Project ke gaddaro ko..... Escalation maaro saalon ko !!!

 It was a normal Monday in an IT company. Actually, there are no normal Mondays in an IT company, Mondays are a time while half the company is on sick leave and other half hates themselves for not having enough leaves to be on sick leave. People are hung over, frustrated, sleepy, looking for other jobs and basically just tired of it all. And when people are like that, something’s gotta give.

09:00 AM:

 It was our monthly meeting when I, as the lead of testing team, placed the figures in front of everyone in our project for Bharat Textiles. We had found 198 bugs in our last testing cycle, which was a very high number. I said the quality of the development was very bad and we were no longer ISO 9000 compliant. The lead of the development team took offense at this. He got up from his seat in the meeting room, caught my collar and screamed “Agar project se itni problem hai to Lahore foods ke project mae chale jao! Tum log Anti-project ho!”.

I was dumb founded. Why would he say something like that? Finding a bug is the first step in solving it, there is nothing wrong in saying there is a problem in the project. All projects do. But my bigger issue was that if I have a problem with the project why am I not being suggested the Coca Cola project or British Telecom project? Where there is an onsite, the project is run well, everybody gets to leave office on time and most importantly, you get to talk to white women.

 10:00 AM:

This disease was spreading faster than Coronavirus. Two of my team members were stopped from entering the ODC…… Before I go any further, I think I should explain what an ODC is. An ODC or Offshore Development Centre is virtual office of another company, which has outsourced its software development offshore to an IT company that has a deep talent pool, and lower cost of operations. Or in other words, where you pass off your shit work to cheap labour but also want to retain control over the data. So a ODC is access controlled, only people who are working in that project can enter. Two of my team members were stopped from entering the ODC and asked to show their ID cards for granting access, but instead of showing their ID they started sloganeering “Hum Kaagaz Nahi Dikhayenge, Security-Guard Aake Jayenge, Hum Kaagaz Nahi Dikhayenge”. I rushed in to see what the problem is and the revolutionaries asked me instead where my degree is. I said I don’t have it with me right now, but it was definitely verified at the time of my joining. At which they laughed and said “In this project where the team leads cannot produce degree you are asking me to produce an ID card to prove I am a team member?” After which they pushed past me and went inside.

 11:00 AM:

The situation almost came to blows. It was the time of our daily stand up call and one person was sitting down for it in the meeting room. Our business analyst was enraged to see this. He confronted him immediately and told him that if he cannot stand for 15 minutes for the stand up call then how can he care about the project. The other person replied that he was just tired and what difference does it make if he did not stand. This enraged our business analyst, he pounded the table with his fist and growled “This is the problem with you people, you do not care about the project at all. Are you a spy from Karachi foods project here to delete all our data? Our soldiers are standing in -40º C in Siachen and you cannot stand for 15 minutes?”. He stormed out of the meeting room while our PM (Project Manager) stood mute but taking notes. Our business analyst could have made his point much stronger only if he was not frequently late to work, or littering the cubicle, or cheating on his time sheet filling extra hours, or being a letch with the women in the project. But of course, just standing for the stand up call made him a stand-up employee. However, I was more worried about the PM taking notes at the Siachen comment.

 12:00 AM:

I had just returned from my coffee break when I saw an email waiting for me from the client. Apparently our last testing cycle wasn’t very good and a lot of bugs were not caught. I rubbed my forehead and sighed, and started walking to the desk of the person responsible. I asked him why the quality of his work was so bad? Instead of answering me, he asked me a question “What about the day when the development team did not finish their work on time? What about the Friday when you reached office late? What did you do when Rajesh died from a heart attack and did not finish his assigned work? Did you ask any questions when Kashmiri Pandits were driven out of Kashmir by JKLF?” None of these reasons was an excuse for his bad work but he thought he had answered me sufficiently, so he turned his chair before I could say that I was 5 years old at the time of Kashmiri Pandits’ exodus.

 1:00 PM:

“Finally, lunch time” I thought to myself and pictured a plate of steaming mutton biryani and a glass of chilled Coca-Cola. So what if I will die at 45 with this diet, I told myself, death cannot be worse than this life in this project. As I moved towards the exit of the ODC I saw a small crowd had gathered and no one was getting out. Our PM was standing there with a dour face and a sour expression. “Mitron”, he said in his loud and booming voice, “Our soldiers are fighting in Siachen, do you think they are getting lunch breaks of 30 minutes every day? If they can do without it, so can you. You must forego your lunch and keep working. Bharat Textiles mata kee jai!” With this, he corralled us back into our cubicles and left to meet another project’s PM. People were murmuring and there was already a blame-game started about who was responsible for this.

 2:00 PM:

The email that will light this powder keg came in. Our Deputy PM sent an email that Mechanical Engineers will inducted in the project with just 15 days of training instead of the usual 1 month training. Being a mechanical engineer myself, I did not think much about it and I welcomed the 2nd point in the email that the PM wants to create of list of all project members. It would be good to have a list of people, I thought, every time we had to send an email for filling time sheets or inviting for someone’s farewell we had to go cubicle to cubicle asking emails of everyone. But a loud cry came from my neighbouring cubicle where two guys who were Computer Engineers, said that it was discrimination against them. Our Deputy PM who was also a Mechanical engineer, rushed into that cubicle to calm them down. He said it was not discriminatory; it was just to help Mechanical engineers. Computer engineers had 150 other projects to go to but Mechanical engineers had only 1. Before they could say anything else, he added that if they did not support this they were Anti-project. One girl who was a Civil engineer stood up to ask that what about Civil engineers, they were also a minority in all projects, but she was asked to shut up, her ID card was checked again and she was asked to submit her code for review immediately.

