Teri Aankhom Ke Siva

I can hold my own in the singing department; especially old Hindi songs.I guess Hindi was a natural choice since I started learning Hindi at a very young age. But I guess what really captured my imagination was Pradeep Somasundaram singing "teri aankhon ke siva" and "poojho na kaise maine"... they appealed in a way that nothing else had so far. Years later today, I heard some of the old songs again in a reality show - and surprisingly sung not in a localized version of Hindi. 
Mohd. Rafi and Kishor Kumar are undoubtedly the best singers that India has produced and I can listen to their songs one after the other without a break; and one of my biggest disappointments to this day remains that I could not formally train in music! My best friends would say many lives were saved!

Letting Go

Letting go is tough. Charlie Trumper realized that. I've realized it over the years. Be it at business or at life. Be it voluntarily or by force. It is heart-wrenching.

How do you let go of an organization that you envisioned and created and see it be run by a board which has no idea about the sweat and blood that has gone in? How do you let go of a relation that you invested hours on to get to where it was?

Do men who've loved, feel it difficult to start, run and then go public with a company? Do fathers have the same feeling when his daughter gets married?

I've had to let go, have been let go and have had things taken away … none of these leave behind good taste… so what is the solution? To not let go or to never have had that in the first place?

Sales Summit and why it didnt sell for me

Two weeks back, I attended my first big "Sales Summit". I'd already talked to a lot of these guys on the phone, but that was a good opportunity to put a face behind the voice. It was an exciting time to hear the guys speak and it was very evident why all the business was coming in. Some of the guys were so motivational that you had Goosebumps.

It was also those full suit days, where you had to wear it all the time. Of course foundation day is also one such occasion but who wears it all the time. Its okay here because it is cold...Interestingly, 95%+ people wore black and no one took a chance. I think very few wanted attention on themselves; its always easy to get a ton of work in these summits come your way and one way to tackle that is "sync with the crowd". Some people took it to the extremes. Two guys had the same color, same brand suits, and to top it all, the exact same tie. You can imagine their state of mind when speaker after speaker picked on them. And the icing was when their photo was taken and circulated the next day with the classic "Mastercard" caption. Ticket fare to summit - 150$, Classic Black Armani suit - $ 1750, Wearing the same suit, the same pant and the same tie as your colleague - Priceless.

Exciting part of any such summit is the food, and on the second day, there was authentic Indian food... I haven’t eaten so much for quite some time as I did on that day...

But, I don’t remember that with fondness because the end result was a group photo; now, with 200 people to be photographed, Mike had to take it in four pieces and stitch it together. The sad part was the end result of the stitch. I was so reduced in height that I looked about 5 feet. And those friends whom I used to ridicule for being a lil short have now save the photo and some have even been rumored to frame it. Somebody should move the US congress to pass a bill which will prohibit Stitching..

"I know where you are coming from"

Even though we say Indians can speak good english, some of the phrases here can rub you the wrong way especially if you fail to see the fine point. Not that I'm failing to see it; but I was wondering how a typical self proclaimed head strong english guru would react to some of these phrases; here we go..

One common usage is "Ah I see where you are coming from" to mean "Ok, I understand the basis of your thoughts and how you are arriving at the conclusions"... Now, for our guy mentioned above, the reaction could be " What do you mean where I am coming from.. I come from karamana.. what has that got to do with our conversation.. Are you trying to say I don’t know about the US" Pooff!! When I say this, I'm always reminded of Russell Peters and his story about his dad.

Another usage (albeit not common) was this; we had a few emails going back and forth on a "prospective customer" and one person wanted to know how big a deal we are landing. so he asks "Mark, are you a fisherman?" in order to ask "What kind of big fish are we landing here; could it be a shark or is it only a minnow?" Ah god help us if it reached our guy... "What??? fisherman??? I'm a high class Nair from the town of Karamana... how dare you call me a fisherman"...


US-English could be tough...
And hey guys, no discrimination against Karamana ok... it's just that Karamana was the first city (eh town.. oops junction) that came to mind.

A new line of business

Even as I complete 6 months in the US, I'm always brought to the reality of how life here can take u by surprise, and how much of pitfalls there are for you to stumble and make yourself look bad..

I had to attend a key summit and so I went suit shopping.. now, for a person of my build, its very difficult to get one that doesn’t seem like being covered in a sack. Fortunately for me, I got a 36S in a very good and unique color, so I went for it only to realize that the pant length was only 30 where I needed 32. Now Vinod who was with me said that there are altering shops and they would increase the length. I bought the suit.

