Saturday at the Museumplein

Sitting on a wooden bench in the heart of amsterdam - Museumplein, I was savoring the sight of the quiet activity of the city laid out in front of me, served by providence, in the form of men, women, babies and dogs. The usual chaos of the tourist and trippers was missing. It felt more tranquil and earthly, very much unlike the accepted and conventional amsterdam, a much appreciated change for me. Running my life for the 10th straight month in the free-amsterdam, I still have not cultivated my liking for the palpable and vibrant cacophony of this city. The hypnotic attraction of the city has not allured my psyche.

On your left, you will see an exceptional view of the museumplein, flanked by 4 musuems of the city, the rijks, van gogh, diamond and another one. Well, you can see only the Rijks if you look hard and straight. This is how the square looked like on saturday, sedate, unadorned and mortal. I preferred this Amsterdam to the one that gave a psychedelic sense of well-being to all.

It was clothed in a blanket of quiescence and low clouds . I was looking forward to this saturday. The weather department had predicted sun and shine today. As I pulled the hood of my wind-cheater over my head, it reaffirmed my belief that one cannot get fired for being wrong, if you worked in a meterological department. The entire week had passed by under gloom and rain. Saturday was no better.

As my eyes luxuriated in the quotidian activity of the hour, I could not help but spend some minutes longer at the canines and kids around. These 2 sights necessiated me to muse over the similarities between kids and hounds.

The man tossed the frisbees in the air, the tykes running behind the game with thier eyes pointed skywards and retrieving it, but refusing to hand it back to their owners, wanting to relish the feeling of biting into the tattered rubber, a bit longer. The men awarding their animals with a rub on thier back, a hug, or a another throw of a frisbee. This cycle continued even after I forcefully moved my eyes away from the play. Kids clothed in colorful and lively looking jackets running around trying to keep off from rolling on the grass. The kid was accompanied by a man with rather harsh looks, but who softened to tenderness when he glanced at the kid playing around.

Between both the men, if there was one thing that was common other than the gender was the look of harshness in their eyes, a feeling of discomfort came over me when I looked at them individually, keeping the kid and the dog at a safe distance. But in tandem with the accompaniments, my feeling towards them underwent a drastic metamorphoses. They looked human, loved and approachable.

Dogs and Kids are similar. Hope moms and dads wont crush me for this. I though I should write this down this today. Both the entities here brought out the humane chacteristics in us. They loved us unconditionally. When we got back home, either to the dog or the kid, it was pretty immaterial where we came from, or what we are. The fact that we are home was enough. The kid squealing in delight, waiting to be picked up and the dog barking in acknowledgement, waiting for a rub.

How impossible it is for us grown-ups to be this absolute and unadulterated. We may tend to ignore the extra and unwanted fittings that exist in the people we love. Kids and dogs do not ignore, because they cannot understand. They cannot calculate. We analyse each other. Kids and dogs cannot. We can never harbor such unblemised feelings for each other.

Wish I was a kid all my life. I did not say "dog" because an idiom - dog's life means an unhappy life, hard plight! I would not mind being that either as long as we do not attribute figurative meaning to it!

No Title

From Paris hilton being freed from jail or from where ever, Shahrukh Khan goes "fair", To Aditya and Ranis marriage ooops, engagement .... news is being rolled out like a old restaurant trying to woo its customers by naming their dishes after cartoon characters.... Mickey Minny spicey kebab to Donald duck soup... Do you need think any iota of intelligence is needed to decipher the idosy behind this? If you answer a No, then you belong to a normal human race.. Welcome to my abode.

Malaika Arora is staged as a fashion diva!! woooo... this must be the next best think to "nothing". Once in a while I prefer to watch and read such news that I DO NOT need to know. Actually it makes me feel(ya rite) intelligent and sensible. When my morale is down, when I feel like there is no place for me even at the bottom of the black sea(or you can name any other), when I feel like a ISO 27000 (or wahtever, I heard this is latest that has been dished out by them )certified worthless Homo Sapien, such news peps me up, albeit for a few minutes.... Today, not that I my psyche is strangled by any such harrowing (d)emotions, I opened IBN live to read up lines, before sleep pulls the warm covers over me!! Basically, I wanted to feel dulled so that I can feel my eyes heavy with boredom.

