Tender is the night

I wish I there was this one grand love in everybody's life and everyone ended with their one, their soulmate, but alas it doesn't happen.

Love's labour been lost many a time. I left some, some left me, some didn't know I loved them, some never told me they did.

I almost wish it made me a stoic, astute, non believer but unfortunately i'm still a romantic a heart. And I can only wish for them that wherever they are, whether they will ever read this, whether they still like me or despise me they find love. The kind that lasts.

I have got nothing better to do than stay up and think about this. And act upon my Momentary lapse of reason. But I hope you are sleeping well my loves.

Tender is the night and fleetingly soothing is your strain,
But fly away o nightingale for this moon deserves your flame.
Heavy would be my heart and damp my eye for away you I send,
But for my soul I wish it saw one love reach its end.

Professional Talk

Warning: If you are a girl reading this you should stop right here. And in case you still want to read on further, FYI every guy you know, yes every guy talks like this so don’t judge us or be offended.

And it is not supposed to make any sense to the people who are not acquainted with these industries.

How bankers talk about a girl –

1st Banker : "Dekh kya mast case hai !!"

2nd Banker : "Case to mast hai bhai, pitch kar, may be client maan

jaye"

1st Banker : "Yaar bada high CIBIL score hai iska, kahi se to

iski limits chal rahi hogi"

2nd Banker : "To kya hua, take over kar le, nahi to multiple banking

mae karte hai"

3rd Banker : "Is case ki baat kar rahe ho, ye to already multiple

banking mai hai, maine bhi CAM dala tha last year par thuk gya tha"

3rd Banker :"Par suna hai multiple banking mai hai and dono banks

pari passu bhi share karte hai"

1st Banker : "Kya baat kar raha hai ? pari passu share karte hai ?"

2nd Banker : "Mai to subservient charge pe karne ko tayaar hun

case, client maane to"

2nd Banker :"Topline to dekh, kitni fadu hai"

1st Banker : "Saale meri to bottomline dekh ke hil gyi"

2nd Banker: “Bhaai bas ek baar balance sheet closely analyse karne ko mil jaaye, for to aisi pitch dunga kee client dauda chala aayega mere pass. Khud to kya apne doston ka bhi case leke chala aayega”

1st Banker: Ek baar client maan jaye fir to bottomline mae aisa cash insertion karunga kee bottomline double ho jayegi

2nd Banker – Main to topline mae insertion karunga, bottomline aise hee sudhar jayegi.

How IT people talk about a girl –

1st Guy - Woh dekh kya sahi project hai

2nd Guy - Haan kaafi bada project lagta hai

1st Guy - Haan par uska implementation ho chuka hai. Main to sirf uske support ke

liye try kar raha hoon...

2nd Guy - Bhai tu toh already ek project hai. Main bench pe hoon, mujhe try maarne

de.

1st Guy - Bhai saab, maine system down time daal daal ke uss project ke baare mein

research kiya hai.

2nd Guy - Toh dost kuch KT toh de.

1st Guy - Yaar uska implementation IBM mein hi ho gaya tha. Yahan support chal

raha hai 2 saal se...

2nd Guy - Yaar ye IBM se bahut sahi projects aate hain. Configuration toh error

free hota hi hai, servers bhi bade hote hain.

1st Guy - Sahi bola... Kaafi load le lete hain...

2nd Guy - Aur bata...

1st Guy - IBM mein medium sized project tha yeh... infy mein itne customizations

hue ki itna bada project ho gaya hai. Sab jaana chahte hai isme...

2nd Guy - Ye baat. Onsite opportunities kya hain...

1st Guy - Maine suna hai kee pehle 2-3 months offshore hee rehna padta hai. Uske baad performance pe aur client requirement pe depend karta hai kab onsite jaane ka mauka mile..

2nd Guy - Kitne log jaa chuke hain onsite..

1st Guy – Yaar ye to pata nahi

(third person arrives)

3rd Guy - Kiski baat kar rahe ho...

1st Guy - Yaar tu uss bade project ko jaanta hai??

3rd Guy – Abey usko kaun nahi jaanta. Main khus uss project mein kaam kar chuka

hoon.

2nd Guy - Har doosra aadmi yehi bolta hai. Proof kya hai??

3rd Guy - Yaar main uss project ke DL mae bhi hoon. Le outlook check kar le.

1st Guy & 2nd Guy - Oh behn di... kab kaam kiya tha tune uss project pe.

3rd Guy - Bhai 1 saal pehle tha... tab itna bada nahi tha project... par newly

implemented project pe kaam karne kaa bhi alag mazza hai.

- shuru shuru mein bahut bugs the... saalon ko nikaal nikaal ke thak gaya...

weekends pe baith baith ke regression test karta tha...

- 4 mahine baad mujhe onsite jaane ka indication mila.. Maine fatafat

multiple entry visa ka intezaam kar liya. Bhaiyon main onsite toh pehle bhi gaya hoon lekin is project ke toh mazze hi alag the...

2nd Guy - Yaar main kabhi onsite gaya hi nahi hoon... Hamesha bench pe hi marayi

hai... E-learning se hi kaam chalana padhta tha...

3rd Guy - Bhai phir toh tera iss project mein chance hi nahi hai. Iss project

mein ghussne ke liye prior project experience ke saath saath domain

expertise bhi zaroori hai.

1st Guy - Teri expertise kis cheez mein hai..

3rd Guy - Background jobs..

1st Guy - yaar woh toh execute karna mushkil hi hai...

3rd Guy – Haan main bhi isiliye seekh paaya kyunki mera pehla project bahut puraana tha aur usme background jobs ka hi kaam baaki tha...

2nd Guy – Paar aao to 1 saal se implementation project mae ho.

3rd Guy – Abey asli learning support mae hai, implementation mae nahi, wahan to puri zindagi ek kee project mae kat jaati hai. Support ka kaam badhiya hai. 3 – 4 mahine tak support karo fir chod do, aur gooda hai to ek time mae multiple projects support kar sakte ho

3rd Guy to 2nd Guy – Lekin tu bata, tu aaj tak bina project ke hai?? College wollege mae bhi nahi?