Two days later, Vinod and I went to the altering shop; its some distance away from the office, but we preferred to walk. Now, S. California has started to get hot, and so walking in white shirts and stuffed in neck-ties wasn’t too pleasing an experience and I was concerned I got Vinod also involved.

Anyways, we FINALLY reached our destination, and there was a Chinese lady at the store; the usual "Hello how are you" was done and i took out the pants and rattled off "I want to increase the length, take off this folding and have once cm from the bottom left. That should do" The woman had her mouth so open that you could drive a truck through it. She goes "what what what". Vinod takes over "He wants to lengthen it". She says "By How much"... "2 inches".. “okay”... As easy as that. I pacify myself by thinking she was not knowledgable enough to understand my highly polished english. (Am also reminded of the film Mazha peyyunnu… Mohanlal – “Please don’t lengthen it”)

She prepared the check (the same old "bill" back home) and said to us "Tuesday". Man!! A week to increase the length of a pant. But I got the shock of my life when I saw the amount. 16$. To put things in perspective, an Arrow or a Dockers pant costs around 6-10$ in a sale. I could've got three pants for the stitching charge. That very thought gave me the jitters. We silently collected the check and came out.

Somehow, the walk back seemed to last forever.

I’m so tempted to resign and open a tailoring shop instead!!

A new experimentation

[Editing this post as per a comment]:
PEOPLE, this post is a song which I recorded in my own voice; the voice has not been loaned from anyone... Also, if you dont see a BOOMP3 player underneath these lines, there is some issue.. lemme know !!

ALSO, just like my blogs, I sang because I love to sing... and not because I want you to hear !! [I always keep saying that... dunno why I still keep posting on the net, though... Oof.. talk about MPD!!]

Just an experimentation... Please forgive the spikes...

boomp3.com

The charge of the juice brigade

A favorite drink at home

Seagull in SFO

This is one of my favorites... I rapidly fired shots when he was circling around; fortunately, I got one in which he struck a majestic pose.

Taken when I was on a boat ride in SFO... very near the Golden gate bridge.

Rubik's Shadow

I recently purchased a Canon S3 IS and have started venturing into the awesome world of photography. I'm just a novice just learning to play around with my camera; I'll keep uploading some of my favorite ones...

This one is of a famed Rubik's cube which I placed on the carpet at a place where there was sunlight filtering in...

Aftershocks of a loan payment

Coming onsite has its own perks; money of course. Within 2 months of me being here, I sent home enough money to finish off my car loan; finally I could say that the car was my own. I was also happy at having dealt with a big burden of more than three years.

But of course, my mum had different plans. As soon as the car loan was finished she was already sending me links to house plots, flats and apartments that were on sale. When we chat, she’ll also tell me the various plot for sale ads in the manorama newspaper. The conversations always followed the same pattern - she was eager to get me to agree on something and start initiating a house loan; me on the other hand downplaying anything she came up with. Some excerpts:

Amma : Da, 10 cents land near nedumbaassery
Me : Just 10? Would’ve been good had it been more.
Amma : I’m not kidding.
Me : Neither am I; there’s a shortage of 10 lacs with me. Will get that in a while; then we can try if we get the nedumbassery airport land also.
Amma : Grrr… Ok, then we can look something near the kaloor stadium.
Me : Perfect; we can then buy the ground also. Long time since I played cricket.
Amma : Ok, fine… I get the idea; then can we look something in Trivandrum?
Me : Sure, why not? I think we should buy a piece of land in every district of kerala. That way we’d be able to counter any price variations across places. Also, it’d help me get settled in any place which might have a probable IT boom. Esp in Idukki - near the dam would be a great place. If we run out of water, we could go to the reservoir and have bath.
Amma : [By this time she’s really getting worked up… she gives me a rendition of some choice words] Ok, do whatever you wish. Don’t later fret that we did not tell you.

Even though I get into this rigmarole primarily to get her worked up, there’s more to it. Buying a piece of land is, to me, akin to getting ready to settle down. Gosh… even the thought drives me crazy; deciding on a place where I want to spend the rest of my life; where to build a home, to come back after work, lie down, close my eyes, and feel contend. I have never planned my life that much ahead; but my mother reminds me everyday of how old I am getting, and the need to do so. I should get some consultancy company to do some work on “The 10 best places to settle down”.

Inspiron

Niche. I remember Geetha madam teaching this to us in her biology classes - something to do with animals finding a unique place in an ecosystem. As the IT sector peaked up, and MBAs spewed up jargons one after the other, niche also found its way into common use…
But what I’m writing about has nothing to do with the new IT definition of niche - I’m going to blabber about a laptop. I’m sure you fail to see the relation; three months before I’d be along with you, but today I’m a changed man.