 3:00 PM:

The situation was worsening by the minute, people were quickly taking sides, all civil discourse had stopped and the people from JavaScript Network Uniformator (JNU) were creating a ruckus about everything. In addition, to make matters worse a girl from the HR department entered the ODC to support the JavaScript Network Uniformator (JNU) gang. Since she was an HR, the normal rules did not apply to her and anyway she needed to fulfil her KPIs by successfully intervening in eight issues a quarter. She came in very combative and first, took a photo with the JavaScript Network Uniformator (JNU) gang. Then wrote an email to the PM that how he was supposed to run a software project even though she was no way qualified about it. Lastly, she wrote about this situation in her post on Linkedin title ‘How the PM is driving down Employee Value Proposition in Millennials who are undertaking Digital Transformation for 4th Generation Companies’ and then left after instigating both sides.

 4:00 PM:
Since we were locked in and I was getting a migraine due to hypoglycaemia I thought to go to get a coffee. Two girls who were Computer engineers had blocked the coffee machine. They were on dharna and they wanted the plan of having a list of project members dropped. They said it was a ruse by the project management to discriminate against the Computer engineers and they were not sure how the management would use this data. These were the same girls who shared their fingerprint with Xiaomi, their location with Google, their relatives and baby’s photos with Instagram, their home address with Facebook and the inside of their bathroom with Tik Tok. One of the girls had shared her entire travel history, her parent’s passport numbers and her last 6 month’s bank statement with the UK government when applying for a tourist visa, just to get a photo with red telephone booth. However, she didn’t want to want to share her data with her own project. However, it was not possible to get through them, so defeated I came back to my desk,

5:00 PM:

I was hungry, having a splitting headache and my cubicle was littered with wrappers and Tirupati laddu crumbs. Email forwards and Skype messages were flying in with fake news from both sides. If that wasn’t enough, my computer got super slow again, each click was taking minutes to work and applications were taking ages to load. Frustrated I got up to ask for local IT support. The technician came to my desk and after poking around my computer for 2 minutes, he said the network is jammed. High data volume on the network is causing these latency issues. I asked so what can be done and he shrugged and replied “Nothing. Ye aas paas ke project se ghuspaithiye aa gaye jo pura network barbaad kar rahe hai”. I was surprised at that answer. I asked him but I am having the same problem since a month, the last week you said I just needed to reboot and wait, the week before that you said it was because of neighbouring projects using our bandwidth and the week before that it was because of raahu kaal. How are you suddenly blaming it on ghuspaithiye . He called me an Anti-Project and left.

 6:00 PM:

 At last this hellish day was at an end, it was time for me to go. There was a lot of commotion, the Mechanical Enginers and Computer engineers were at each other’s throats. The development team was blaming testing team for everything and vice versa. With a lot of effort I made way to the exit. But the exit door was again blocked by the PM. “Mitron”, he said “where are you going? The soldiers in Siachen do not leave their posts at 6. Why should you? You should continue your work. The previous PMs ran the project badly for 60 quarters, it will take 120 quarters for me to correct it by making you working longer hours with lesser pay. Anybody who has anything to say at this is an Anti-Project. Bharat Textiles mata kee jai!”. At this point I shouted “Project ke gaddaro ko… Goli maaro saalon ko!” and strangled the PM with my mouse cable. I am sure revisionists 50 version releases down the line will call me a project-bhakt and a true Mechanical Engineer for murdering someone.

I am a honest, sycophanic, workaholic man but my boss still doesn't love me

Dear Abby,


I am an honest and hardworking man, but somehow I am not being recognized in my workplace and my boss totally ignores me. Let me tell you my story and then you can advise what more do I need to do.

It was September 2013, right before my 27th birthday, when I decided that the hair around my temples had sufficiently greyed out to make it as a measure of my dedication to work. I had been grinning and looking sideways at my team member Naveen and his jet black hair for days, slowly working on my conversation starter with my boss that how office stress has prematurely greyed my hair, because I care about my job so much. I rolled in early to office for my birthday to prove that I don’t put my one special day in a year before my work and in fact I was going to work extra-long hours on my birthday. But as soon as I entered, I saw everyone was gathered around Naveen’s desk and there were people on their toes trying to look over other’s shoulder. Worried, I rushed to his desk to see that Naveen was standing there completely bald, apparently that man had lost his hair in the first year of his working and was wearing a wig till now. He proudly proclaimed that his work stress caused Telogen Effluvium, thus total hair loss. He announced pretty loudly that any man or woman working here with hair is not really serious about his job. The boss entered the circle, patted him on his bald head and asked to put that in his yearly achievement, they are looking for more people like him in the senior positions. That year on Diwali late in the night when we were all waiting for someone else to leave first, the email came in, Naveen was being promoted and moving out of team.

Things started looking up when a new guy Satvinder who asked everyone to call him Sandy, was just hired to replace Naveen. That guy was thin, had lots of hair and didn’t understand office politics. That guy definitely would have been chewed and spit out in a few months. But this time I did not want to take any chances, I wanted to clearly look like the harder working of the two. So I started eating only junk food, not doing any exercise and worrying even more. All this work was paying off, I was 13 Kgs overweight and my blood pressure was 145/95. I just wanted it to hit the magic number of 150/100 before starting talking to everyone around and maybe even pin a print out of my BP on my work desk. But that bastard Sandy got lucky first! He had a heart attack and died. Apparently he preferred his butter chicken with extra butter, used to have a samosa every time he went for tea, which was 5 times in a working day, was popping gulab jamun like tic tacs and was worried even more than me to impress the boss. And the boss was clearly impressed; Sandy was mentioned in the quarterly town hall in the young achievers list and was named employee of the year posthumously.

