Holiday!

It’s a Thursday and I am sitting at home in the peak office hours. Reason, I am not well you know. This weird NY weather has caught up with me. One fine day it would be chilling winter winds the other bright and sunny and on cusp of breaking a sweat. The ailment per se that I have caught is called “garam – sard” in poetic Hindi. Literally translated “hot - cold”. Sounds fluke, but don’t blame me for the naming conventions. The standards have already been patented by the likes of Munshi Premchand and Mahashweta Devi. Okay that’s all crap! Bottom-line, I am cozily perched up on my sofa typing away on word and my guitar lying right next to me. Bliss!

Holidays are luxury commodities for IT professionals like me. Because although we might just be breaking office chairs while searching weird terms on google during our usual so called busy work day. It’s the number of hours of this chair breaking work that the client pays us for. And so our managers insist that in the spirit of the company we should spend the maximum of our lives in the office, in sickness or health, till death do us part types. I won’t go into the dynamics of how our companies make money and why the client pays us for this high-end work, because that’s way beyond my comprehension.

Back on track, what’s the POA for today? For the ignorant POA stands for Plan of Action. First and foremost lots of rest, lest I forget I am on a sick leave. Then there’s this guitar tutorial that I have bought, couple of chapters to be covered in that. Write a blog.Well I am already writing one so that’s taken care of. Cook a nice lunch, afternoon tea, a nap may be. Basically chill.

And that’s an FYI. Go figure that out for yourselves.

Slam Dunkin

Was sitting in a Dunkin Donuts this evening, sipping on a tall rather very tall plastic cup of Iced Latte, which seemed to be missing sugar in it and there were these flyers of back to school hanging around over the head here and there from the ceiling. FYI…it’s the beginning of the school season here in the US after the long summer breaks. Back to the flyers, they read quiet a lot of stuff including welcome backs and animated books of math and the works thrown in for the spice. One thought led to another and soon I was thinking when I last studied those subjects and for the matter of fact any subject. I was trying hard to remember myself studying anything…any darn thing; I just couldn’t picture myself at all. Has it really been that long? As in it’s hardly a couple of years, okay, 3 to be precise. But then it’s not entirely a time thing you see. I really haven’t studied much in my life. In school I used to be on my bicycle perennially, partially because my best buddies used to live miles away from my place and secondly because I just loved it. School was a breeze, with the assemblies and the long sunny corridors, where I used to run around chasing or being chased, the chemistry labs, the falling pens in the bio labs to sneak under the tables and just like that I was in college. Away from home for the first time, alone per se, though I never got to be alone actually. There were freaking 200 other guys like me in the hostel. And another 200 in the other hostel next to ours and at least 100 girls, who used to put up in some hostels a little too far for our liking. Bull…I wasn’t writing about girls.
It’s about the studying part, and its funny I remember one of the tougher of the subjects of all Control Systems. Khiljee saab, the purveyor of the now famous phrase maut ka kua, was the prof .I just saw myself solving those positive and negative feed back loop problems from all those books written by authors with weird names and always russian sounding. Used to love solving them and it was a matter of prestige as to who would get to the farthest problem number on the back of every chapter. It’s really amazing how fast and how far once thoughts can go in a matter of split seconds. I hadn’t even finished my latte yet, and I was already at least 4 years back in time and many thousands miles away in a not so clean hostel room. Although as a foot note, the latte was really humongous.