My Experiments with Truth

Last night an insane idea passed my head. Or was it an inane one? Or maybe insipid, perhaps intrepid, maybe even inarticulate but definitely inalienable. I was drunk, and by drunk I really mean high. And I was almost about to act on my momentary lapse of reason, but thank god I didn't, as it does not look such a good idea when the alcohol content in my blood has reduced.

Anyways the idea was that when I'll be about to get married (which I soon will be, given the pace my parents are working on this) I will publish the list of girls I had a thing for, the girls I found hot or liked. Girls whom I thought might have had a thing for me. And ask them if they ever did.

I don't know what possible good can come from this and I can think of lot of bad which can ,but nevertheless it seemed the perfect thing to do last night.

Marriage does seem like the end of life but it really isn't. But when I do die I do really wanna tell people what I really thought about them and to discuss all the things that could have been. I would be dead soon so I don't think the repercussions would ever reach me. Considering that those people will outlive me of course.

I'm not sure why do I wanna do this, they will be too old to care and would be dying too soon to matter. But as I always think. Truth matters.

But who will track the tracker?

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards.)

– Juvenal

 

 

Warning : If you are not an IT employee or never have been, then you should probably skip this one, it’s all going to be Geek to you. But if you are, or have been, then continue reading. You might have an answer to my question.

It all started with the making of the great ring. Forged in the great fires of Mount Onsite by the Dark Lord – Project Manager. For within these ring was bound the strength and the will to govern over each team. It was called the…. Defect Tracker. One tracker to track them all. 

But the flesh of men is weak and forgetful and lazy. And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half enhancements, the tracker passed out of all knowledge. Until, when chance came, the tracker ensnared another maker.  But then something happened that the tracker did not intend. It was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable. A consultant, me, of the quiet village called offshore. For the time will soon come when consultants will shape the fortunes of all. As I was made the anchor to for all the trackers.

It was a long and thunderous night when a major delivery was missed as the person responsible was on leave. And thus came into being the great leave tracker, designed to keep track of the planned leaves of the people and plan accordingly. And for a time it was all good. But then tragedy struck again, as it happened when one of the team members had high fever and couldn’t come to office and deliver within the deadline. To make up for this great folly our leader, the lord of lords, the king came up with a very ingenious idea. We were to keep track of our body temperature in a tracker and to mark all temperatures above 99 F as red. So all the fevers could be forecasted all thus the damage could be contained.

But we soon realized that all diseases didn’t come with a high temperature and a runny nose. Some came with an enlarged belly and an intense desire to eat chocolate ice-cream at midnight. It just so happened that a lady who was just sent to onsite had to come back on maternity leave. Now this waste of resources, money and precious visa did not sit well with the management, the HR department and her colleagues who were clamming to go in her stead. Also as this was such a thing which required much planning in advance we all knew that a tracker was due, and it was there, what later came to be known as the knocked-up tracker. All women were to mark whether they had sex last night or not and two columns for protected or unprotected. Assuming that all contraceptives were only 99.9% reliable I was to calculate their chances to get pregnant and when. But soon a young engineer made me add one more column – ‘don’t remember, had too much vodka last night’.

Now other issues had started creeping in. One new joinee promised a functionality on a client call that couldn’t be implemented. To contain such screw ups our manager asked us to maintain a tracker where we were to log all the keywords spoken by us in any client call. We all were getting a little worried when our chief technical architect always entered the same 6 words in different order – Scalable, Agile, Robust, Intuitive, Holistic and Cross- Platform. But what really set the alarm bells ringing was the day when a person entered the keywords as Naked, Hard, Table, Ass and Sex. The man afterwards told nearly in tears on a conference call with the senior management, the HR panel and the legal department that what he had told the client that instead of hard coding the sex of the customer in the table he could use the data entered over the naked kernel of the program and use ASS (Agile Semantics System) to determine the appropriate salutation of the user. This fiasco made me add a new column to the tracker with the heading ‘Sexual Innuendo meant or not’.