I realized that I cannot cut it in a such a dynamic and high achieving work place so I switched jobs. And as my luck would have it, the new place was even worse. They had what the boss used to call a ‘start up culture’, even though it just meant very long hours and working on weekends and holidays just like my previous office but here they did on standing desks while wearing casual clothes. The place was full of fat twenty-five somethings, we had chai latte instead of tea in our in-house cafe and every week we had to compulsorily do a holistic wellness class after we finish work, which usually meant staying past midnight on Friday.

In one of this wellness class they took away my first bragging point, that Diabetes was genetically passed. After that whenever I talked about it, people very rudely pointed out that my high blood sugar is not something I achieved but passed on to me from my parents. Things got even worse after that, I was used to the old skipping lunch routine or eating at your desk to show that you are saving time. But the new kids were taking it to next level, they would proudly say before lunch that they were going to miss dinner as they were pulling all-nighters or just “crunching” as they would like to call it. One guy even advertised that how he came up with some sort of protein kale quinoa shake, of which if you drink one, it is enough to go through the day without any food, and to top, that no bathroom breaks either. These new kids were even impinging on the long standing gentleman’s code that the last person to leave the office is clearly the hardest worker and thus needs to be valued by the boss. They were now sending emails at 3 AM in the night from their homes, setting up meetings on Sunday morning from their phone’s Outlook and suggesting boss to add everyone in a Whatsapp group so no one can ever be offline.

I would have been glad, if these invasive technologies which let’s work permeate every aspect of our life was the worst thing these new kids brought. But they brought something else, something worse, THE DIVORCE CULTURE! It was a long standing culture of our country that you have to stay with the person you married till death or immolation for dowry does you apart. Every hard working man and woman was ignoring their spouses and kids, this was a given, nobody talked about it, nobody needed a document from a court to prove it.

I still remember that Monday when I was sitting in cafeteria abusing my juniors who had asked for leaves. I had taken out my laptop and fished out the email from my appreciation email folder, where HR had said that 18 out of my 20 leaves are lapsing and had copied my boss. My boss, being my boss had replied “great job team, next year let’s aim for all 20”. As I was looking at my dumb founded sub-ordinates I saw Vijay Prakash or VP as he asked everyone to call him, taking a selfie with an official looking document in his hand. I jeered at him asking if that this was one of those worthless certification and was he going to change his name to PMP VP in his Linkedin profile. He stormed to my table and slammed his divorce file on the table. He challenged the entire crowd in the cafeteria to spend so much time in office that their spouse decides that even going through the Indian legal system and hearing the taunts of Indian society for a lifetime is better than their marriage. Needless to say, VP just had to put “Divorced due to workalholism” in his yearly self-review and he got the highest rating that year.

Abby, time and time again I have tried to show I am the best worker in office by being fat and grey haired, panting when they make you take the stairs in the fire drill, by missing Holi, Diwali and all festivals because of being in office, counting calendar days instead of working days for deadlines, by generally ignoring my family life for years, by sending needless status emails to everyone copying my boss after midnight, never participating in any of team activities, always leaving after the boss, using the latest jargon and lastly being exhausted all the time. But I have failed miserably. What more do I need to do?

Your truly,
Unlucky hard worker.


Dear Unlucky hard worker,

Have you tried to produce good work instead? So you would be judged on that and nothing else.

With love,
Abby


While this is clearly satire. There is nothing funny about the Indian workplace situations. More than 50% people are stressed and 8% people are downright suicidal. Google it if you think I’m exaggerating. There is no study which has shown that stressing people or pressuring them to work harder has resulted in growth. When forced to work longer people will either find ways to kill time in office or take time off later faking sickness or personal emergencies. There is no secret on why so many of us fall sick on Mondays. We (most people in my social group) have started moving to junior management positions, we are in a position to make a change. Don’t follow the sick culture of staying late and working on weekends and don’t make your juniors do it. Don’t mistake having a life outside work as lack of passion for work. Encourage the gym goers. Don’t say shit to freshers like “this is your time to learn, don’t go home so early”, “Where are you going so soon? You don’t even have a family”. Don’t do shitty things like making them wait whole day for an input and they give that at 7 PM and expect them to finish the work the same day. Remember how this shit felt like when you were in their position. Don’t get into the ragging mindset – “It was done to me, so I will do it to others”. That is what child sex abusers do! Remember how you first went abroad and appreciated their work culture? That everyone leaves office at 6 sharp, that no one calls on cellphones for work, that no one expects you to work on weekends? We can have it here in India. Don’t say: “Oh this will never work in India”. It will, the only thing not making it work are the asshole people like us.

Oh yes, the picture above is Flipkart's promotion photo of their sale, where they are proudly displaying that they are going to make their employees sleep on rented uncomfortable mattresses, of course as India has no overtime so probably they are getting nothing out of it. Cheers to India Inc!

ज़िंदगी हिसाब मांगती है

ज़िंदगी की इस भाग दौड़ में
मेरी कलम ठहर सी गयी है।
शब्दों की आंधी जो अंदर थी मेरे ,
धीरे धीरे ठंडी आहों में बदल गयी है।
 
कभी कभी Google Maps से ही ,इस जीवन की राह पूछता हूँ।
Directions तो मैं खुद ढूंढ लूंगा,
उस से सिर्फ जाना कहाँ है ये पूछता हूँ।
 
सुनता हूँ स्तब्ध दोस्तों के जलसो में अब,
तेरा EMI कितना ? तू कितनी Insurance भरता है ?
इन पलो को फिर से रंगीन करने लिए 
क्या कोई Instagram फ़िल्टर लगता है ?
 