2nd Guy - Haan sir... Main U.P. TECH university ka mechanical engg hoon.. Wahan

toh aap jaante hi ho kitne ghatiya internal projects hote hai... Aur ab

yahan bpm waalon jaisi haalat ho gayi hai, project hi nahi milte...

1st Guy - Isiliye bolta tha chutiye bangalore mein engg kar.. Wahan badhiya

projects bhi hote hai aur exposure bhi bahut milta hai...

3rd Guy - Rehne de, tu toh hamesha buffer hi raha hai saare projects mein...

1st Guy - Bhai buffer mein rehne ka alag hi mazza hai.. Easy tickets hi assign

hote hai fatafat kaam karo aur ghar jao... Billable nahi hoon toh apni poori

aish chalti hai... Project mein billable hone ke matlab, time pe aao time pe

jao, aur buffer hone ka matlab khulla nahao khulla khao..

3rd Guy - Yaar woh toh hai

2nd to 3rd Guy – Accha sir lekin fir aap is project se release kaise hue?

3rd Guy - Iss project se release main apni hi galtiyon ki wajah

se hua tha.

2nd Guy - kya hua tha???

3rd Guy - Yaar main itna bore ho gaya tha.. Onsite bhi ek se hi tickets milte the,

main der se jaake jaldi swipe out kar deta tha. Finally mujhe kharab

performance ki wajah se 3 hafte offshore rakha aur phir project se release

kar diya. Ye hi nahi CRR 3 aur de diya, saala company mae aur projects tak milne ke waande ho

gaye the

2nd Guy – Kya ? CRR 3 aur release bhi ? Hahahahha, Aapka toh double ka meetha ho gaya!!!

3rd Guy – Bhai dusro ke phate mein taang mat ada. Kasam se 8 mahine tak e learning hi

karta raha. Saare course kar dale, reading wale, video waale, interactive

waale, animated waale.. 1 saal pehle hi ek ghatiya domestic project mila

hai, tu toh jaanta hi hai bangalore ke local projects kitne ghatiya hote

hai. Implementation ka wo bhi. Par maine fir bhi le liya, bench pe hone se to kuch bhi better hai.

2nd Guy – Haan sir, mujhe toh koi bhi project mil jaye, set ho lunga. Mujhe toh waise hi

project experience nahi hai. Coding, testing, debugging sab kar daalunga.. Abhi toh apni kismat apne hi haath mein hai..

How Automobile Salesman talk about a girl –

1st Guy – Boss ye kaunsa model aaya hai market mae?

2nd Guy – Naya model hai, BMW 352535. Abhi launch hua hai is market mae

1st Guy – Kya fender hai aur spoiler bhi ekdum sahi hai.

2nd Guy – Arey interior bhi utna hee sahi hai, batate hai andar pink upholstery hai, aur dials kee to baat hee mat kar

1st Guy – Naya model hai ekdum? Yaar jiski ek prerelease testing kari hogi to zindagi ban gayi hogi

2nd Guy – Sahi hai, testing track pe naya model daudane ka maza hee kuch aur hai.

1st Guy – Top end model lag raha hai ekdum, price kya hai iska?

2nd Guy – Abhi tak company ne price to release nahi kiya lekin suna hai kaafi high hai

1st Guy – Koi baat nahi, iske liye to koi bhi price zyada nahi hai. Market mae kya report hai?

2nd Guy – Abey mere ek dost ne iski test ride lee hai, ek hafte tak khada raha tha uska

1st Guy – Company ab bhi de rahi hai kya test ride?

2nd Guy – Haan de to rahi hai lekin saale ye koi Maruti 800 nahi hai kee ghuse showroom mae aur test ride le lee. Luxury car hai, sirf aukaat walo ko hee test ride milti hai

1st Guy – Luxury ke saath saath agar performance bhi ho to fir kya baat hai.

2nd Guy – Performance kee to baat mat kar, mera dost bata raha tha kee 0 – 100 in under 6 seconds, aur top speed pe to tu sambhal hee nahi sakta gaadi ko.

1st Guy – O teri Bhen dee! Safety bhi hai kee nahi koi gaadi mae.

2nd Guy – Factory fitted twin airbags hai, aur kya chahiye?

1st Guy – Yaar bonnet nahi khulwa sakte warna ek baar main iska engine dekhna chahta huun.

2nd Guy – Arey wo to mere dost nae dekha tha, bol raha the ekdum high quality german engine hai.

1st Guy – Kya baat hai! Aur maintenance?

2nd Guy – Ab yaar aisi gaadiyon ka maintenance to high hee hoti hai. Aur petrol bhi bahut peeti hai. Aur wo bhi sirf Speed, normal petrol daalne kee try mat karna isme?

1st Guy – Tu petrol ka load na le, ye samajh kee khud ha hee pump hai. Full tank karayenge aur khuub daudayenge.

2nd Guy – Aur haan cylinder ekdum tight hai, piston daalne se pehle engine oil khub hona chahiye, agar theek se lubriucation nahi hua to engine seize ho jayega

1st Guy – Bhenchod agar ye engine seize to to kahin ka nahi rahunga.

2nd Guy – Haan aur gaadi ka dhyan bhi rakhna padega, wash din mae kam se kam 2 baar.

1st Guy – Arey ye gaadi to main apne haath se wash karna pasand karunga. Kisi ka haath nahi lagane dunga

2nd Guy – Haan dhyan to rakhna padega, abhi mere ek dost nae aisi hee gaadi lee thee lekin chutiye nae driver rakh liya

1st Guy – Fir?

2nd Guy – Fir kya? Driver nae bahut daudayi gaadi aur fir 5 mahine jab suspension baith gaya to naukri chod ke kahi aur chala gaya

1st Guy – Kya 5 mahine mae hee suspension baith gaya?