By this time we had also gone in to the support phase of the project and lot of complains were coming from the support team, to better collect the data I was asked to make a tracker for the support team. They were asked to enter the number of bugs resolved after each issue solved. I was the first to notice that entries were almost always in negative. When this reached the management they quickly introduced one more tracker to identify the root cause of each error found in the support phase. As reason could be many I was asked to make a flexible tracker, I added the usual reasons like ‘Incompatible Middleware’, ‘User Error’, ‘Incomplete data supplied in the design phase’ etc. But soon I realized that most markings were under two columns marked GOK and TBTPAIA. On one team call when some curious soul asked the meaning of these acronyms there was 2 minute silence then one hot –blooded Sardar blurted out the meaning of them as ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘The Build Team People Are Incompetent Assholes’ .

As time progressed the project had grown in size and dissatisfaction. Lots of people were clamoring up to go on-site. So after a lot of arguments someone suggested an objective way, which was of course a tracker. The initial tracker I made very soon ran into trouble, it was a simple excel file containing one column for name and one for months spent onsite. But people shortly made it clear that 6 months spent in Switzerland were not equal to 6 months spent in Kanchipuram. So more columns were added to capture the average salary there, cost of living, continent, wife happiness and a rating from 1 to 10 of whether it brought favorable matches in marriage classifieds. The earlier mentioned hot-blooded Sardar added two more columns one night, ’Skin color of residents’ and ‘Number of strip joints in a 10 km radius’.

The all-seeing eye saw this and the Lord of Mordor commanded me to make a tracker of all insolent and tracker abusing people. And I could only murmur “But my lord, who will track the trackers?”

Hope

What do I hope for? I hope for a lot of things. I had hoped for a lot of things, I had hoped for you and I still long for you. But now there are things I hope for you. I hope that when the nights are cold and there’s nobody to hug but your blanket, when the silence deafens you, when you can find anything but sleep in your bed, I hope that then you think of me. I hope that you think of me and you lament. I hope that you think of me and lament and you can’t forgive yourself. How I will never forgive you. How I will never forgive you for what you did to me. For what you did to me and what you did to us.

And what about me? I will carry on living my life. I will carry on living my life without forgetting and without forgiving. I will carry on living my life to the fullest and will find every happiness there is to be found other than you. Or I will die trying; die trying to find every happiness there is to be found other than you. And that; will be my revenge. Or at least I hope so.

Don’t Marry The Girl You Love

Don’t marry the girl you love. Leave HER. Just to prove that you can get someone better. Pick someone from the pretty photos your mom showed you. Choose her from you dad’s matched horoscopes. Date her from the single colleagues in your office. Get a fancy marriage. Take her to Mauritius. Remark on the natural beauty. Keep silent about hers. Don’t be alarmed when you feel a deep lingering regret. Be alarmed when you don’t feel anything. Ignore the eagerness of a new bride. Talk a lot when you can’t. But nothing of significance. Shut up if she does. Try to say trite romantic lines. Stop when you witness that they don’t stir her any more than they stirred you. Try to make love to her. Fail. Fuck her anyway.

Get back. Get yourself a career and not a job. Lay down ground rules. Send her anniversary gifts and spa treatments from office. See her late every night. Don’t see her every night. Take office people to lunch on your birthday. Build a moat and retreat into your bastion every time she asks what’s wrong. Brood. Become too jaded to brood. Ponder over how dreary your life has become. Get an ostentatious car to prove to yourself that it hasn’t. Hit the bottle when you realize that the car doesn’t help.  That nothing helps. Keep hitting the bottle. Hit her when you are overdone with the bottle. Weep silently at what you have become.

Try to work even harder to earn more money. Get a kid. Get two to forget their mother. Invite people over to pageant your successful life. Let it crumble as soon as they leave. Say bitter words. Become too bitter to care about words. Let years go unnoticed. Notice that. Descend into ennui. Take trips to foreign lands when someone points that out. Smile for the photos. Return to your blackberry an instant later. Look up to catch a fleeting glimpse of HER face disappearing into the crowd. Try not to think about HER. Have a sleepless night when you can’t. Abstain from telling her that she will always be the second woman in your life. Abstain from telling her anything.