दे नहीं पाया आज दिन के १० पल भी बीवी को
शायद कल iPhone X से कमी पूरी कर पाऊं।
१० साल का प्यार १० हज़ार के लिए गिरवी है
उसको बचाने के लिए कौनसा discount coupon लगाऊं?

माँ मेरी भेजे टूलिप्स की तस्वीरें ख़ुशी से
अपने दोस्तों को Facebook पे दिखाती है।
साल मै ५ दिन से ज़यादा मिल नहीं पाती,
ये दुखड़ा न जाने किसे, किस App पे बताती है ? 
 
आज फिर आगे बढ़ने के लिए झूट बोला,
कहीं करी चापलूसी तो किसी को टांग अड़ाई।
आत्मा शायद रोज़ थोड़ी मरती गयी लेकिन,
उसकी दुरुस्ती के लिए कौनसा Fitbit है भाई ? 

ऐसे मिली तरक्की की खबर
अपने बाप को न जाने कैसे सुनाऊंगा।
जिसने हमेशा बोला , बुरा काम न करना
उसको इसके बारे मे Whatsapp तो नहीं कर पाउँगा।
 
हम हाथों में लिए बैठे है चाबियां
अपने पिंजरों की, कोई तो हमको बताएं।
एक जिसके आदी है और दूसरा जो सपना है
उस यात्रा के लिए कोई तो एक Uber मंगवाए 


कुछ चीखें है दबी अंदर, जो पन्ने तक
आने के लिए आज फिर से शराब मांगती है
बोझ समझकर फैंक दिए थे कहीं 
ये आँखें वापस वो अपने ख्वाब मांगती है।  
कहने को नदी की तरह स्वछंद पर फिर भी 
दो किनारो के बीच फंसे, ज़िंदगी आज सैलाब मांगती है।
कितने महंगे पड़े ये चंद सिक्के 
मेरी आत्मा एक Excel में इसका हिसाब मांगती है 

 

The NRI Oath

 

 

I never thought much about NRIs when I was kid, my only experience with them were the Bollywood caricatures like the helpless cousin who needs saving by the street-smartness of the hero or the cartoonish villains in Vishawatama who were plotting something nefarious against my motherland along with some vague ‘Videshi Taakatein’ and lately the spoiled, out of touch with his/her Indian-ness, cigarette smoking, hard drinking, partying brat like in Namaste London or Pardes who needed to be remedied by the hero. My first tryst with an actual NRI was when my uncle returned from Nigeria, which I know now isn’t the hottest of the destinations but still it was pretty exotic to us. He used to buy all us cousins video game cartridges and ice cream and used to have imported whiskey for my dad. He got a bath tub built, got an AC and joked about putting a music system with a speaker in each room when all as had in our homes were those BPL 2-in-1 cassette players. In short he was doing everything right by the…… <drumroll> …… NRI Oath. Something that I didn’t know existed but I had to take myself one after moving to Spain for work. A binding oath they make us swear if we are ever outside India or its territorial waters for more than 182 days in a financial year.

The NRI Oath or just ‘The Oath’ is stricter that Nights watch vows, more sacred than any pinky promise and more lasting than the Wolfpack promise the four guys made on the top of the Caesars Palace hotel on that fateful night in Las Vegas. The Oath compels us (NRIs) to -

Be more Indian outside India then we were ever inside it. In India we always used 26^th January as the day to sleep late and run over to Big Bazaar for discounted shopping. However outside India we need to have get together parties, go to flag hoisting and send each other messages congratulating each other on the Republic day even though we still do not understand its significance. Out here we have to force our children to learn Bharatnatyam and memorize Veds, go extra-ethnic-wear on Diwali and start blog on traditional Indian dishes. We also have to watch documentaries on ancient Indic civilizations and recommend reading ‘A Search in Secret India’ to each other. So in short, none of the things we bothered doing while we were in India, before the Oath compelled us to.

After spending two weeks living in a new country, we have to become an expert on it. We need to have them all figured out and be happy to disburse that advice that to any other NRI who has come to the country one day after us. Ask us (or don’t ask us) and we have the low down for each country – Americans are just stupid consumerists, Germans are cold hearted bastards, Spanish are lazy and Canadians need to develop more industry. All this gyan comes streaming down from people who cannot even speak the local language (except if it’s English) and will be hard pressed to tell you the name of the elected official of their city/state. There is no getting around the obligation of that solemn vow you took.

We need to blame all of our problems in a different country on racism. Got entry refused to a club because you were 7 badly dressed guys? The bouncer has to be racist. A restaurant didn’t let you use the restroom for free? The waitress needs to be proclaimed racist. The bus driver didn’t answer you properly because he did not speak English? Take down his badge number and put it on Facebook how you had a harrowing experience because of racism. But remember to hold on to your wallet tightly if there is Black guy behind you in the subway and never enter those Latino ghettos because that’s where all the drug dealers live. We act like that not because we are idiots, pseudo-racists or never learned to deal with foreigners because we don’t have any in India, it is because and only because of the coercion of the NRI Oath.

Whenever we are in a formal Indian gathering or in an Indian community group on social media, we try to outdo each other on praising India. We say things like India has the oldest civilization, the zero and plastic surgery was invented in India. We had buttons and space ships in the ancient India (serious theory, google Vimanas + Ancient Aliens). We are the biggest democracy and have the second largest army. In fact we all love India so much that none of us want to go back. People back in India are clamoring to get visas to developed countries (and when we use this phrase it automatically means that India is not), people who have visas are trying to get permanent residencies and people who are permanent residents are trying to get their country’s passport. But yet, our country is the greatest, we just don’t want to spoil such a great place by our humble presence. This is the first doctrine of the Oath, love your country, be jingoistic about it, send money to even terrorist organizations in it (Khalistan separation for example, read the Wikipedia Article) but try extra hard to get the citizenship of another country.