Coming back to Madam M (woooooo Casino Royale.. James bond, I liked the current bond as well, a bond with a heart and no gadgets!! Wish he could use his heart like used his devices.... Dil ke hazaaar tukde kar ke, ek ek ko chun ke marega... Yuck, how crass can I get???Sleep here I come), she is the 'new makeover guru'... Well, yes make-over!!

Some cute lass asks her, "Could you please give our viewers some style tips?"
Madam M: "Tips for the monsooon... giggles!! Gee Geee Geeeigles "
How inelegant. M continues after some pouting, "Keep it short.. just to the ankle". Well, when it rains, even my grandmom tucks the ends of saree in, so that it lifts up till the ankle, my mommmy darling does it too, my brother does it too, not his sareeof course but his pair of chinos... Wow, I come from a real stylish family. It took me 24 years and 2 months to realise this. Thanks M.

Accenture dressing policy says, When we say keep it short, we are referring to meetings and presentations, not skirts! Wow.....

The aim of this blog was for me get bored and lug myself to sleep. Am bored of writing on Madam M and her KISS(Keep It Super Short ideas) . Mission accomplished.

Applying weight...

Supervisors are funny. They know they are important, we all know that they are very important.... Well.. :-) Lets leave the game of importance to the ones who believe in them.
Yesterday, I was sprinting down to the 4th floor. I heard a manager barking to the team at the coffee vending machine. Hmmmm, did I say coffee vending machine, yes, we have these fancy coffee makers that encourage us to use caffeine as a means to sustain our rapidly failing metabolic system.. to possibly contain our atrophy to doom. Coming back to the manager, he said, "We need to press them for it, yes, put pressure on them to comply, there is not way this cannot be done". The team nodding their sagging heads in mute agreement.. You know straight from the horses mouth to the fatigued psyche of the team members. With each sentence, the nodding un unision increased, until it reached a frenzied pace and all I all that my retina could reflect is a 5 heads moving in tandem with each other. It seemed like they had had a bout of hypnopaedic session the night before. I looked at them in absolute surprise. I had a mind to ask the guys, what they wanted to push. The sentences continued to be volleyed at a rate of 1 per coffee sip, each one with renewed vigor.. "How can they do this", "Does the IT know about it", "How is that we were not informed"(ya rite.. you are the LORD OF THE RINGS and your team members are the 7 dwarfs!! Self importance... is a funny thing), " I am going to approach the management with this issue", Go on, the management is only there to solve your problems. But the catcher was, ' We must apply weight on them '.. Ya rite, you and your team should go and sit on them...They will definitely buckle under pressure!!

Fate and I

Have you ever tried to solve a problem that you don’t understand?
Try it.This will freak you out totally. I nearly feel like being pushed from a cliff from a deathly height of 8848 metre, with a cushion on the earth. And my dead body lands with a thud on the bed of sponge!

How can I solve a cobol error when I don’t know the C of the cobol. I am big time bulshitting myself here. Feel like a ISO certified moron.

Did some one ask me why was I doing it??

It all began this morning, when a certain cobol job was not updating a value in a sql table. The job owner says the table does not exist and sends a mail with this conclusion to everyone with a copy to their dogs also. It scared the day lights out of me. Not the fact that it was CCed to half the world, but because if the table did not exist then we are doomed and there is no place even at the bottom of the dead sea for us. I had a good mind to tell him, “You retard, why do you conclude such incongruous impossibilities ”.

As far as I am concerned, diplomacy is not exactly saying what you want to say.. Keeping this in mind, I asked my C-coleagues regarding the problem. Collected the information, well.. for me, it is data. I needed to communicate this problem to the right person and also sound “intelligent” in the process. I mean No.. ahhh’s… errrr’s allowed!! I felt like kicking myself in the posterior, and keep a straight face while doing this as well.. !@#$ %^&$..

I dialled the number of the DBA. All the 3 DBAs have the same name. It was immaterial who answered the call. After the initial formalities, I slided straight down into my grave. After what seemed like an exchange of nothingness, I hung up. I am not into mainframes to understand his questions. Felt like a dunce. I had no clue. But after 3 such chances which I had given to make a fool of myself, I managed to convey to him what the problem was. I could feel him precariously balancing at the edge of his patience limit, during each of these conversations. I dont know if the problem is solved. I do not what happened later.