Gather up your youth’s savings. Grieve that your youth’s savings is only money. Buy a big house from it. Ask her to decorate it as she pleases. Fight over the color of the table when she does. Recognize that this is just stuff; horded over to cover up the emptiness between you two. Recognize the emptiness between you two. Recognize the emptiness inside you. Accept it. Burn the bridges and build the walls. Turn a blind eye to her tears. Shed a few when her eyes are closed.

Get a heart disease. Hire expensive doctors to prolong you pitiable life. Start taking walks on your doctor’s advice. Don’t feel like returning home at the end of them. Start earning more money for your kids. Realize that it was never money that they wanted. Realize that it’s too late. Realize that it always had been. Die fretting over the debacle you made of your inconsequential life. And let the last sane idea to pass through your head be that the better girl you picked never made your heart beat with even the iota of passion it did for HER.

Don’t worry about HER, she will die too one day, thinking of … What if?

P.S. - Inspired by a post in the Thought Catalog
 

Hiatus

Not that I have a lot many regular readers but I thought I would do this anyways, I owe to my blog if not anything else.

I have  hit a dead end as far as writing is considered. I have two Ideas with me to write on, but I'm unable to give them shape in words. Whatever I forced myself to write was trite, dull and soporific to say the least. The fountain of or rather the small ephemeral stream of words inside me has dried up.

This morning while searching for a Gtalk Status Message I couldn't think of anything relevant as I'm currently neither brooding or longing for a drink; and I can't think of anything clever to say either. I am currently content and happy. No wonder there is a vacuum in my vacuous verbiage. I feel like a Happy Hulk or I should say Bruce Banner, who is lets just face it is just another intelligent guy.

So I'm going to take a hiatus, till I find my grip on my pen again or rather the slick on the keyboard and find something worth returning for. I'm gonna read more, drink more, brood more and make myself unhappy again till I get to the place again where words come from.

P.S. - I just watched 'Pyar ka punchama' and am feeling bitter towards the whole world again. I think it's helping already.

Taking over an IT company and other bad ideas

I am an honest, god fearing, true to my word, sincere in my work terrorist. I love my wives and children, I help old women cross the road and I spare some change for the beggar on the street. I am telling you all this so that you take my advice seriously and realize that I only have your best interest in my mind.

I have done some stupid things in my life, my third son from my second wife (she was not my wife then) is right on top of the list; I have watched Tashan first day, first show; have bought a Macbook Pro and have tried to race a Haryana Roadways bus (that’s why I limp and my Wagon R is no more). But all these don’t even come close to my biggest blunder in life; taking over an IT company and holding its employees hostage.

It was a Friday afternoon when after months of planning, recruiting people, arranging the weapons, getting an approval from the agency, services and our high command we finally decided that today is the day. I had spent months on researching the potential target and I had realized that Rashtrapati Bhavan was too difficult, no one actually came to the campus of BHU, crowded markets in Bombay and Delhi were done to death, and that it was an IT company that was the perfect target. Being an IT savvy terrorist myself I had done my research on them; tens of thousands of people came to them every day, they were mostly located outside the city, generated a lot of foreign currency so were the darling of the government and were full of meek IT geeks. They had a strenuous security procedure though, people were frisked, the luggage was scanned, and the cars were checked so it had the right mix of ease and difficulty. But most of all I wanted to be different, no one had done it before and I wanted to get noticed and rise up the ranks.

We loaded the guns, bombs, walkie-talkies and ourselves into two Qualis (stolen from some company which provided cabs to that IT company only) and stormed the campus. After firing a few rounds in the air, pushing the employees in the buildings and rounding up the security guards we were all set. The so called security guards were so terrified after seeing guns that they nearly crapped in their pants, only one of had seen a gun before that too in the Indo Pak war after which he had retired, the rest of the boys had only been trained to lookout for missing ID cards and pen drives. In fact all this seemed easier than writing a novel these days (the thin, big font, 100 bucks a piece ones I mean, ‘metro reads’ I read somewhere; they are called).