We are pro-immigration only till the point that we are through the door. The NRIs who got US citizenship are against people getting more Green Cards and the people who have Green Cards are worried about Indians getting too many H1-B visas because is ruining the job market. The people who have Australia PRs are against more people getting Visa 186. And no NRI in Europe wants to have the Syrian immigrants to be admitted. The real talk between the enlightened, globe-trotting, politically conscious desis in US is always about H1b, premium processing, RFE, Visa denials and nothing else. However, if you ever talk about how Trump coming in as President has reduced onsite opportunities in India and you can see the crowd go wild about how disgusting that it and how immigration is beneficial for every country. All because of the Oath, all because the Oath.

We like to bash Bollywood movies every chance we get. How the song-dance routine is so cheesy, how they don’t have a proper plot and how they are not trying to tackle bold subjects. We always laugh at Salman movies and always make absolutely clear to everyone we meet that we are not amongst those Indians who like his movies. We go on and on about how progressive French cinema is and or actually West End is where the true actors are but the moment the next SRK movie releases we are all ready to drive 100 KMs to see it. Because this what the Oath obliges us to do it.

 

 

 

 

It is absolutely needed for us to buy a 2^nd hand or 3^rd hand Mercedes or Audi as soon as we arrive, because it is much cheaper to buy them there. From there onwards the regulations state that it is needed to get our money’s worth out it as quickly as possible with Facebook and WhatsApp DPs pictures having captions like ‘The man and the machine’, ‘The beauty’ etc. as soon as possible. Before the maintenance and fuel bills start hitting you and you realize that there is a reason the Americans and Europeans buy Toyota Camrys and VW Polos. A special by law also indicates that if you are renting the car between four people then, firstly it has to be a BMW X5 or Jaguar F type convertible and secondly and most importantly all four people need to have a picture taken with them sitting in the driver’s seat. There was an amendment after the Y2K that simply getting a photo taken standing near someone else’s Porsche or Hummer is no longer allowed.

Every time anybody acts in an even the slightest non inclusive manner, we are needed to criticize that. It is required that we hate the fact when the Spaniards switch to Spanish at lunch time in the office even we are sitting with them. We hate ever more when we see the Germans want to have some private conversation in German in a business meeting when we are there. We especially hate it when the English use Cockney slang even in a joke because it just is difficult to understand even though it is English. But the moment one Tamil guys meeting another Tamil guys in a Diwali mela, let’s just say that it not their problem if the rest of the India cannot speak Tamil. And it is absolutely needed to abuse other non-Indians in Hindi in front of them or pass lecherous comments about women, totally oblivious of the fact that 93% of all communication is non-verbal. We are not in the slightest bit having-double-standards-linguicist-twats, it is just the rudiment of the Oath.

 

 

We save all our holidays and money for our annual trip to India, but we do nothing but crib throughout it. “Oh my god this country has so much pollution. Oh my god look at the traffic. Oh my god this country is so dirty. I hate the fact that I have to meet so many relatives here.” We pound our fellow countrymen over the head so much that they know that the next sentence out of our mouth is going to start with “You know in the US/UK/Germany we …..”. Nobody of us talks about the longing for family and familiarity, the alienation, the anxiety, the constant feeling that we are doing something wrong, is everyone secretly and inwardly laughing at us, thinking of us less developed. And none of us especially talks about how much we look forward to this India trip. It is not because we like to be so irritatingly predictive and predictively irritating, it is because the nature of the Oath is so.

3 years in Spain, or what I learned about Happiness, Time and India

 

  

Happiness is a strange thing, for some it is an abstract concept, for some it is a fleeting emotion and for some people like me it is a state of being.

The house in Bangalore

Before I go on, let’s have a small thought experiment. Take one person who has a 2 bedroom apartment in the center of the city, has a car, a maid to do his cleaning and washing, decent enough salary, goes to a fancy pub every weekend, cooks only 5 times a week and eats out the rest of the time and lives with his beautiful wife. Now juxtapose him with another guy, who lives alone in a studio in a suburb, doesn’t have a car but walks everywhere or takes public transport, cooks all 3 meals seven days a week, cleans his own apartment, irons his own clothes, lives in a country where he doesn’t know a single person and cannot speak the language of. Now tell me who amongst these two will be happier?




Since I have asked such a seemingly obvious question, you know it is a trick question. You know the answer is that the second guy is happier, and this is right.

5 days before I
moved to Spain

After moving to Spain

When I was about to move to Spain I was 77 kgs, I ate and drank too much and had difficulty sleeping at night. My job even though a menial one was stressful and I spent more than 13 hours at work if I include the commute. I ended up working on a lot of weekends then bunking a lot of Monday with fake sick leaves. In addition to all this was the stress of getting a visa for Spain. I was miserable with no real reason for it. No financial difficulties, no fledgling business, no cheating girlfriend, no tough boss; really none of usual reasons of unhappiness.








The studio in Madrid

Cut to when I moved to Madrid. I worked 9 hours a day, left early on Fridays, had a half an hour commute. I ran every day, lost the excess 7 kgs and slept like a baby in my tiny apartment. Every day was a new day full of new things, each street that I took was a new discovery. Once I rode public buses in the city aimlessly just to see the city. I took out time to see the sunrise, the sunset and the night sky. I took out time for reading, for writing, for doing all the things that I thought I would do when I will have time.


