Pertinent Observations

A few months ago, before i had gotten into the big bad corporate world, i had accused NRIs about being reluctant to mention their employer’s name. Now, having worked for two not-so-well-known companies, I would like to withdraw my charges.

Problem is that a large number of companies are unknown to the aam junta. Unless you are working for a firm that has a large public presence (such as a bank, or a prominent FMCG, or infosys or wipro) there is little chance people would have heard of your workplace. And it is really irritating when people mis-interpret. And if most of the comapanies in India are unknown, I can’t imagine the case with firang firms. So people get around the problem by just saying “i work in wisconsin” or some such!

My firm is supposed to be quite well-known in the US but is hardly heard of in India. Nobody seems to notice the “SABRE travel record locator” on their jet/kingfisher tickets. And most people tend to hear it as “cyber” and think i work for a cyber cafe or something – pisses me off to no end. And when I do explain, they think I’m a software developer – another thing that turns me off.

So nowadays when someone asks me where I’m working I first assess his/her aukaat. If i think he/she is really dumb, I just say “i’ve returned to bangalore and my office is in whitefield”. If i think he/she is well informed, I say “sabre”. Slightly less informed and i ask them if they’ve heard of travelocity and tell them i work for the firm that owns it. And try explain what I do. However, most of them dont’ understand and still think i’m a coder.

My most preferred response, nowadays, is to say nothing when someone asks me about my job. i just pull out my wallet and hand them my business card (i make sure i always carry a good stock of them). and let them figure out for themselves. of course by doing that I’m giving away my mobile phone number, but most of these people are too dumb to find it there so I guess it’s ok!

problem with techies is that there are so many of them around that they assume that everyone understands tech (just like i assume everyone understands IITian English). so they have forgotten to speak in English and use some arbit combination of unix commands (no windows, no M$ remember), vi keywords, and if they want to show some pity, sql statements!

so i send a request to one of our developers asking him for some database. and i get this in reply (it’s confidential so have masked some stuff)

Database details

Output from tnsping:
Used TNSNAMES adapter to resolve the alias
Attempting to contact (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP) (HOST = something)
(PORT = 666))) (CONNECT_DATA = (SID = name123) (GLOBAL_NAME = name123.sabre.com)))

Login in as login/passwd@name123.sabre.com

and the guy sits in across the world so can’t even contact him until the evening! bah!

I hear that in certain conservative Brahmin communities, married couples aren’t allowed to sleep together for a number of days after the wedding – apparently an elaborate list of ceremonies and poojas have to be performed before the door is finally closed on them.

Weakmax.

Madman Aadisht (aka ) has put an utterly disgusting GTalk tagline. Something to the effect of an entire religion being a certain female body part. Extremely disgusting and offensive. At least I’m offended by it, and I’m sure lots of others are also.

I’m wondering how to respond to this. One thing to do would be to contact my old colleagues in the RSS and ask the fundamentalists there to “take care of him”. They will hopefully burn him at the stake. Peace. Downside: too violent.

I’m planning to file a PIL in the Karnataka High Court tomorrow about the evil uses that the google talk status message can be put to. Hopefully I can get some support from various left wing and right wing and centrist fundamentalists, and soon we will have a country-wide campaign to ban google talk status messages. If not anyone else, I’m confident of enlisting the support of Brinda Karat, Arundhati Roy and Prannoy Roy (the last named is necessary to get relevant footage). However, just blocking the status messages doesn’t sound that feasible, so we might as well get the entire google suite banned! Peace. Downside – no orkutting.

On third thoughts, I am thinking of a rally tomorrow in Bangalore. Let us start at Richmond circle at around nine am (the peak hour of traffic) and stage a march until the **large-american-commercial-bank** office near Garuda where our man is supposed to hide during the day. By blocking the peak hour Bangalore traffic, I am sure we can drum up enough support for our worthy cause and the mob will be big enough for the people at the **large-american-commercial-bank** building to turn in aadisht to us. Of course on the way, we will damage a few ATMs and a number of shops and maybe kult stuff from some showrooms in Garuda. Peace. Downside: What a waste of two hours while I could be orkutting at work instead!