2nd Guy – Rough handling karta hoga saala, aur fir ye Luxury car hai koi SUV nahi kee Ghaziabad kee sadkon pe dauda rahe ho 90 kee speed mae. Smooth road pe chalaoge to bhagegi smoothly ekdum

1st Guy – Bas bhaai bahut bol diya hai. Kitna bhi finance lena pade baahar se lekin ye gaadi to hona!

2nd Guy – Sahi hai bas jab baahar jaaye to mere pass chod dena kuch din chalane ke liye.

Post Credited to Amit Khanna, Akshat Govila and Myself in that order.

Comment to tell which one you liked the most

Dhobi Ghat

There are multiple reviews out there, most by professional who can do a better job than I can, so I’ll not get into the normal review mode and start with how Kiran Rao’s debut venture is a story of 5 characters, Munna, Shai, Arun, Yasmin and Mumbai. Or how she has captured the ethereal Mumbai and the strive by the characters for their lebensraum in the maximum city or something to that accord.

It’ll get its critical acclaim, a big opening it has already got, but I don’t think it will appeal much to the average viewer who gets satiated by movies like Dabanng and Robot. At this point I wish I could call this movie path breaking or a masterpiece or anything of that sort but I can’t.

It’s like the black & white photographs in the movie by Jyotika Jain which just exist. So is the movie and the three characters, the movie can be a called a character study but doesn’t hold any narrative in the traditional sense. For me a movie is like a painting and book combined, while it must tell a story which is gripping it should also have a visual beauty. Visual Beauty doesn’t mean pretty landscapes or women getting out of sea in bikinis, it should have some art in what you are filming. I take movie watching seriously because I think the movie makers took their job seriously but through this movie my and other audiences mind wandered off many times. The metaphors and tributes in the film are many, some real some just imagined by the critics. I am afraid this might become a movie which many people will pretend to like because the critics are saying so, a set of emperor’s new clothes so to speak.

The movie captures many of Bombay’s famous landmarks and places which have become clichés now. It doesn’t seem captured by a neutral by stander but more by someone like Shai (Monica Dogra) who has come from America and like all tourists only wants to capture the poor, backward, worn down part of the city. Most of the action takes place around Mohd. Ali Road, Dhobi Ghat, some slum and other such parts. The other part of Mumbai has just been casually referenced. It could be fascinating for some people but for the average Indian (I included) have seen several such scenes in their life and the beauty of it, if any, is lost to them. They can’t relate to the fascination or curiosity towards it by Kiran Rao.

But still the movie has its moments, for me the most endearing is the part played Yasmin (Kirti Malhotra), the lonely new bride who only talks to the audience through the video tapes played by Arun (Aamir Khan), she is excited and fascinated by moving in the big city but also longs for her family and her past. She keeps a brave face till the very end when she realizes that her husband is having an affair and commits suicide. The scene where Arun realizes that what had happened to this house and runs out scared is the really the most memorable one.

Shai plays the part of NRI staying in the US and back to India on a Sabbatical to capture Bombay on her digital camera. A luxury only the rich Americans can afford. And she plays the role of someone like that pretty well. Obsessed by the reclusive painter Arun, fascinated by old part of the city, the washerboy, wants to capture his daily routine like delivering clothes on film. As much as she offers the Dhobi tea at her house and gives the better mug to him she still doesn’t think of him as her equal. Like anybody like her will do in real life. So she says hi to him when in the multiplex but hides from him while buying drugs, he takes her around to his part of the town but she never takes him to her part of town, her world.

Munna wants to be what film makers think that every guy in Bombay with half decent looks wants to be, an Actor, that if doesn’t want to be a gangster first. And while he falls for her he keeps his sanity and doesn’t tell her that, because he knows that ‘they’ are never gonna happen. I don’t think you would have seen this movie of Manoj Bajpai called ‘Dil pe mat le yaar’. Manoj Bajpai plays a mechanic who is very honest in his job and a little too naïve for his own good. Tabu plays a journalist who does a story on him and thinks of him exactly like that, subject matter of a story. He on the other hand misreads the whole thing and arrives drunk to her house to profess his love to her. Of course he is turned down and Tabu utters the line “Men. You get friendly to them and they think all you want is to sleep with them”. Quite parallel to this scenario.

All the actors have played or rather under played their roles quite well and the background score by Gustavo Santaolalla's is quite good too. Aamir Khan tries hard not to misfit in the role of a painter which is reminiscent of his last role as a painter from ‘Taare Zameen Pe’ but he does spoil the look of Indie film sometimes. All in all I think I will watch the movie again to see something which I might have missed the first time but I would still say if you that if you want to see the real Mumbai go take a walk in the city. Probably you will find out more about the city in those 95 minutes. There are better movies out there who talk of alienation, love and longing in Bombay.

Waah, Double ka meetha

A lot many things came out of the last year, my first (legally earned) pay included. Whatever illegal stuff I have done is a matter of another post, for now I will keep it short and sweet.

This is about the words which ran for the ‘word of the year’ and the first prize goes to –

1. Waah –The universal word to show surprise, anger, appreciation, sarcasm, enquiry and ridicule. And could be uttered with or without voice modulation. It can mean Bravo, Right, Really?, Very good to lot of other things, the possibilities are practically limitless. Though the original inventor and the source of the word was Mr. Karan Madhogaria but it was two great roommates of his Akshat and Yours truly who caught and really ran with it, thus making the word legendary. Mayank Sharma tried to imitate ‘Waah’ but him being himself could not imitate and thus gave birth to the ‘Waah (Without voice modulation)’.

So now if you hear it from us or read it on FB then you would know what it is.

2. Double ka meetha –Though ‘Waah’ got the first prize, this was the most innovative word of the year and it came out nearly towards the very end. This phrase taken from a type of Hyderabadi Dessert (made of bread = DOUBLE roti, milk and ghee) came out to mean something which had no words for it till now.

