your factory. And maybe even burn you.

Hence, the solution is that in order to preserve myself from being burnt, I need to keep the old machinery!

Is there a solution to all this? Is there a way someone divine can provide some incentive for people to make large-scale long-term decisions against short-term ones? I’m wondering.

As for me, I’m not changing the stereo in the near future. At max, I’ll be buying the cassette adapter that some people have mentioned, and continue to use my tapes. Thankfully I’m saved, since the expenditure on tapes is now a sunk cost. What will happen to the PSUs???

I don’t know if the creamy layer concept is in force in Karnataka, but i heard recently that there are two criteria which makes you an OBC here – caste and family income. And from what I hear, fudging the former is “tough” but the latter is “easy”.

I was recently talking to a friend who belongs to a caste that qualifies to be OBC in Karnataka but from a well to do family whose income is much higher than the prescribed OBC limit. However she said that it wasn’t hard at all for her to get a certificate, with more than a few notes under a sarkari table doing the trick.

If what she says is right, it is indeed a worrying thought. Doesn’t it render the whole concept of creamy layer meaningless? If you are rich, you can actually buy yourself a caste certificate. Else you legitimately get it!

What a lot of people are calling for is to pack caste based reservations and do it on based on income instead. However, the example of my friend shows that implementation of the income bit is not exactly an easy proposition.

Extremely disturbing.

given my general dissatisfaction with radio stations in Bangalore (except for Indigo after 8pm or City in the morning (with Vasanthi) ), I am trying to get better music to my car. thing is the stereo system can’t play CDs, so the only option is tapes.

and the kind of music i am trying to get is anything but the kind for which you readily get tapes in music shops. after ransacking the Jayanagar store of planet M (a very large store), i managed to get tapes of The Wall and Dark Side of the Moon, and also “Echoes: The best of pink floyd”. Nothing of deep purple or ledzep or maiden was available there. Or other albums of floyd (animals; wish you were here; meddle; etc.)

anyone has any clue what would be a good place to get tapes? i’m mostly looking at floyd, purple, ledzep, maiden, beatles, doors (weird combo i guess but anyways… ). or are there any online stores that could ship these TAPES?

TIA (thanks in advance for the uninitialted)

i think it was a damn good decision that i slept off for the chelski-liverpool match and instead decided to stay up for the man u – milan game. and what a game it was! awesome stuff by milan. utterly pathetic display by man u.

the commentary on ten sports was sucky and heavily biased towards the club from england, nevertheless it offered some nice insights. there were a few names that were hardly mentioned by the commentators yesterday.

nesta. kaladze. janulowski. giggs. scholes. rooney. all of them put together may have earned around 10 mentions (ok i’m exaggerating but it’s a ridiculously low number). i think that tells the story. along with the fact that gattuso had effectively blocked ronaldo out of the game until he forced his own substitution.

the stage is set for another mouthwatering milan – liverpool final. and right now i don’t really mind who wins. on one hand, i’m supposed to be a liverpool fan. on the other, milan are the underdogs.have fought off a points deduction and several injury problems.

given that i’m indifferent, i hope to just sit back and enjoy the football. and i seriously hope that they produce some good stuff.??

one reason why Liverpool has never won the Premiership – there are no penalty shootouts!

Anyways, now that they have exhausted their penalty puNya for the season, they need to make sure they win the final in full time itself!

So I made my debut on the Indian Economy Blog two days back. Must say that in just two days, i’ve noticed a lot of difference from “personal blogging” (such as this one).

For a start, it is to do with the readership. The thing with this blog is that most of the readers/commenters are friends or friends of friends. Of course there are a few others also, but most of them seem to be of the kind I can connect to. And that allows me to treat each comment with respect and reply to it honestly.

The thing with a public blog such as the Indian Economy Blog is that most of the readers are unknown. They are people who have no clue who you are, or you have know clue who they are. And it is not uncommon to find really arbit comments such as those on this blogpost a year ago. And it’s a public forum, at least more public than this. So i can’t even abuse them! There are a number of sane comments also, which you want to reply to, but they are usually lost.

Then the next thing is the “structure”. Having been so used to the “tree structure” of comments in LJ for more than two years, it is tough to reply to comments in the “list structure”. Need to put numerous “@”s.The comment and it’s reply are in two different corners of the page. Too much of a pain.

Yes, like a good blogger, I tried to reply to all the comments that were there but hte lack of the tree structure meant I soon put no enthu da. Also, the fact that most commentors were perfect strangers meant I somehow didn’t feel like replying to all. And of course, the number of comments is much greater so it’s all the more difficult.

However, yeah, it’s nice to get some footage. It is nice to see that something you have written is being read by so many people. It is nice to know that i have one place to put most of my “serious” posts for which I want an audience bigger than this blog provides. The structure and nature of comments, well, I’ll just have to take them as the natural counterbalancing factor! ??

Today I make my debut on The Indian Economy Blog. The first post is? about the need for an exclusive first class public transport system.