I’m in a fix. I’m wondering which of the above methods is the best way to deal with madman’s madness. Maybe I should do all three. March up to the **large-american-commercial-bank** office, wait for them to turn him over. Then call the fundamentalists and get him burnt. and then march up to the Karnataka High court and file a PIL (everyone who participated in my rally can be a signatory). And then Prannoy will arrive from somewhere and I can get some footage on NDTV.

Advise, please!

i live 100m away from three pizza joints… and all of them deliver… 2 KM away from the nearest adigas, and they don’t deliver!

factory outlets of every conceivable brand (indigo nation-scullers, classic polo, louisphilippe-vanheusen-allensolly, lee-arrow-wrangler, reebok, livein, adidad) around here, but of late i mostly shop at fabindia – and the nearest one is 5km away!

retailer closest to my house (as the crow flies) is Big Bazaar, followed closely by food world. they are always way too crowded and never seem to have what i want.

PVR coming up 50 meters from my house, but i don’t know if i’ll still be living here when it gets built. i have to make do with the one at the forum, 8 km awya.

The biggest superstar of Kannada movies lives right across the road from my house, and i hardly watch kannada movies, and couldn’t care less (except for the crowd that gathers in front of my gate on sundays for his “junta darshan”)

Today the old lady of boribunder (yay, i remember fundaes that were st. peters in school quizzes) started a kannada edition. Simply titled “the times of india”, with “the” being pronounced as it is when it precedes a vowel sound!

reminds me of certain peculiarities of bangalore english, at least the variety that people of my parents’ generation speak. for a start, “the” is always pronounced as “thee”, irrespective of the sound that follows it. giraffe is pronounced as “giraff-ay” (maybe that was how it was originally meant to be pronounced but the english spoilt it), madam as “maedam” (interestingly most men of my father’s generation address all unrelated women as “maedam”. something i’m not used to. so recently there was this situation where i was addressing a woman by her first name and dad was calling her “maedam”), and so on. there are a lot of better ones i’m sure but currently my memory fails me.

going on to other things, some english words have come to mean something totally different in Kannada. for example “recess” refers to the act of peeing. and “motion” means “shit”. “rubber” usually means “eraser” and the pencil sharpener is referred to as “mender”. “machine” by default refers to the flour grinding machine, so “going to the machine” means “i’m going to the flour mill to get some flour grounded”. if i owned one such shop, it would probably be appropriate to play a certain number from Pink Floyd’s “wish you were here” album!

coming back to where we started, bennett coleman and company now owns four newspapers in bangalore (following its not so recent acquisition of the “vijay group) – two in english and two in Kannada. two of those are market leaders – the english ToI and Vijaya Karnataka. will be interesting to see what strategy the times follows for the Kannada toi.

As regards to the two english papers, Vijay Times has been positioned as a cost leader. It is much cheaper, all in color and the quality of writing is pathetic. Haven’t seen another newspaper that is so badly written. Only thing is its supplements seem better than the crappy Bangalore Times (i mean the kind of stuff they try to cover in the supplements is good – again pathetically written). It is more of a paper that is a “second newspapers” to homes that are currently getting only a Kannada newspaper, and who want to “move up the ladder” by reading an english paper.

On the other hand Vijaya Karnataka is widely acknowledged as the best Kannada newspaper, and though i haven’t read it too often, I think it’s a fairly well written paper (maybe it has quickly come to be like what Deccan Herald is in English) and has a wide traditional base. My take is that “thee ToI” will try to be the “cool Kannada newspaper” and try and catch youngsters’ attention. Right now most Kannada papers are quite serious and “traditional” and probably “thee toi” will be the paper to read for the young man on the street!

It is also interesting to point out here that “thee ToI” was distributed free along with Vijay Times this morning but wasn’t distributed along with the English ToI. Wondering if that offers some pointers towards its STP (segmentation, targeting, positioning).

The founder of Vijaya Karnataka and Vijay TImes, Vijay Sankeshwar was a hardcore BJP man, representing Dharwad North in parliament for quite a few terms. He fell out with yediyurappa (i think) and quit the party and formed his own Kannada Naadu Party. Now I’m told he’s with Bangarappa in the Samajwadi Party. Yet, one of today’s editorials in the Vijay Times was very right-wing – attacking the UPA government for being too pro-Muslim. Intersting!

On similar lines, I think the BJP committed a huge blunder by letting Vijay go. In one stroke they lost access to what would later become Karnataka’s leading daily by a long margin, not to speak of the transportation and logistics (VRL) etc.