This interaction added weight to my belief, "Fate never throws something at you which you cannot handle". Though you make a fool of yourself in the process, you gain enough.. Whenever I thought, I was on the verge of drowing, I felt my inherent boyancy pushing me up to the surface. This was one such. We are never prepared for anything, but fate does not toss it at you if you are not inherently fabricated with the potential to handle it. Well, I made a fool of myself in the course, but when I retrospect, I cannot but smile at my conversation with the DBA.

Ipod and brothers.

Returning from Amsterdam to his home in the northern vale of India, my friend wanted to buy an apple ipod-nano 30 GB-239 euros, for his brother. Pottering around in the Media market, he was deliberating whether he must buy the expensive gadget for his brother or settle for a decent 1GB ipod. I agreed with the hodgepodge of thoughts that were following him everywhere. It felt like a hovering thought bubble on his head. I am a witness to the clash that was ensuing between his providence and the urge to pamper his brother. The latter made home with the trophy by conquering rational thinking.

How I then wished that I all my thoughts could be automatically be transferred to my system. Like a wire that could transfer all my e-thoughts to my laptop in my bedroom, or to my blogspace.

I found it incredibly unbecoming of my friend to feed his MBA pursuing brother's wish to flaunt the newly-acquired ghetto blaster in front of his friends.

Let me jot down what my mind could decipher from the wide display of the beat boxes. The Apple ipods are available are in 5 vibrant colors, in the memory capacity of 1, 2, 4, 8, 30 and 80 GB. The cost ranging from $79 to $349. The storage capacity of songs spanning from 500 to 20,000 songs.

The younger brother wanted to flaunt the new thing in front of all his friends. You know the peer approval things that most of the college-going 20 somethings that blindly strive for. I could imagine the , "Kya mast cheez hain yaar", reponses from the younger brother's freinds. The wide beam of happinyness that would swell the younger brother's psyche.

20,000 songs??? 80 GB?? You got to be kidding. I have a feeling that we are grossly overdoing many things be. Do we listen to all these 20,000 songs. Ok, we may not store 20K songs, but even photo graphs, documents, movies, etc. 80GB? Do you want to sit inside the gizmo? Well, maybe i am terribly old-fashioned in this regard. I know, I know... I maybe sounding like my mother, or maybe your mother. Yes, I am already aged in my capacity to accept things.

I do not how fabulous a gift technology is. I do not understand the joy of having more for less, in these aspects. I am not a gizmo freak. I would be very happy with a 1GB player.
I think every second humans develop certain wants that superpass the ones that they originally possessed. From acquiring a new cell phone each month, to a new watch each time they chance their eyes on. The bottom line is there is no difference between needs, wants and wishes.

Coming back to the episode, my other friend challenged me that all college going guys are the same. They would easily succumb to peer pressure. They love to fluant it, if they have it. All guys love attention that these exorbiantly priced things can attract. Well, well, well... All guys are mostly the same, but I was not sure if they are the same in all respects. I dialled my brother's cell phone number. Let me call him by his initials. DD.. He is also in college, studying to attain his bachelor's degree in engineering. I ran him through the range of the ipods available, and asked him what he wants.

Me: Which one do you want? From 1 GB to 80 GB...
DD: 80 GB. You got to be kidding gal.
DD: How many songs can a 1 GB hold?
Me: Hmmm.. 250.
DD: Get me a GB. That is more than enough. I can always sync my ipod.

Hail to sanity and my brother.

Calvinism

We get to hear these unalloyed truths from Calvin. Some of my favorite

"I'M SIGNIFICANT!...screamed the dust speck."-Calvin

"There's more to this world than just people, you know."-Hobbes

"I'd hate to have a kid like me."-Calvin

"I hate to think that all my current experiences will someday become stories with no point."-Calvin

"Girls are like slugs - they probably serve some purpose, but it's hard to imagine what."-Calvin

"Do you hate being a girl? What's it like? Is it like being a bug?I imagine bugs and girls have a dim perception that nature played a cruel trick on them, but they lack the intelligence to comrehend the magnitude of it."-Calvin


"In my opinion, we don't devote nearly enough scientific research to finding a cure for jerks."-Calvin

"You know how people are. They only recognize greatness when some authority confirms it."-Calvin

Hmmm, sigh...

Less:Lesser:Least is as to Mouth:ears:Brain

Galileo proposed the geo-centric model. Each of us have our own 'me' centric model. Galileo was unncessarily declared as a heretic for it.

Whoever said time heals was gifted with a very bad memory.

Fate never throws anything at you, which you cannot handle.

Except death, you can survive anything.