When I came to the US, I accommodated myself in a 2BHK house with 4 guys; all of them had a personal laptop. Fortunately for me, there was an additional one which was provided to one of the guys for official purposes. I’m basically an outrageously social animal, and for the initial week I couldn’t even imagine how people could spend all their time glued to the front of their laptops. I’d have preferred a game of cards involving everyone; a discussion involving everyone; watching a movie along with everyone - you get the idea… Even though we came from different places and would go away to different places, it’d be better if the time we spent together could be spent as a family. Well, I’m not getting too emotional, but you know, that would have been nice.

Instead, what I see is oodles of time spent in front of the laptop; atrocious!! This prompted me to think about what might be driving this. I then realized it; and it was so plain obvious. Even while all of us thrived under the same roof, and we tried to have a family atmosphere, the laptop was an outlet to their individuality. It was their wife, their brother, their mother; in short it was family. It was the entrance to the internet which would connect them to their loved ones; it was the window through which they satisfied almost every urge. It was their niche, their own place to be, in this "hostel" - somewhere they could let out their emotions, imbibe the emotions from the outer world, and yet show it to no one...the next best friend to man himself (long gone are the times when that description suited a dog; a laptop now rightfully earns that adjective.)

When I had this BIG realization, the natural step for me was to get one on my own. Guess what - I started spending more time on my laptop than the others on theirs… But we still have a happy family in our home.

Oh, BTW, this is titled Inspiron because thats the name of my laptop model. In a way it applies to what it does - it inspires....

From the land of Howzzitgoooin

One month in the US...and one of the first questions I often get is - Missing Home? A decent yes would satisfy most people. But that would be far from the truth. For one, Seattle is a beautiful place, reminding one of a scenic village in Alleppy or the north of Kerala. To add on, 25 friends, all of whom I know personally, from offshore. So no, I say, I'm enjoying.

And yes, now for the flashback... I reached the US of A on the 4th of September; I was supposed to reach a day in advance, but our Indian flights as usual delayed people by a day. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I reached Seattle one day late, albeit, in one piece.

I opened a bank account, applied and received my SSN and started off on my daily routine of work. So far ever day has been learning new things; the American way of things.

As i get accustomed to the way of life here, some things jump straight out, some ironies that cannot get unnoticed. They have their own set of standards for everything. Forget MKS standards, forget what they world follows, here things are done differently. Now, I don’t say that is good or bad, this is just a "middle of the road" observation. Let me quote a few examples: petrol is called gasoline. Traffic is on the right side. People haven’t heard of the Degree Celsius. Speed to them is in miles ph. The monetary system is not far behind. There’s the dime, penny, quarter, nickel and then the regular denominations follow.

Ironies apart, I am amazed at the way things happen here. If a bus is supposed to come at 8.27, you can be sure it would be there. The traffic system, the airports, the public administration - everything is so well greased and in place. Everything works like clockwork.

Now, being in an alien land for the first time can give u moments that you can think about later and laugh. Like when a friend goes to a restaurant and says I want to go, and you wonder why they need to go to a hotel and say they want to go.( I learnt later that To Go means a "parcel" back home). And another time when after you have finished lunch they waiter comes and asks you if you need it wrapped up and you say yes thinking that they meant cleaning up and in another 5 minutes they return with a packet with the food that you wanted wrapped up - even if it contains chewed up pieces of chicken bone that you placed at the side. But my favorite times are when I order something on the menu imagining it to be of some shape and form which in reality turns out to always the opposite.

I know you have noticed that most of my faux pas have been in restaurants. Of course, when you are here to sample everything they offer, this is a good place, aint it? Ok, so here are a few things, which are out of the restaurant. In office, people don’t have any qualms about using the restroom for the "second" type of relieving. And insanely enough, those rooms are not fully enclosed and not "sound proof". So, when you go for the "normal" relieving, it is not unusual that you are greeted by sounds of "crackers" and smells reminding you of garbage. One time, while I was there, I let out a cough almost coinciding with a sound burst from the other room. The guy in there, god knows who, thinking that I was reacting to that, muttered a big sorry. I was too embarrassed to stay, and ran all the way back to my seat. Phew!! Its a funny place, the US of A.

oh, and by the way, I went to San Francisco over the last weekend and experienced a "city". Seattle, I came to realize, is a far greener and better place to be when compared to SanFran. Autumn is in, and it is always good to be in a place where there are lots of trees. The panorama that is accorded is breathtaking to say the least. And by the looks of it, old timers say, there might be snow this time around too. I dunno if I'd be around to see it, but that would be the icing on the cake, if it were to happen.

I'll be back with more tid-bits; until then, Au revoir.