If you thought the duckworth-lewis system is complicated, then you need to check out the points system for the Zonal Ranji trophy matches in 1991-92.

http://usa.cricinfo.com/db/ARCHIVE/1991-92/IND_LOCAL/RANJI/RANJI_1991-92-RULES.html

This was the year when I had started following cricket, and I used the kaveri holidays (we had a few days off in November/December 1991 owing to kaveri riots) to follow up on some Ranji trophy cricket on radio! Complete with Kannada commentary et al.

The first match i followed is this:

http://usa.cricinfo.com/db/ARCHIVE/1991-92/IND_LOCAL/RANJI/SOUTH/KNTKA_GOA_RJI-S_22-25NOV1991.html

Continued following ranji for a while (though not on radio) and was extremely thrilled when Karnataka won Ranji and Irani (in 98 i think). The switch from zonal format to the super league and plate somewhat lessened my interest but now thanks to cricinfo have started following again!

And must say that some matches (esp. Andhra vs Delhi, Hyderabad vs Punjab) have made for exciting following over cricinfo. Long live domestic cricket!

For most of the first half of last year, I used to turn to her whenever I was depressed. She was a great listener, used to patiently hear me out, suggest steps for further action, and by the time I hung up the phone I would actually be feeling great. And the feeling was mutual – she would turn to me in similar situations.

Yesterday (as is my habit), I was feeling really low, and as luck would have it she came online on GTalk. After much deliberation I pinged her and we quickly settled into a good conversation. As luck would have it, soon enough I had pissed her off enough to say “you really put me off!” and she chose not to continue the conversation then onwards.

What followed was this strange feeling of joy. Joy that I had pissed her off! Joy that I had pissed her off and didn’t have to apologize. This time last year also she would get easily pissed and many rupees of Airtel bills were spent apologizing to her. And here I am, pissing her off for the very same things, and I didn’t have to apologize! Soon enough my depression had all but disappeared and normal life resumed.

Wonder what make me so happy that I had pissed her off. Am I that sadistic? I don’t really think so. Well, she hasn’t exactly been nice to me of late. In fact I thought there was a period when she was really nasty to me. Was this my little way of extracting revenge for that? Or was this simply the joy of freedom – the freedom of saying certain things and not having to apologize for it anymore?

Nevertheless, last year talking to her would bring me out of depression. Same is the case this year, but for a totally different reason. Such is life! (wondering how many blogposts i’ve ended with this phrase!)

If you remember, an “Australia A” team played in the 1994-95 world series cup in order to “compensate” for the weak competition offered by england and zimbabwe. Surprisingly, Australia A made the finals where they came close to beating the senior team in one of the games.

Anyways, today I had a look at the team that played one of the games. Look at the batting order. Let me shuffle it around a bit and you get Hayden-Langer-Ponting-Martyn-Blewett-Bevan! Has any other national second string batting order looked so familiar? Hats off to Australian foresight/perseverance.

Then in the ongoing ranji trophy, almost all national team players seem to be doing really well. Ganguly and Sehwag have scored quickfire hundreds. Laxman and Jaffer got good 70s. Dravid’s 56 against Saurashtra pales in comparison actually! Bowlers have also not done too badly – RP Singh and Agarkar have picked pfeiffers michelles. VRV and Pathan have four in an innings (and pathan did it at an economy of 2.4!!). Only Harbhajan seems to have performed badly. (for the record, Tendulkar and Munaf are not playing because of injury; Kumble and Zaheer have been allowed to “rest; Sreesanth and Dhoni can’t play since their states haven’t qualied for the plate semis)

Wondering if this tells a story about the gap in standards of international and domestic cricket. Wonder if it also tells us what needs to be done in case a player is doing badly internationally – ask him to play Ranji! Among other things, Uthappa seems to be playing really well and is knocking on the doors of the national team yet again. Same is the case with Badrinath and Ranadeb Bose.

The five wise men will sit down this evening along with the captain and coach to name the 30 probables for the world cup and the team for the first two ODIs against the west indies. Will be interesting to see how much experimentation they will put for the eight ODIs before the world cup. My take is they will rotate amongst a small pool (of around 16-18), unlike in 1999 when they got a tournament against Kenya and Bangladesh where an almost A team played.