It was when a guy (not me) got BPM in Chennai in the allocations in Infy, the least desired stream in the least desired location that Akshat uttered this phrase –“Yaar iska to double ka meetha ho gaya”

From then the phrase caught on between the three of us (I, Vipul and Akshat) and now I am trying to spread the innovation. I have even uploaded it on Urban Dictionary. The phrase describes getting a double serving of bad luck or one disaster right after another.

Example : Guy 1 –Yaar ladki milne bhi nahi aayi aur ate hue gaadi ka tyre bhi puncture ho gaya
Guy 2 –Ha ha ha ha …. Abey tera to double ka meetha ho gaya ….

So now you know. More later. Adios

Water Baby - Part 2

Arnab closed his eyes and shook his head trying to wake up again, “this must be a dream”, he thought. His mind screamed that this is not possible but the evidence in front of him didn’t leave much scope for argument. The pictures were a wide angle shot and the girl with the medal in the picture was wearing a full body Speedo swimming suit covering everything except her face, it was really difficult to tell if she could be his mother 25 years back.

He tried to find out more things from the pictures and the artifacts but after a while it was not possible to know more. In a rage he went up to his mother’s room and started pounding her door, after 5 minutes of beating the door she opened the door sleepy-eyed and asked “What happened Arnab ? Is everything ok?” “No” replied Arnab, “Can you explain this?” he raised the photo frame to her mother’s face. She was horrified and snatched it away from him “this is nothing and where did you find this? Stop meddling with my stuff!” she screamed. “Is that you in the picture? Were you a swimmer? And who is the guy with you? Is he my dad?” Arnab screamed back. “He is no one, forget about the pictures, they are not mine and go to sleep. They mean nothing to me!” saying this she pushed Arnab back and closed the door on his face. Now Arnab knew where he got his hard-headedness from, furious he stormed out of his home and started walking, sub consciously his steps turned towards his lab, when he was almost there at the Applied Physics department he realized that he had unknowingly walked towards his ‘alone’ place, his lab. Not knowing what to do he walked up to his familiar security guard who always used to be there in the night and said he had forgot his ID card at home and asked him to open the lab from his security card. He happily obliged him by swiping his card at the entry and unlocking all modules of the facility for him. He smiled and asked him to enter “Go in Babu, I think today you will discover something very big”. Arnab looked up at him in bewilderment and said thanks and entered the lab. He went in to his module and tried to do some work to get his mind off the events that just unfolded but it was futile, the same questions kept coming back to him again and again.

“Was my father in the picture? Who was he, what was he like? Why did he leave my mother? Was my mother a star swimmer? The same woman who never even entered a bath tub and never let me in too.” He had no answer, he felt cheated, let down, abandoned, like the whole universe had conspired against him, today he felt like an insignificant tiny speck in this universe whose powers influenced him but he had no influence over the Universe. Frustrated he put his face on the table and muttered to himself “The only way to find out anything for me is to go back in the past”. And then it hit him like a ton of bricks!

He sprang up and from his table and ran towards the Taurine vending machine, he needed to sober up fast and think straight. What he thought could be done, thanks to his colleagues’ recent discovery of tachyons and ability to accelerate particles to superluminal speeds through use of low energy particle accelerators and his work on teleportation.

If matter could be moved along the three Euclidean Dimensions, that is through space and It could be very well be moved along the fourth dimension as well, that is time. All he needed to do was accelerate the constituent molecules beyond the speed of light at which they started moving backwards in time, along with the information as electricity in the wires which were also accelerated superluminally to carry that information back in time too, all he needed was to hook up his teleportation equipments with the particle accelerator team’s Tachyon producing machine and use both their computing powers to map the process, of course the calculations would take up a lot of time, but for what he was doing ‘time’ was not an issue at all. The final ingredient in this recipe was stupidity, there was no other word for what he was doing, for the subject of the first ever time travel experiment was he himself.

He ran back and forth between the two laboratories and used the resources seamlessly thanks to the ‘All Access’ security clearance given to him by the security guard for tonight. Thankfully there was no one in the whole facility as everyone was tired of the celebrations and the work earlier in the day. There were two major difficulties in his plan, he could only travel back to the time when the first working Teleporter was invented as he needed a working Teleporter to teleport out, also he had no way of coming back as the technology to make a time jump did not exist back then. The first thing he was overcoming by going back to the very next day the Teleporter was invented in this very lab and he had mixed feeling about the second, the knowledge that he had now would surely make him win a Nobel Prize back then. But all in all he wasn’t bothered about all that too much, he wanted to go back find out answers to his questions, and why his life was like this. Trembling but fixated he went into the Teleporter after making all the necessary arrangements and then everything went black.

He regained consciousness and walked out of a box which had lot of wires and tubes coming into it. He looked around, it was surely not his lab so his experiment had succeeded, but whether he was in 2013 or not he needed to find out. But currently he needed to get out of the lab fast as he could be easily be mistaken to be an intruder, he had no ID or papers of the current time to prove his identity. Luckily he slipped out without raising an alarm. Everything around was different, like set of some period movie, it was night and it was difficult to make out if this was the same MIT campus, thankfully the lay out was same and he knew which way was out. He took the same way as he usually took and thought about searching for something familiar after he got out.

He was walking by the MIT swimming pool lost in his thoughts when suddenly he heard a scream, a woman’s scream. He looked around to see a woman splashing in the pool violently, maybe she was drowning. He ran over to the edge of the pool and saw a woman splashing hysterically, holding one edge of the pool with one hand and trying to reach something. He realized what was ‘the something’, there was no time to think and he jumped in the pool to save it, ‘the something’ was a 4 year old boy drowning. He took hold of the boy and swam to the side, he put out the kid to the side and got out panting, the woman limped to the boy. The boy was alright whereas the woman was crying as she hugged the boy and kissed him hysterically. Arnab was surprised he could swim, that too effortlessly, he was reeling in this discovery when the woman came up and spoke to him.