 

 

The sea view room

Slowly it dawned on me that happiness has nothing to do with material things, on whether you have a car or not, whether you have a small house or a big one, whether you have 46 piece cutlery set or you eat out of the pot. It is something intrinsic. It is something inside you. You and you alone can make yourself happy. It is not dependent on your salary, your spouse, your designation in your job or any of the usual things that people associate happiness with. My most memorable vacation is not when I stayed in a 4 star hotel on Costa del Sol (yes, the place they go in ‘Zindagi na milegi dobara’) with a sea view room and champagne for breakfast. Instead, it a vacation I took in Lisbon where I stayed in a hostel, slept in a bunk bed in a dorm, ate a one Euro ham & cheese sandwich for breakfast and rode the tram to buy a beer to have it on a street bench.



My moving to Spain also made me realize a two other things. One is about time. I travelled a lot, to villages nearby, to a forest close to my house and to every other city that is everyone’s European checklist. When my wife was here a for a month’s vacation we covered Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Switzerland and Ibiza in a month! Because we knew that our time was limited. This sense of urgency, this understanding that this will not last is a great motivator. In my humble opinion that is how life should be lived, with the understanding that it is an ephemeral thing; that we will never be here again, we will never be in the same moment again. Our time here is limited and that is what makes our lives beautiful. When I was in Bangalore I always wanted to go to Bylakuppe, it is small Tibetan settlement around 80 kms from Mysore, I made the plan many time and then cancelled it by saying we can go any time, and of course I never did go there. That is because I always thought I had unlimited time. Don’t most of us do that? We think we can do this any time and we wait for some perfect time for it. When we will have the weekend totally free, when we’ll not be as tired, when we will have a little more money, when the weather is a little better, when all our friends would want to go etc. etc. You know the answer to all these whens is never. There is no better time than right now.

 

These however are not the only thing I realized. I also realized that I should respect us Indians a little more. I used to think we are exceptionally stingy, close-minded, conservative, littering, rapey, racist people. We are not. We Indians like to think we invented a lot of things like Nuclear weapons as Bhramaastra, Airplanes as Vimans, the number 0 and surgery. However racism, crime, poverty are certainly not our inventions. We are just poor, illiterate and a lot us cramped up in a comparatively little country. The Spanish from the 1970s tell stories of how they conserved plastic bags to carry stuff in them and had metal plates. South Koreans did not have any music that was not approved by conservatives until the 1990s. Women get catcalled on the streets even today in Morocco and the women in Brazil still feel unsafe going out in the night they have a female only taxi app called FemiTaxi. And yes, the Filipinos throw a lot of garbage on the streets and pee in the open. The cause of most of our problems boils down to poverty. Since we do not have money we do not have good public schools or dustbins on the street. People cannot afford to build toilets in the house and no restaurant or café will allow them to use the toilet while they are outside. The police is understaffed, underpaid and under equipped to handle the crime. Most people cannot afford to travel outside the country and have never seen how the world is. Vacations are scarce and most people are overworked. Women and men are kept segregated most of their lives because of the crime and our conservative values and this manifests in weird ways. I can go and on but the bottom-line is that we are not inferior in any way, we are just poor and a little behind in the development curve as a society. Once our living standard improves our country will become better.

 

Nine most useless things in the world

 

1.       Airline Announcements

 

Is there anything more useless than the announcement where the Pilot introduces himself and then rambles on “This is your pilot Arjun Chopra, ummmmmmm,  we are flying today to New Delhi, ehhhhhh, we are cruising at 30,000 feet, the temperature outside is 5 degrees below zero, anddddddd….. the skies outside are clear…”. All that goes in my mind that time is “I couldn’t care less about your name, I am not even going to see you. I know where the plane is going, you see I bought the ticket to it. I also do not care about the weather outside, inside I am going to open the fan vent even further because someone farted. And finally it is your problem how the sky is outside. I do not call and tell you how my network speed is when I am working, so I don’t appreciate about information on your working conditions.

 

Imagine if your Auto driver suddenly starts – “This is the Auto driver Ambarish Rangaiah, we are going to your house today, we are currently crawling in a traffic jam at 5 km/hour and for this I am going to charge you 20 Rs. Extra, It is hot, humid and polluted out here …..”. Nothing will drive you to murder faster.

 

2.       Inspirational Messages

 

What is the deal with them? Especially the ones that you receive in Whatsapp with a lame Good Morning tacked on at the end of them. Especially in India. Especially with photos of Sunrises or Flowers or Toddlers in the background. I mean we send more than 100 crore a day, we froze Whatsapp’s servers and Google had to put a special team to find out why so many Android phones in India were suddenly getting full and crashing.

 

What is the use of these messages? Does someone one day get up, see a message on Whatsapp and changes his whole perspective on life? Imagine waking up late, you are still sleepy and worried about the how painful the traffic is going to be now, your boss will crib that you are late, you are given impossible targets for your quarter and then suddenly your phone beeps. it is your Uncle who has sent you a message saying “All Birds find shelter during a rain. But Eagle avoids rain by flying above the Clouds. Good Morning”.  And you go - Eureka! So that is what I was doing wrong till now, instead of worrying about the traffic I should … I don’t know what… Maybe build a Quadricopter which runs on water to fly me to work and also helps me to create clones so I can do my work in time?  Moreover this text is not a text but words as an image with an Eagle or a mountaintop as the background and attributed to a famous person. Because sensible words matter more if they are an image and said by someone famous .