But then the gloom started setting in. Even after a quick glance I had realized that there were a lot of people un-accounted for, at least 5000 less than our estimate after we counted. “It is Friday and most people have left for their home towns after lunch” said the man in charge of the campus after I slapped him twice and demanded an explanation. Now it was only 2 o’ clock and not even the Sarkari Babus go home this early, this was beginning to look bad. Then came the first distress call of the day from one of my colleague who was sent to manage some hostages in a building. 

He was a newbie and already seemed to be in tears. Over sobs he told me that the people in his building are not terrorized, in fact some of them have not even realized that they were hostages. I quickly rushed to his building, the last thing we needed was somebody playing John McClane. But the situation was something else, I realized, after entering the lobby, people were not rebellious, they were just sleeping and too morose to care for anything else. After shouting terrorist, you are taken over, bomb, I will shoot you, hands up at the top of my voice I finally resorted to firing in the air, after the deafening sound of bullets was through the most it did was one guy opened his one eye, looked at us, then looked at his watch, asked the guy next to him that “do we have a call now?” and went back to sleep. This was embarrassing to say the least. I have successfully blown up buildings, armed force’s jeeps and tortured a traitor to death but this scenario looked very bleak. Admitting defeat I asked my colleague to lock this building and leave them to themselves.

As soon I was exiting the building I heard gun shots coming from the neighboring building. While I am all for teaching people’s manners, shooting a lot of people wasn’t in my to-do list for today. It reduces your ability to negotiate with the police. As I rushed to that building I saw another colleague of mine shooting a mass of people sitting on their chairs, unarmed. After I snatched the gun from his hands and reprimanded him in the harshest words he said, he saw them making some move, as if their trying to draw some weapon. After the screaming and hysteria had subsided I also noticed the same thing, their hands twitched every 5 minutes as if they are trying to draw a knife or something. After frisking and finding nothing on 9 people, I leveled with the 10^th guy and asked him what it was. He said it was an involuntary habit of moving the mouse every 5 minutes to stay ‘Green’ on the office communicator and all they are doing is mentally clicking a mouse. I was further alarmed when somebody suggested bringing a cake for their recently dead team-mates. This was looking worse than my village cage where they kept all the crazies locked.

I had finally come back to the main building and was thinking of how to negotiate with the police when one lady approached me and asked for my email id, she said she was an HR manager and wanted to mail me a list of demands from the employees. When I asked them to state them verbally to me she asked one young guy to come with a notepad and asked him to note the minutes of the meeting. Firstly she asked that they few of the employees wanted to be tied to more comfortable chairs. Second one stray bullet had shattered a glass and AC cooling was going to waste, this building was losing points in the ‘go green’ challenge. Thirdly the restroom was running low on liquid soap and wanted that to be refilled. Fourthly if the hostage situation continued till tomorrow they wanted a written approval from their managers for a ‘comp off’. Fifth, the coffee machine was not working so they either wanted to be moved to a floor where it worked or wanted a working coffee machine brought here And lastly and most importantly she thought that employee morale was running low so she should be allowed to send a mail with some quotes and a 'face painting' contest with a chance to win a pack of 8 crayons. I think the last point that kid wrote down was “If you don’t shut up and sit down I am going to shoot you and the guy left to you, just for the heck of it”. This was getting intolerable.