“Thank you very much … You saved my son’s life, I …. I was teaching him to swim and then suddenly I had a cramp in my leg and I started drowning, I caught hold of the side but I lost him… If you wouldn’t have saved him then I don’t know what would have …..” And she turned and hugged the boy again.

She had a slight accent probably she was from the Indian Sub Continent as well; “You are welcome. I am glad I could help” he said feeling slightly nauseated. “I am sorry to ask this but what were you doing with a small kid alone at this time of the night?”

“I am a swimmer, I am in the MIT swimming team, I stay alone so I have to bring my son along too when I practice, he is just 4 years old. I was just teaching him for some time too, you see he is such a natural, he took to it like a fish to water” she said. “But today I suddenly got a cramp and I couldn’t move my leg and …. Thank god you were here. Are you a Grad Student here as well? You look like an Indian too, but I haven’t seen you in any of the Indian club meets”

“No I am a researcher here in the applied physics department; I was just getting out of my lab when I saw you people”

“Oh ok, my name is Jhoomur …. Jhoomur Ghosh.” She outstretched her hand saying this and Arnab took a step back stupefied as it sunk in who this woman really was. “Your nose is bleeding. Are you alright? What’s wrong?” she added. Arnab turned around and ran from there.

He kept running, his vision was becoming blurry and he was feeling more and more nauseated, he threw up in a trash can and then passed out. He woke up in the Infirmary with all kinds of vitals sensing equipment plugged into him. He looked around for the call bell and pressed it, within a minute a doctor appeared. “How are you feeling now… Mr Arnab , if that is indeed your name” he asked him.

“Yes I am a little better, what happened to me? And yes my name is Arnab, but how do you know that?”

“You were found passed out in the university campus yesterday, a group of students brought you here, we went through you driving license and other ID, but we couldn’t find any Arnab Ghosh either in the DMV or MIT’s database, officially you are still listed as a ‘John Doe’. And as to what happened to you, I think you would know, it is final stages of radiation poisoning”

“What ? Radiation poisoning? But I didn’t work with any hazardous material; I am just a teleportation researcher! I … I …” his voice trailed as he realized what might have happened.

“Yes radiation poisoning, you are a very severe case of ARS, acute radiation syndrome, I have never seen any case like that, it is like you got radiation inside of you, every cell in the body is affected, we thought you would know. Nobody this severely affected would have gone without symptoms, we thought you knew”

Arnab started feeling blurry again “Yes I knew, I just got confused, maybe it’s a symptom of radiation sickness. Is there anything which can be done?”

“Well yes, we can give you some pills which will ease your pain for some time, you can be admitted here or some other hospice and they will take care of you in your final hours. But apart from that you must know that there is no cure for this thing. Do you want me to call you family members?”

“Yes I know, thank you very much. I would like to have those pills. And yes I would like to see my mother, but I think I should go to her instead of calling her here”. He knew that there was no cure for this thing, and what he had heard in the HazMat training and from the doctor he realized he only had a few hours, a day at max. The tachyons and other radiation which might have been emitted when his molecules went superluminal had caused this poisoning, there was no Nobel Prize coming for him now. All he could do and wished to do was get the answers to his questions. He discharged himself from the hospital and went to where he thought he might see his mother.

She was there where he thought she would be, right beside the pool and staring at it but afraid of going in.

“Hi” he said “Scared of going in the water?”

“Yes” she replied “I don’t think I will be ever able to, nor will I let my son. Even the thought of it is giving me Goosebumps. This water almost snatched my son away from me, but only almost, thanks to you”

“Oh I merely played my part; it seems you love your son very much”

“Yes. He is the only thing which keeps me alive and gives me the strength to carry on. I shouldn’t have brought him inside water, but he likes it too much, he is such a water baby, it was all my fault” She tried to fight back bitter tears.

“Oh don’t worry about your son, I am sure he will be alright, and it wasn’t your fault, plus you made sure that there was someone to take care of your son”

“What … I am sorry I don’t understand”

“Aah never mind … But can I ask you a question. Where is his father? I know this is very personal and I hardly know you”

“It’s ok. You almost feel like family to me already. So you wanna know about his father? I am a single mother, we used to be in swimming team together, we were called the Ideal couple. And then I conceived him when we were not married, he wanted to give him up. But I couldn’t, he was a part of me, and will always be. It’s like killing a piece of you. Of course this wasn’t ok with him, he asked me to choose between him and my would be baby. I chose my son, and I have never regretted that decision for a second since then. “

“I am sorry I never knew this, I don’t know why I felt like asking”.

“It’s ok, no big deal, it’s good to let it out once in a while. Besides I owe you a lot more than the answers of few questions. I owe you my everything; I don’t know how will I repay you? I don’t know what would have happened if you weren’t here”.

Arnab popped in more pill, his eyes were burning and he knew he wouldn’t be able to hold this façade of being alright for long. “Oh don’t worry I will be there. I realized how much this kid means to you now. And I know this sounds strange, but make him learn physics, he will be good at it but make sure that he is the best. Push him hard, like, like his life depends on it”. And he got up to leave, he could barely stand now.

“You are leaving? Will I be ever seeing you again? I don’t even know your name”. She asked Arnab

“Oh yes, you will be seeing me, perhaps in some time, but you will be. The Universe is finite but it has no boundaries, you end up again from where you started Mom. And my name is Arnab, perhaps you can name your son after me” He smiled as he said that, waved, turned around and left.

THE END

Water Baby - Part 1

Arnab Ghosh looked around to see what time it was, he never wore a watch and lab didn’t have a clock anywhere. Maybe they didn’t want the people working to realize how much time they used up here; the lab had no windows, no skylights, no way of even knowing if it was day or night. He felt his pockets to look for his PDA and realized he had deposited it with security, the facility had strict rules about PDA and other electronic devices, with the new life connect devices people didn’t even know how much confidential data they were sharing without being aware.

