Its a mornin' here

Allo folks:

As the year draws to a close, you guys must be getting all the feel-good year-end emails and voicemails from your managers and higher-ups. Just another smoothing of nerves before the next round of spanking begins come the new year.

I have been thinking. What if one had the kahoonies to write it like it is. A little thought experiment, and I came up with this:

Dear employees:

As the year draws to a close, you must look forward to such feel-good emails from us, just to see how removed from realty we really are. Since we, as the reasonable compassionate people we have been all year with the lay-offs and pay-cuts, have decided to acquiesce your desires. If we cant pay you or keep your jobs here, we might as well do the little we can in keeping with the holiday spirit. It is after all christmas.

We have accomplished a lot this year. We were at the bottom of a seemingly unsurmountable mountain at the beginning of this year. Our technology was at the rock-bottom, morale was low, deadlines were looming close, budget was strung tight like a freshly botoxed face. Now look at us: We have realized that that seemingly unsurmountable mountain was in fact, covered at the top by a cloud. Through the year, the cloud disappeared and its in fact a mountain with a volcano brewing at the top. We have lost a few people in the process, andgained a few good friends in china and India. Our morale here sucks, but the morale of our brethren overseas is on the up and up. We should learn from our new colleagues across the globe. Our purse
strings have been tightened even more. Please be glad you have jobs. If we hear you complain about the economy, who won in the elections, the stinking garbage, and ill-maintained toilets or even the weather in general, that will count as a "black mark" on your files. Ou HR police is on the high-alert for the season.

On the bright side, we shall have a christmas tree in the lobby with little santa and Rudolf ornaments on it. Employees are asked to proffer $10 to pay for the fake tree the management managed to procure from Walmart. The christmas was a grand success thanks to the efforts of you people. Sorry about the late announcement of further lay-offs. It was bad taste on our HR's behalf to announce the news during the party. I mean who does that? That bit on who is going to be laid off (We misprinted initially as "Paid Off". Hahahahaha) on top of it was just uncalled for. The announcer (who was encouraged to do so by our CEO in the first place) has been properly reprimanded.He is cooling his heels in New Haven, Connecticut FYI. Address will given on demand.

Please keep up the good work. We need more horses like you to flog. The glue industry has a high demand for old horses. FYI, we have some secret plans in the cooking to usurp your 401-K plan moolah. Kenneth Leigh (spelling ok?) from Enron is our hero. In fact, his picrure hangs in one of our restricted boardrooms. What a guy! In all, it was one good year for all of us.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS.

Management.

p.s. Please fee free to take you stuffed stockings from the security on your way out today. Unfortunately its coal in the stocking. Our China and India colleagues got new cars FYI.

Images

This is a "Did you ever notice?" articles. If you are not in the mood, I think there's a good movie playing on TNT that you might want to check out ;o).

I think images and smells are quite interesting as a carriage for memories. Do you guys agree ? Everytime I hear the opening flute sequence from "Chinna Chinna Roja" from "Roja", I am reminded of the corridor outside Murali/Krishna & Ramanathan/Lazar's rooms. There were these good times that were spent sitting there chatting with my good friends while watching Rameshwaram express steaming past in the 6.30 morning sun. Well past the cashew groves and the compound wall of the CECRI campus. This song was playing in the background. The memory is of us trying to time the Roja song opening line to the train passing by, while the sun was still coming up. That reminds me of this beat-up tape-recorder that Murali had. It was the size of big folder. Worked well for the beating it took. There was this one frigid (then it was!) december morning, when we did get it right and got the timing right. There were 3 blissful minutes spent in silence while we watched the perfect blending of the sun, train and song. That is an image to keep for eternity.

Everytime my birthday rolls by, I remember Chockka. It was 1990. Chockka woke me up on my birthday so we could go to the local temple before the mess opened. 6.30am in the morning, Chockka and I were on his bicycle. Now his bicycle was the lifeline of our hostel-house. For 10 of us, his bike was the only way to get anywhere faster than walking. Well-used in the 4 years it spent with us. Anyway, this was when the bike was still new. We had just left our hostel-house. Sokka was pedalling while I was trying not to fall asleep, when he stopped abruptly. I was jolted awake, and blurted out "Enn..." when he shushed me and asked me to look to the left (outside Dr.Rao's house). I did, and found a mongoose family under a tree very close to the road. Could not have been 4 feet away. The eyes were red, and all 4 were on their hind legs, watching us. The most rivetting sight to our sleepy sore eyes. We didnt speak for a while while we rushed to the temple and the mess thereafter. For a change I felt good going to classes. Thanks to Sokka, I have a memory to keep as long as I live. Talking of sokka, having been his room-mate for 4 years, one can imagine I would have a few barrel-fulls of memories to let out. In due course of time.