As I just sat down I head another SOS from my colleague. What I witnessed as I hastened to his post was absolute pandemonium. People were running amok; trying to login to their machines, checking their Blackberrys and even the threat of shooting them down was doing nothing. Finally I caught one guy running like crazy and I could get only two words out of him - ‘Client Escalation’. They looked more scared than my suicide bombing instructor who realized we had switched his demo kit with a real explosives belt as an April 1^st prank. One engineer came up to me and clearly told me that he would prefer getting shot in the head than risking another client escalation, especially now when the annual appraisal was due. Frantically I searched for his project manager who he mentioned had the name  Sathya and even after going through the name on ID cards of the entire floor I was unable to find him. Finally I mixed my yell with a few bullets in the air and demanded Sathya to come forward. Three people came forward but only one of them looked old enough to be a manager. His name was Sathyadhiran Srinivasulu Mucherla Laxman, no wonder I was not able to find him! I asked him to tell all his sub –ordinates to get off from their computers, go to one corner of the building and be in total silence. He responded by saying that he wanted an requirement document detailing which corner of the building he was supposed to go to, what was the SLA of total silence and number of man hours given to him for the job. I was too flabbergasted to say anything and sheepishly excused myself out of the situation.

I went back to the center building again. The police had come by this time and wanted to negotiate. I said ‘Hello’ in my most terrorizing voice to the inspector. ‘Cheppandi Anna’ came the reply. I repeated in Hindi. ‘Enti ‘ was the reply this time. I tried 3 other languages but no avail. I needed a translator. I caught hold of a Reddy from the crowd and asked him to translate. “Talk-a?” he asked, “to the police-a” while moving his hand with his thumb out which meant ‘fuck’ in my part of the world. He then flat out refused after I said yes; he said it was the onsite people’s job to talk to the client and translate the requirements, he always the got the final document. Also, this was not a part of his current allocation and hence would require the approval of his team lead, Project manager, Development track lead and Offshore Delivery head. When I insisted that this is not required he suggested me to log my demands in a tracker and mail it to the police while keeping my manager in CC, he even volunteered to give me the latest template for the tracker. This was pathetic. Not only was I feeling like a ring master, trying to juggle 5 balls on a unicycle. But I was also not able to tell the police that I wanted my three colleagues freed, 1 Crore rupees and a chopper brought to me. This day was getting worse than when my iPod had crashed, that too before a 10 day hike from Kabul to Waziristan.

But the straw or rather the pillar that broke my back was when I thought I would check in with my team till they mulled the issue over outside. Alpha 1, who was in charge of the recreational center was not replying. Fearing the worst, that Indian government has finally learned its lesson and has sent the cavalry in, I rushed to his post. But what I saw were beyond my wildest dreams. Abdullah the 6’6” Pathan from Kabul was found merrying in the Jacuzzi, his 2^nd in command was taking a Sauna, while the rest of his unit was either in the pool or playing foosball. To the people who had seen nothing donkey turds and each other for months at a stretch it seemed like someone had torn open the gates of heaven. One of his guys was even making a deal with an employee, in exchange for referring him he would tell him how to get into US without a H1 – B.

At this point I broke down and started sobbing. I had taken the sandstorms of Afghanistan, the blizzards of Siachen, torture of US Marines and nagging of Kherunissa (my 1^st wife) but this was beyond all that. As all my dreams of a promotion, Interpol red corner notice, Al-Jazeera exclusive videos , hot virgins in heaven and finally be able to afford an iPad2 came crashing down as I realized couldn’t go any further and I walked out and surrendered myself. Anything would be better than this.

Now I as pass my days in an Indian prison and enjoy the VIP treatment alongside that new kid Kasab, I have nothing to do but ponder over my past actions and I always reach the same conclusion. Don’t take over an IT company!

Love and other drugs

Yesterday I felt I was eighteen again. My heart fluttered, I jumped around the bed restlessly, looked at my phone every 5 minutes and to shake my head every 10 minutes to break up the imaginary conversations in my head.

My heart wants this day to be an epoch, my head says it was just good three hours spent. I don't know what It'll be, as I keep as my fingers crossed as a teenager. Now life might play out as usual or it might change but I wanted to write this feeling down. I want to remind myself that I can still feel and despite my growing cynicism I can still connect with another person, with the the romantic in me, and the 18 year happy - go - lucky kid in me, that once was.

Now after reaching for my phone as soon as I woke up, I will listen to the song I have been listening to over 50 times since yesterday morning. I am alcohol free for 15 days and I am still high.