He guessed it will be around 8 in the morning; he was always good with guessing the passage of time though his entire thesis was based on proving that passage of time was an unreal concept, people just moved in the space-time without being explicitly aware of it. It was the property of the entire universe to move along geodesics. He realized that this was another night this week that he spent away from home, his mother would be worried even though he had told her he was going to the lab.

He got out of the lab, swiped in his ID card in the machine in front of the security guard, who retrieved his PDA from the bin the machine had told him to. The guard returned his PDA with a smile that he thought he should give a fellow Indian down here in Boston. He returned the smile while taking the PDA and said “Good Morning”, the guard smiled even wider and said “Good Morning Sir”, he wanted to remind him not to call him ‘Sir’ or ‘Babu’ which he used to do sometimes but he realized that might tempt the fellow Indian guard to launch into a conversation with him which he didn’t want at this time. He signaled a goodbye and started to turn around to leave but not before the guard said “Oh its morning again, working I didn’t even realize the passage of time here”. Arnab smiled and quoted HG Wells “There is no difference between time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our consciousness moves along it" and left.

He took his normal route to home which was a little round-about avoiding all escalators and conveyors knowing that this was the only exercise he was about to get the whole day. He would now go back home, eat the food mom had kept, sleep, get up, socialize on the web for some time and then it was time to go back to the lab again. His research on teleportation had hit a plateau, with his day to day work now being going over past calculations, derivations and seeing if the earlier researchers had missed something. Around 20 years ago in 2013 this very lab had discovered teleportation or rather the first working prototype of a teleporter, the idea was simple, strip down the matter to its constituent molecules, transport them over a dedicated line and then reassemble them over at the other end, nothing more than graham bell had done with his telephone, but the calculations and data required to reassemble the matter required a few Petabytes of data to be sent along the matter and the entire processing capability of MIT’s supercomputer working at few exaFLOPS speed. But this had come down due to new algorithms developed by two Philippine mathematics students, but still it was substantial and time taken was far more to satisfy curious science fiction enthusiasts who could have been possible research grant donors. It was hailed as the next big thing by fellow scientists and media alike but now 20 years later it had still to become commercially viable. It has been put on the back burner by MIT’s applied physics department and totally ignored by the media now, but 2 years earlier when Arnab had surprised everyone for opting for it as he had shared the vision of Prof. Jin Swan of living in Asia, coming to work in America and being home in time for dinner. He was the brightest of Ph.D. students and looking at his thesis work on space time, accelerated particles he was supposed to work on the hottest field of Grand Unified Theory or GUT as it is called but he shocked everyone by opting for teleportation.

He walked out and passed by the University Pool where some kind of race was going on, of course the swimmer was alone but on the giant screen in front of her she could see all the other swimmers swimming in their virtual lanes probably swimming alone in lanes of their Ivy League pools, the coach was of course physically there and had added the ambient noise of a crowd shouting and cheering in the background. Maybe he also had realized the advantage of being physically there rather than tele-commuting as they used to call it. Being present there on a screen never had quite the same effect of physically being there and people like Arnab were trying to make it a reality. But till that had happened the rising costs of transportation and fossil fuels and inability of mankind to find a cheap alternative source of energy had made it nearly impossible for people to travel large distances except for the Uber Rich. He took out his PDA and clicked a snap of the pool with his Augmented Reality program, the program threw up a lot of data, he touched the recent happenings section, which showed that there was currently a race going on in which MIT’s best swimmer Bella was competing with other colleges. He felt a twitch inside of him seeing the pool, he felt like jumping in taking a swim himself but he remembered he had swore on his mother never to be in water not even a bath tub. His friends used to make fun of him and call him a rabies infected dog because of his complete refusal to even enter water, he had missed many a trips to the beach, water parks etc due to this. Of all the idiosyncrasies of his mother this was the greatest, her being hell bent of keeping him out of water bodies. He sometimes used to wonder if his mother’s being possessive and controlling was the result of her being an immigrant of India in the USA or something else, many of his friend’s mothers were single mothers too but they never acted like his mother. He had actually wanted to visit India in an exchange program and see if all Indian mothers were like this but his mother had flatly refused and made a huge scene of him wanting to leave her for a whole year and go to some other country rather than concentrating on studying physics.

His mother’s insistence of him studying physics was another mystery to him, he was a natural at physics and could imagine the most complex of physics’ theories in his head, in fact better than his any of his known peers at it, but still his mother kept pushing him more. He didn’t know he was at this position because of his mother or despite of it.

He entered his house and saw his mother on the treadmill as usual, even at 51 she had a stamina of 25 year old athlete and was in better shape than people his age. Panting she asked if he had something to eat, he shook his head and started to move to his room when she got off and said she will fix something for him and asked him to sit down at the table. He pulled out the table from the wall and sat down to what he dreaded most, his mother’s questions about his work, she knew nothing about physics but always asked a lot of questions.

“So how was the day at lab”, she asked as she put down a microwaved ‘quarter pounder with cheese’ in front of him. “Uhh.. Ok ok … “

“Anything special?”

“No maa… Nothing special, just routine everyday work” he said getting irritated, he picked up the remaining burger and walked off to his room. He went in and punched in his name and password at the door of his room and instantly the room started configuring itself to his liking. He kicked off his shoes, finished his burger and switched on his TV to watch some movie and dozed off to sleep.

He woke up to the sound of his PDA ringing. He picked up the call half asleep; it was his over eager research assistant Kwon speaking in a hasty manner. “Slow down Kwon, I already have difficulty understanding you” he said to him. Kwon in his short-out-of-breath sentences told that the particle accelerator team had got some new break through with their tachyon research and there was some crisis situation at the lab which he needed to see personally. He couldn’t make much of it but Kwon instead of sending an email or sending an IM over the messenger had called on his number, then it must be important. He got ready quickly and headed out to the lab skipping 'breakfast' much to his mother’s daily displeasure. When he reached he saw the maintenance and IT people were doing some work on his lab when he asked them they said to contact their manager as they were just following directives, their manager pointed him to the head of the department saying this was his directive that most of his power and computing capabilities be directed to the particle research lab.