 

And don’t even get me started of the ultimate cowardly act of sending a message starting with “Forwarded as received…”

 

3.       Warning messages

 

I mean the diplomatic warning messages like on a plastic bag which says “This bag is not a toy”. The person who is going to use that as a toy is a two year old, he or she can’t read. It will not matter even it says “This bag is made from radioactive plastic which was previously used to store Anthrax spores” with a skull and crossbones sign on it. The two year old kid is still going to put it on his or her head and run around. It can’t possibly be for the parents either, if they do not understand the difference between a plastic bag that can choke kids and a toy without reading a warning level then they should take the Darwin award and remove themselves from the Gene Pool. And these parents are surely the same people who will disregard warnings of wearing a seatbelt while driving and wearing a helmet while riding, not to talk on the phone while driving, not smoking etc., but when they will see this warning and they will realize how serious it is and safely store away the plastic to recycle.

 

4.       Kitna bada ho gaya hai ye!

 

Isn’t the most useless bromide to lead with? You see a kid after 5 years and you are surprised that he or she has grown up? What were you expecting? For them to grow younger like Benjamin Button? You might as well start with any of the obvious truths like ‘The sun rises from the east’ or ‘Gravity exists’ or ‘I hate my boss’.

This useless sentence is followed by another equally useless sentence “The last time I saw you, you were so little” with a stretched palm measuring arbitrary distance from the ground. It is the exact same things. It like saying “oh you have a new black colored car, how nice” then following it with “the last time I saw you, you did not have a new car and it was red in color”.

 

5.       HR announcement and Town Hall meetings

 

They are like an election rally where people are forcibly sent to listen to stuff they don’t care about, but here you do not get even a biryani/saree/quarter to attend it, just an email from manager saying “Team, let us show high participation in the the Town Hall”. Then you drag yourself from your desk to wherever this is happening and listen to top management ramble on “We are showing very healthy growth in Middle East, we are up by 4%... blah blah blah …. Customer are giving very good feedback about .. blah blah blah… We need to invest more in Blockchain technology / Sustainable Buildings / Smart Cars / <Insert your Industry’s buzzword here> …. We are setting up new Champions / Intrapreneurs  / Agents of change / who will prepare our new go-to-market kill chain to amplify our return on relationship with our strategic customers (which basically means that some guy will do a lot of foreign travel on company’s money and come back with un-implementable plan)”

 

If you are not bored to tears till this point, then HR will take the stage and start “Guys, we have this initiative S.H.I.K.S.H.A or Strategic High Impact Knowledge Study on Human Aspirations. Mails have been shot out (because just sending emails is not good enough) to everyone, please finish the survey asap”. But you already zoned out and are checking Facebook on your phone and make a mental note of Shift+Deleting of this email when you see it.

 

6.       Photos of Housing Projects

 

You have seen them, haven’t you? And they always are the same - A tall, good looking man with his arm around his wife and sipping his tea with another hand, standing on his balcony from the top floor of the building, looking at the sunrise. This man is content, proud and impossibly young to afford a house of 1.3 crores + registration + tax + parking + higher floor surcharge + common space deposit + Preferential Locality Charge + brokerage + Interiors. And if this is not bad enough they slap on the most useless tagline on it – YOUR DREAM HOME.

 

Fuck this. My dream home is not a 2 bedroom, 950 square feet house which is 2 hour out of the city. My dream home is 60 room mansion has a view of the sea from one side, Times Square on one side, Alps on one side and one side has a view of my pool where porn stars are sunbathing topless.

 

If it was honest advertising they would write that this is the only house you can afford, that too barely by giving up all your savings, taking money from your parents and being neck deep in EMI for the next 20 years of your life. This balcony that you see in the ad will only be used twice in the day, once when you hang your wet towel and once when you come to put your clothes for drying. The only view you will see is other’s laundry drying or under construction buildings. You will never have time to sip tea with your wife because both of you will be working your ass off to pay the EMIs. Your kid will be in school till 4, then do homework, then have tuitions, the 1 hour of play time on his tablet; the play area and jungle gym will all go to waste, the club area will be hoarded by someone or the other having some religious functions and if office politics wasn’t enough you’ll have housing society politics.

 

7.       12 month gym membership

 

For once people should be realistic. These are the same people who want to try 5 different flavors of before buying ice-cream, want a free sample of shampoo before trying it, spray every deo bottle in the store before buying their usual brand. But for an activity which requires 2 hours of time per day, which is punishing, physically and mentally challenging, which requires a commitment of entire year and they have never ever done it successfully for their entire life; people are ready to dole out 20,000 Rs. Upfront.

 

Of course the gyms know it, one third of the 12 month members who take it as a new year resolutionists drop within the 1^st month, only 15% of all members in the gym come regularly. However this does not stop the gyms from putting the entire newspaper full of ads in January. Because they know the people who have difficultly controlling themselves in front of Gulab Jamun, pastries and onion bhajji will lap up their bullshit as well.

 

8.       Goa Plans

 

I don’t think this one requires any explanation. Just recollect your last conversation on a whatsapp group of your school or college friends when one of them was too drunk –

 

Drunk Bro - Bro, let’s all meet up once bro. It’s been so long since we’ve all met

The admin of the group - Yeah bro, we should definitely meet

Enthu Pataka of the group – Bol bhaai. Kab milna hai?

Drunk Bro – Bhaai jab tu bole. Bata kahan aana hai, bhaai haazir ho jayega

Bro 4 – Yeah man we should all meet at least once.

Admin – Let’s meet in Goa for new years, half way for everyone (Changes name of the group to Goa Plan 2018 with a bikini emoji)

Drunk Bro – Go Goa! (fifteen emojis with thumbs up, beer, beach , bikini, and various smileys in a jumbled manner)

Bro 4 – Oh Sorry Bro, December is little difficult for me, in laws would be here.

