"Dude.. I want you in the night"... All in a day's work.

Well this was destined to be the first post of 2009.

My Blog has anyway been begging me to add some flair to it since long.


So before further ado, and to stop your filthy minds from associating some vulgar connotations to the title, here is the summary of what happened.



It was somewhere close to the lunch break and I was as usual busy cursing TINA and C@fe (they are the main IT apps of the company I serve and deserve a post in their own right, but that will be for some later day) and was busy as hell trying to at once monitor 7 different PCs when I suddenly got this call. As is my usual custom in such hectic times, I didn't stop to check the caller ID and answered the cell immediately. Well actually I was secretly hoping to hear a sweet voice at the other end and it was my impatience that led to me to it, but all said and done... here I am... posting this.



I have this habit of going on tangents... irritating, isn't it... ;-)

Think again, its just a cheeky tactic...



Well coming back to the core... so first unexpected thing.. a male voice.. followed by the question.."Dude.. I want you in the night"... Huh!!! ... blankness... shock and awe... (to be precise, he asked me in Hindi, so it sounded more like you'd think it would, to make me go silent, berserk, amazed, perplexed and what not... all at once)



I thought it was someone trying to pull my leg, and I should use this opportunity to vent out some of the curses I keep uttering to TINA and C@fe, by giving him a piece of my mind. So I locked the PC and got up, thinking that this bugger better have some good explanation and came out to the corridor. I knew that I'd have to use some heavy duty expletives which even though the Dutch speaking junta sitting around me wouldn't be able to understand but they'd still get the idea with the tone I was going to use.



All this happened so quickly that I never thought of checking the caller ID. But to cut a short story shorter, it turned out to be my boss, (with whom, unfortunately or fortunately whichever way you'd like to put, I had have the pleasure of talking only once previously in this new year and very rarely on the phone in general). He had called me to confirm the planning for the Post Go Live for the upcoming release next weekend.



Well it was fortunate that he quickly identified himself otherwise I was on the verge of starting with the barrage. After that I couldn't stop laughing thinking of how his unwitting query turned out to be. When I pointed it to him how it actually sounded, then he also joined in and even tendered an explanation. :-))
I decided to not push it further and to not get on the wrong side of the appraisal in the process. Thus ended the short lived affair which promised grandeur but alas it was not be.



Has it been a valuable lesson in my corporate life... not quite.
Is it something that has prepared me for some unforeseen circumstances... I hope not. ;-)



But it did add that extra little bit of humor to my day and I hope it would make a nice story to tell at opportune moments. All the components that make one are certainly there.

The importance of the Smile

Not so long ago I quoted in my "Adieu" e-mail from my last assignment that one is successful when he doesn't know whether what he is doing is work or play. Work- for me has been for most of the times- play. Even though life does play hard ball quite regularly, it's something that I never had to learn to tackle. It came naturally.

The way I have dealt with adversity in work place till now has been such that people who don't know the specifics and who do not have the chance to observe from close quarters, come to think that I'm having too much fun. It so happens that 'the smile' that I have on appears to be growing according to the difficulty of the situation. (Even though it is not easy and I have lost my cool in some situations, this is how it generally has been). The harder the situation to handle, the broader "the smile" would appear to be.

But this post is not a self congratulatory note about my prowess with what I do.

Let me come to the point. What I refer to by "the smile" is not just what you have to put on your face. It’s the cheerfulness that reflects on the outside when the thrill of tackling a challenge would be the driving factor. When you think of the innate satisfaction of achieving a seemingly impossible feat which you have set out to achieve and not think about how many hardships you'd have to go through, then it’s easy to have 'the smile'.

The trouble with such a scenario is that success in such situations begins to be the 'expected' instead of the 'outstanding'. But that is food for thought for some other post. This one is about 'the smile'.

It could be that after the daunting tasks that I set out to achieve at the beginning, many simplistic tasks don't challenge me enough, but of late the sheer tediousness of simple tasks is beginning to weigh me down, and I have been putting off work just because it’s not challenging enough. And the smile has been missing ever since.

I realize now that I have been trying to put the cart before the horse. It should not be the challenge that one should enjoy rather than the joy of completing a task to the best of one's ability, however trivial it may appear to the intellect. It's the smile that is important and not the challenge. The smile would always have to be the single unquantifiable factor and not proportional to the task at hand, simply because of the fact that a smile does not have degrees. There is no measurement to the amount of a smile. It is, to put it bluntly - a binary. It either is there or is not. There is no more to it than less.

To be successful one should not aim at achieving the impossible; or climb Mt. Everest every time there is a chance, but to look at the satisfaction of a job well done. It’s important to have 'the smile' and not to measure it. Success in the end is just to quote one of my friends, "Doesn't even matters" (improper grammar intentional). It's the journey and not the destination or the speed with which you travel that matters.

The Trouble with Harry

That's is a 1955 movie I watched recently. The tag line of the movie says "The trouble with Harry is that he's dead". It's from Hitchcock, but probably the only one of its kind. Hitchcock is famous for being a great exponent of the suspense/thriller genre but in this movie he tries to tickle the funny bone (He doesn't do particularly well, which is evident by the fact that probably you would have never heard of this movie before).

But this post is not about Hitchcock or the movie. There's Wikipedia for that.
In the movie the character of the wife of Harry, (who ends up killing Harry later because he comes looking for her to the quiet little town) tells another character (an eccentric artist), "On the day of our marriage, I read my horoscope which said, 'You should not start a new project today, for if you do, you'll never be able to finish it'. So I just left and came here."

Of course Hitchcock was famous for his telling commentary on the human subconscious and this dialogue though absurd, carries more meaning to it than seems obvious.

We keep finding excuses for what we are just simply afraid of doing.
Had the wife of Harry just stayed and decided to complete what she started; had she taken the chance which she was on the verge of anyway taking, the trouble with Harry wouldn't have started in the first place.

We keep on putting off things just to avoid having to face the "consequences".
Well if you look at it, you anyway end up facing the consequence of not doing it, which more often then not, you regret later.

So why not regret having done it, than having to regret not having done it at all.
And there's always the sweet chance that you end up committing the "best" mistake of all.

Life from a Balcony

Is not so interesting... if you discount the fact that it gives you some voyeuristic pleasure to the vagaries of the world. Sounds confusing, isn't it. Yeah it is.. first and foremost, I'm a confused soul, who has to have every experience in the world, but doesn't know which one to have first.

My current focus is on loosing focus.. my thoughts are totally unformed and they keep wandering from pillar to post, in search of something to ponder on...

Well I am a child of rebels.. who decided to go against the whole world.. and when the world has started accepting them, they are now confused as to who to rebel against now.

So, life goes on as it is.. time to sleep.. but no time left to...

If I have to remember my fondest memory of my childhood, it is of painting a beanstalk on a big chart paper, with a big flower on the top, kind of like in the story, Jack and The Beanstalk

I guess those days will never return. But life can't be wasted thinking of what has been and what's going to be. Its the current that matters. Always.