When he met Prof Steve he said he was expecting him, he then went to explain to that particle research team had finally found evidence of tachyons, particles which travel backwards in what we perceive as time. They have also found a way to generate tachyons with very low energy particle accelerators and that too in abundance. And they needed all the computing capabilities and power they could get, they needed to do a lot of work before this could be published. Arnab tried to argue but he knew it was futile, this was a major discovery, Nobel Prize winning major discovery and this would take precedence over a research which had not published any papers for a year and wasn’t going anywhere.

Dejected he went back to Kwon who was sitting outside the lab like a puppy who has been turned out of his home. He told Kwon the story and pretty much the news that this might be the dead end of their research. They needed a really fast computer to work on their teleportation data and even the remaining computing power was also taken away from them. Apart from a miracle or some new kind of algorithm which would lessen the amount of calculation necessary nothing could save them now. He asked Kwon to schedule a tele-meeting with the remaining team at a time which was convenient to all the time zones and let him know. He then walked over the particle research lab where many of his ex-classmates were, he saw the whole division was in state of celebration and frenzy at the same time. So much new data about the particles’ properties was coming in and many people were just running around to collect all that, many people were there to congratulate the pair who had achieved this, Michael Adams and Ernest White, the pair was a couple in real life too, they had met in the university and had realized soon that they shared more than their love of particle physics and sexual orientations. There were many big shots there , who he recognized from conventions and paper presentations, everyone was saying the same two words to the pair ‘Nobel Prize’, he went up to congratulate them and said the same two words. He struck around to drink a little champagne which was just sparkling wine imported from some African country. But he was at mourning, his lab, his place of solace where he found a little peace if anywhere in the world, was dying. He took out a bottle of wine and left for his lab when he got an IM from Kwon saying that meeting was scheduled in ten minutes from now, he had to tell his children that their mother was dying, he needed some liquid courage.

The tele-meeting went worse than he had imagined, many people felt very let down and angry and didn’t hesitate to show it in on the screen, one girl Allesandra from Brazil broke down in front of the web cam and started sobbing that her life’s best years were wasted on this project. He tried to keep a stern face while he felt like shouting “you are crying for your few years my whole life just vanished” but he knew that such was life and all its random injustice. He was increasingly getting more irritated as the day was passing, coming out he even snapped at the security guard who called him ‘Sir’. He stopped on the way back at a liquor store to buy a bottle of wine, he knew he was drunk but wanted to be more so, if there was any day to get drunk this was ‘it’.

He got home fully sloshed, when he walked in his mom got startled as she was not used to seeing him at this time, as soon as she looked at him she realized that something had happened. She asked him he was ok, he replied in the affirmative and started to walk towards his room. She asked him to at least have dinner to which he said an instant no.

“What’s wrong, what happed today at the lab?”

“Nothing happened in the lab and nothing is never gonna happen in the lab, ever”

Shocked she started following him and asked him “Tell me na what happened? You don’t come drunk every day, was there something major that happened in your lab today?”

This was the final straw for him, he erupted “Yes something happened, but not to me, nothing major happened nor is it going to, only thing that happened to me was this stupid teleportation project and you, and both were the worst thing that ever happened to me. This this …. God forsaken life happened to me” he threw away his PDA which smashed to pieces. There were silent tears in his mother’s eyes she got quiet and withdrawn like she had seen this kind of anger before.

Arnab started furiously punching in his password in his door and after a failed five attempts he was locked out of his own room, frustrated he kicked the door. His mom quietly walked up to the door put in her password. Arnab without saying a word walked in his room which didn’t seem like his own, it had different lighting, different position of the bed, even a new storage space overhead which he has never noticed before, this was his mother’s configuration of the room. He kicked off his shoes and tried to sleep but his thoughts didn’t let him, he wondered why was this happening to him, why his research failed, why his mother was like this, what happened to his father, why his life was like this? He realized he had no answers and that he needed something to drink. He got up suddenly from his bed and hit his head with the overhead bin which suddenly popped open and lot of junk fell on him.

Dazed and confused he switched on the light and saw what the junk was, it was pretty old, at least 20 years old, a digital photo frame, a jersey of a guy having MIT swimming team written on it, a thing which looked like a bike helmet from the 2000’s and some other random stuff. Curious he picked up the digital photo frame and turned it on and surprisingly it came on, first picture was a group of boys and girls wearing the MIT swimming team jerseys like the one he just saw, then it showed a guy and girl sitting on a vintage motorbike, a girl in a swimming costume holding her medal up for the picture and screenshot of webpage which says Jhoomur Ghosh wins gold in some Inter-state swimming competition. He stared at that one till the pictures switched again, he tried to clear the cobwebs from his head; as Jhoomur Ghosh was the name of his mother and she was also a student here at MIT once.

TO BE CONTINUED…..

Rebound

A rebound in basketball is the act of successfully gaining possession of the basketball after a missed field goal or free throw. Rebounds in basketball are a routine part in the game, as all possessions change after a shot is successfully made.

Rebounds it seems are a routine part of life as well, especially mine. Not many people know and neither have I had the physical characteristics of one, but I used to play basketball in school and was in fact a decent player. I used to play at the position what can be loosely described as the 'Point Guard'. I used to play defense and was good at it, especially at checking and dribbling, I was fairly ok at layups too, but what I used to suck and still do is shooting. First of all I am short (for a basketball player that is, otherwise I'm above average height, at least for an Indian) so couldn't go over raised hands and blocks, plus my shooting accuracy was bad too. So I generally I used to make play happen and pass the ball, or occasionally shoot the ball hoping some of my team members will take the rebound. I never could, because of my playing position and my height. But I guess what I couldn't do on the field maybe life is doing to me off it.