Enthu Bro – Oh Shit! December is year-end closing time in office, won’t be able to get leaves.

 

And then the entire plan goes down the drain

 

9.       Listicles like this

 

I think the only use they are is to prove that the author has no understanding of prose and structure and definitely no imagination at all

 

The idiot's guide to be a feminist

 

Feminism is THE Fad right now, just like patriotism was in the 1999. Whatever you want to sell; be it cooking oil, deodorant or yourself, this is THE bandwagon you want to jump on.
So do you generally like females and want to put this liking into a moneymaker? Or you like boys instead but since the women have never harmed you, you want to help them out? Or since your friends are already against animal cruelty, gun violence, genetically modified crops and Hitler, you want to have your own topic where you can passionately berate the whole world for? Or you just an attention commercial sex worker (we do not use the word ‘whore’ now)? Then read right on because even if you thought till now that the glass ceiling is just the roof of a Greenhouse this blog will make you the uber feminist who can run circles around Angelina Jolie.

See the first thing you need is a Tumblr account for a blog, not Wordpress or Blogpost but Tumblr. It is the holy ground where all Feminists congregate, the last bastion of the pure world which is not polluted by misogynistic pigs with their catcalls, rape threats and acid attacks. Then you need a name for it, a name has to be something powerful which screams out that you will not take the oppression of the patriarchy anymore, in fact you will take the very thing they shamed you with and wear it proudly like a gilded armor. That is where the names like Menstruating Minstrel or Voluble Vulva come in. Or you can go with something panglossian like ‘Girl Boss’ or ‘Women on top of the whole wide world while everyone else is like way down’ as well. Of course something masculinist of this type would be totally absurd, for example Penis Soliloquy can only be an adult cartoon strip and a name like Speaking Scrotum would be just plain offensive.

Now that you have decided upon the name you need something to talk about. It has to be something everyone can relate to, so keep it an everyday topic and explain how it is actually a conspiracy of evil men. Something like: How using the word Friendzone propagates rape culture or how older relatives wanting hugs is equal to rape. Ok maybe not those two, since they are already taken. But there are plenty of topics out there, like how the name ball point pens is sexist and how feminists will call them ovary point pens henceforth. Or how the iOS development is funded by men because it only has Silent mode but no PMS mode. Or how the umbrella is made phallus like by men and a gender neutral umbrella would be perfectly horizontal when open. Perhaps you can quote specific instances of your life, for example the last time you saw a shitfaced girl in a bar and all her male friends asked her not to drive and take a taxi, which is incredibly patriarchal of them, to assume she will not be able to drive at night.

However just these opinions and point of views will not last a long time. So you have to support causes, causes can be anything related to women. One favorite cause of a group of feminists was to support Hillary Clinton, and she was to be supported because she was a woman. Anybody who objected to the point that supporting her just because she is a woman is actually sexism was straightway termed misogynist, anti-feminist and a woman enslaver. That was a fun group, more power to them! Then there causes like giving higher stars to Sushmita Sen movies on IMDB because she is a strong independent woman and needs encouragement. Or asking for equal representations in colleges and workforce and protesting every institution which does not have 50% women. However care has to be taken so as not be grouped with people asking for OBC reservation in colleges or SC/ST reservations in private jobs, because those people are stupid, casteist and do not understand that these positions should be filled with merit as they currently are. You can also twist innocent statements into anti-women messages: Movie star thanked his father in the award speech? Why? He doesn’t love his mother more who gave him birth? Must be anti-woman. On asking for opinion a guy says that his girlfriend’s hair is too short? Round up the posse and get that girl to break up from that guy at once, because he is a control freak who is body shaming his girlfriend and taking away her control over her own body. You can go on and on like that

And then you have your basic outrage, the meat and potatoes of every true feminist. Feminists are supposed to vociferous about any crime committed against women. All rapists, child molesters, abusive husbands and boyfriends, dowry harassers should be skinned alive, their genitals cut and fried in a pan, then torn limb to limb and their insides left to rot in the open. Because these people do not belong to a civilized society like ours and have no humanity in them. Lesser crimes than these against women should at least carry the death penalty to act as a deterrent to men and push them to commit more benign crimes like murder. Spend some time on smaller outrages as well, like sharing photo of guys on social media accused of catcalling or molesting without any fact checking. Applauding women who beat the men who were harassing them because violence from women on men is totally ok and not double standards at all. Another good example is sharing photos with the message “This man/woman was seen carrying this baby but the baby does not look like his/hers”, don’t worry about the moral implication, judging someone based on their looks or clothes is totally ok till it the look is without makeup and the clothes are not fashionable. Brand anyone asking questions about a woman’s allegation as performing moral policing or victim blaming. The list is long but you’ll soon get the hang of it.

Finally it is the positivity messages and a show of how proud you are to be a woman, which is nothing like being proud of something else you are just born with. So you gotta post all your photos on with captions like ‘Girl power’, ‘Woman on top’, ‘Girl boss’ or ‘Proud to be a mother/sister/daughter’. And keep a lookout for those groups of guys having ‘Cool Boys’ stickers on their cars or stuff like that, because those men were not raised right by their parents.

Keep going like that and soon you’ll be a feminist with a capital F, a celebrity and a well respected member of the society, life of every party and envy of all your friends. Your Tumblr hits and reblogs will be in millions, people will queue outside your door to know your opinion about what to do with armpit hair, what movies to see, which words to use and how to raise their kids right. All by just following the above easy five points! You are welcome!
 

P.S. – As the above text suggest I am not a feminist. However I am also not a sexist. I believe in equal opportunities for everyone and in everything. Feminism must be about equal opportunities and not woman first, keep it sensible. And watch out for fakers.