Talking about our days in the hostel-house, I remember the one time I was coming back to my house from the one Ramanathan stayed in. I had to cross a grassy patch of land. The grass up to my hips and dry. It was 2pm in ths afternoon on a nice sunny day. I suddenly heard rustling in the grass and found that something was coming toward me at a brisk pace, not too fast though. I waited while the rustling came close. Then the creature that was the source of the rustling stopped and jumped 2 feet in front of me on the path. It was the most cute bunny rabbit I have seen in my life. It was a little one that must have lost its mom or just lost. It must have been surprised by me too. It just sat there and looked up at me. I felt bad. I picked it up by his ears and supported its belly. It was soft and shivering. I then walked a good 50-60 ft into the grass and left it there and walked back home. Again with a smile on my face. This little incidents served to pep the spirit so beat by Ahuja, and electrochemistry.

Some songs remind me of my teenage crushes. Our Hawaii trip was a riotous trip down memory lane. There were so many street corners that reminded me of Adayar, Trichy and Bangalore that it was unreal. There were the "Thengapoo" tree, the wild jasmine tree among the few I can recall now. I bet it was similar for Kala too. Right now she is looking like a tiny chinese butler in her nightgown! And that is a another good memory to behold too for me. A nice start to a warm sunny day in the northeast.

Good luck and a fair day.

English Woes

I was on the telly with Kala the other night, and I was, for some reason, reminded of Subburaj saar. Anand and only Anand among the Idlies would know who this man is. Others, like my lovely wife, may have been initiated into the Ordnance Factory Trichy life. Nevertheless, I just had the urge to write about this man, and get the itching off my chest once and forever. Every student worth his or her English-speaking salt who passed through the annals of Kendriya Vidyalaya, Trichy, would bear a lifelong grudge against this man. Subburaj saar. Wasn't a tall man Subburaj saar was, standing at 5 ft 0 inches. With that height that was just about enough to intimidate a toad, he tried to make the rest up in attitude. He made negligible impact. He then tried to make the rest up by being the most bad-ass NCC (National Cadet Corps) master there was. That entailed yelling at poor clueless students such as the author (who with chicken finger legs attached to 10kilo marching boots, resembled a broomstick stuck to an anvil) who in turn had joined for the free soggy puri and aaloo and masala dosai.. Got it up a notch more. But still had his pupils sneering and jabbing at him, both behind and in front of him. Not being able to bear the ignominy of his students, who he wanted to shiver in his presence, making fun of him, he hatched an ingenious plan of making them suffer and remember him for the rest of their lives. He decided to teach them English. I am the last person to take offence to someone named Subburasu teaching me English. At that time, I hardly knew enough to know better. And to think he was the substitute teacher, who VOLUNTEERED to fill-in while the replacement was being moved in from some other waterless paradise. Class X, the 1st big barrier a student faces in India, he decides to put forth his plan into action: Subburaj saar started to teach English. Half the time, I remember him yelling "Elei Nayee!". (To the non-tamil souls in this group: ask your spouses what that means).

The coup-de-grace came in the form his version of the tenses. "Pasangala: There are 4 types of tenses", he used to preach. "There is the present tense. There is the past tense.There is the future tense." And the moment of truth ,"And then there is the past future tense". For the whole year, he preached there were 4 tenses. "Johnny came. Johnny is coming. Johnny will come. Johnny would have come. Johnny would have come is the past future tense students!!" He would bellow out.

A whole year of past future tense later, that INCLUDED mid-term exams that asked us to write the past-future tense of "Ram is driving the car", we were indoctrinated into the Subburaj school of English. The class X CBSE exams, mercifully, did not ask us to write versions of tenses. We had no clue. Then we decided to migrate to another CBSE school in a neighboring town. 10 of us, band of brothers, went to RSK Higher School, wherein taught English a tyrant Lloyd Gonzales. He was funny, he was articulate, he was the cynosure of the beautiful doe-eyed girls of RSK, and he was Anglo-Indian. Did I mention he KNEW about us new-world enlightened English-speakers from the neighboring town? And he looked forward to skewering these poor, unsuspecting souls from KVT. First day in class, after a couple of jokes and quips that relaxed the entire class of 75 (more than half of them girls), he suddenly assumed a dour demeanor and announced "Are here any KV students here?". Caught unawares, we stood up, 10 of us quivering introverted souls and I were among them. Also present among us was Rakesh, a stocky pimply kid who desperately sought to blend in with the cool kids of BHEL township (that's where RSK was. An up class neighborhood). Then Lloyd Gonzales made his move: "Can anyone of you who are standing up tell me how many tenses there are in English?". Wanting to impress and thrill the audience with his new-found wisdom, Rakesh blurted out "4 saar". Then the mayhem started. First there was stunned silence. Shock hung over the classroom like the cloak of a New York socialite. Then there as murmuring in one corner. Someone laughed in another. This caught on, like a virus, spreading along the aisles, all the way to the back-benches. The sleeping students in the back, awakened by the sudden noise, woke up, asked around what the brouhaha was all about, and jumped right in. There we were, 10 of us out to prove a point that we are as good as anyone else there, standing stupefied among a snickering crowd of 65 students. Then Lloyd chimed in with his "Wren and Martin" version of text-book grammar enlightenment. It went on for 30 agonizing minutes. There were examples he quoted. Then he wrote down a sentence and rewrote it in the different tenses, as we looked on in horror, regretting coming there. Regretting to admit that we were from KV. Over anything else, vowing to strangle Subburaj saar when we met him. Some of us were craving to meet him in a dark alley to do a number on him. It never happened. Those 10 grew up. Many became engineers. Some became doctors. There were clerks, scientists. But no one became a teacher, definitely not an English teacher. Guess Subburaj saar got his wish after all. We could never forget him. We all have a dark past ladies and gentlemen. The students of Subburaj saar are an accursed lot. Don't ever ask us how many tenses there are. You might not like the answers you get. We all lost our innocence the day we learnt about his dubious 4th type of tense.