To a layman a rebound (offensive rebound) is a failed attempt to score, it's when you throw the ball but it doesn't go in where you wanted it to be instead it bounces off the ring or the board of the basket but then someone of your team gets the ball and puts it where you wanted it to be in the first place, the basket or the goal.My life has seen a few rebounds too, especially two very recently. It was when I shot towards the goal, missed, and then got it in the rebound.

Excuse the dramatic portrayal which you are about to encounter and the pseudo intellectual gibberish you just did. But if this stuff happens to you in real life then Shakespearean dramas and Hindi TV soaps look bland compared to it.

First rebound was when I came back from my class; it was after my first 15 – 20 days in BIMTECH. After 98.8 percentile in CAT I was kind of overjoyed and almost with the feeling that now I am pretty much through with the MBA entrance and a good college is guaranteed. What I didn't realize that time there was a big hurdle in front of me, namely the GD-PI round, one hurdle too big it seems, of all the 9 colleges I was shortlisted for I could only clear one of them, namely BIMTECH. It seems like I missed quite a few shots. Now it wasn't too bad or too lowly for me or something but I'll be honest here, it wasn't what I was expecting either, after truly working hard for once in my life I thought I had deserved something slightly better. But what I got was what I got and with that thought I told myself to get the best out of the opportunity that I was given. BIMTECH didn't have a lot of things, but good people certainly was not one of them, I made friends quickly there, and I am still good friends with most of them. I started settling in, enjoying my first ever true hostel life and imagining my future there.

But it was the 17^th day of June and I had come back after a full day of classes and was just Facebooking and checking my mails, when a mail from a certain Ravi Sharma came in which certainly changed the course of my immediate life in many ways. It had a pretty bland subject line 'Admission to PGDM Programme - 2008 – 2010' but what was inside was pretty exciting for me. I had got into IMI, though in probably the 3^rd list but got in nonetheless. I showed it to my friend who was standing right there, where I was overjoyed his reaction was 'Abey matlab tu jaa raha hai', I nodded in approval and went out to call my parents. What had happened the earlier day was that they had said that Ravi Sharma from IMI had called and said you are offered admission in some course, the first list for IMI had come in so long back that I had totally forgot about it and had given up any hope on it. I had said it maybe for some other program of them, their main program's list, for which I was interested in had come out long back, and I wasn't really interested in all those. They had still asked me to call him once to confirm, I had also said yes just for the sake of it but wasn't planning to do it.

But then life has its own way of turning out and no matter what and how much you plan the journey there are some unexpected turns in the road that change your destination altogether. What if I had not gotten in IMI, what if I had taken finance as a major as I was planning to that time, there are a lot of what ifs that I can ask, but no one knows their answer. I was happy needless to mention, as I got into a good college, what my friends say about it now or what I feel about it from time to time is a different thing, but at that time I was happy, and content with the feeling that I got what I thought I deserved. That I had finally scored with the rebound.

It was another struggle after getting into IMI and as much as people don't think about it now but it was pretty chaotic back then, in the first trimester, juggling classes, case studies, assigned readings, reports, my sidey room in Katwaria Sarai, a certain Marketing Professor. I was almost going bonkers. The recession had hit full time and my seniors were facing the heat, scrambling for the thing they had taken for granted, the most important thing in any MBA student's life, PLACEMENTS! I had been asked in the IMI interview itself that how you think this current recession is going to affect you, I had very replied very smoothly that it's a minor slowdown, it'll blow over by the time I pass out, Guess it wasn't to be. A few Americans who I had never met, done anything to or thought about took loans on high interest rates on the simple hunch that housing prices will go up and changed the lives of many people far beyond their wildest imaginations. I was one of them. The college boasted of an average domestic package of 8.75 LPA and by even the most conservatives estimates was about to touch 11 in two years, i.e. when we would pass out. My seniors from Placecom had come and said that our senior batch was placed in just a day; we will be placed in half a day. And you … (he let out a chuckle) .. you would be placed in a matter of few hours. Of course that didn't happen, and what did happen is what as they say is history.

So as fate would have it, I passed out with a modest package of 5.5 LPA in an automobile manufacturing company and a disappointed dad who had lot of expectations from the B-School which ranked in the top 15^th in India (I still believe it does). What he didn't know was how deep and bad this recession thing was, a word he had heard a lot in the media a few years back, before it got pushed to the backburner by the media who had got bored of it. Also he absolutely hated the mechanical engineering field and any company that had something to with it. So it was like a double serving of bad luck to him. I on the other hand was ok with it with a slight twinge in my heart again, the "I think I deserved something slightly better than this" one.

So I got into Mahindra Navistar with a sales profile and a Calcutta posting. Once again I made peace with what I got or fate as someone might call it and started settling in my job, making friends, and growing roots for the lack of a more dramatic word. But then as all big things, this had also started as a small thing and got bigger and bigger. It was one day when I was sitting in my office when I got something which I recall as a ping from Mayank Sharma saying "Brother zara apni CV forward kar do". And I did without asking many questions, the one I had prepared in IMI. He later told me that there were openings in Infosys and he would refer me. I didn't give much thought to it except once in a while when Mayank used to talk about it. One day he said he was changing my center from Calcutta to Delhi as it was taking too long to happen there and Delhi was just a flight away, I again said yes without thinking much. I did start thinking about it when I got a mail from Infosys people saying that I was short listed and I had to appear for an interview in Delhi on 18^th September. I immediately booked my tickets and got serious about it when I realized that more than 10,000 Rs were at stake. I gave the interview, did 2 days of fun and came back praying that I get through. I finally got the offer on September 29^th when I was sitting in conference room with my colleagues, they are actually more friends than colleagues, again with an e mail with a bland title 'Offer of Employment'. And another rebound.

I ask the same questions to myself now and then, what if I had stayed in this company, what if I was doing Sales only instead of IT consultancy. I have no answers; but what I do have is a much more satisfied father, a higher paying job and the belief that in life you can't plan everything, certain things come out of the blue and change the game.