A thought on politics

I have been thinking about the events of past 4 years, and the events before that leading back to the times when I was hardly ever political or interested in politics.

I do not know about the rest of you, but my knowledge of politics , when I was little, came from watching my dad ranting and raving about DAs (Dearness Allowances: those tidbits of rupees that the central government throws at the predominantly middle class workforce to adjust for inflation and price increase) or lack thereof in the latest budget announcements. Those extra Rs.200 he would receive after taxes, would I guess have helped cover the charges for the cycle repair he incurred that month, or that extra chit fund my mom or he had joined. Indira Gandhi may have called for emergency rule; there may have been multiple parliamentary elections conducted since the current government was toppled in a no-confidence motion ; we may have had the embarrassment of enduring 2 prime-ministers- one the regular, and the other his so-called deputy; MLAs literally hitting it out in the assembly afterJayalalitha first came to power (I remember seeing an MLA ranting against the DMK on TV while his bleeding forehead was reddening his starched white shirt and his dhoti was tattered to reveal his striped underwear. Ah the good days!).

Never did I stop to think then what else was going on outside. While the Indian foreign policy was restricted to regional diplomacy, guess there was a lot of turf wars being fought by the cold war adversaries right in our backyards that I was not very aware of then. For the first time in my entire puny life, I am actually worried about this upcoming election here. I feel so powerless and emasculated when I see the events unfold one after the other. I have been talking with the good citizens of this country when and where I can and am in a position to find out about their views of this election. There have been the ultra-liberals (this IS Upstate NY), the coveted undecideds, the ultra-republican crowd. There have also been the unconcerneds", who reminded so much of my parents. This last group are of the category who have this attitude of "Who the hell cares ? Its one crook versus the other anyway."This particular group is the one that I see mobilizing their opinions. Every single one of them hates the incumbent. And mostly because of his Forrest-Gump-like attitude toward everything. They are tired of the jokes, the barbs, his "misspoken blurbs", his compassionate conservatism speeches. I just don't know how big the group is unfortunately. (If a person needs his deputy to hold his hand during an important deposition in front of prominent statesman, it would be a joke to see the debate where one has to improvise. I see the debate as the turning point in this election. The one with the deputies in particular. The one in 2000 was a joke don't you think?).

I am thinking of writing to the challenger to encourage him to stand out as a sincere person who makes more mature mistakes, not the juvenile ones. I don't know what tone to strike, what else to write. All I know is the following: There are republican voters who hate the incumbent because of the above-said information. But they don't trust the challenger because he is just a democrat and people are proud of just being republicans. There are democrats who obviously will vote their choice. But the undecideds might swing the incumbent's way if they don't see a difference. A case of the proverbial known devil. Sen. Kerry is just not swinging the votes his way, and it pains me that I cannot put my words onto paper to throw my opinions in as a third party observer. I think this does concern me in some way somewhere. I know this is important, but I am struggling to make sense when I write.

Do you guys understand what I am trying to write here? Does anyone agree with what I say or not agree? Do you think I should not be overly concerned? Are we not in a closer-knit world now that 15-20 years ago ? Last of it, do you agree this election will define OUR lives, the lives of the floating idlies?

Bungle in the Jungle

Vamsee Modugula, a gregarious civil engineer and transportation planner from Fremont a suburb of gay paradise San Francisco, loves to meet people and make friends. So much so she claims she has almost 150 friends from all over the world. Among them, she holds a selectfew very close to heart. In a freak turn of events leading up to this past labor day weekend, she organized a convention (of sorts) that almost ended in a melee and riot police having to be called to handle the irate crowds. Here is what happened, in her own words.

"...It started out as a funny idea. My friend Madhavi and I were talking about how we don’t meet that frequently anymore. See, she lives in Pittsburgh and a CEO of an upcoming software company, and has a cell-phone tattooed to the side of her head. Busy life-ishtyle, badei log (in her native tongue Hindi. What Vamsee says is busy life-style, important people). She loves to tell jokes of that about which we don’t talk about anymore, after this weekend. There are these friends of my husband's, 4 guys all married (Readers: please realize Vamsee means 4 friends married to other people, not to each other. Indians like to speak English in a circuitous way, remember Appu in Simpson’s?). Madhavi is married to one of them. The others are equally fun-loving and enthusiastic to talk about that about which we don’t talk about anymore. We decided to make it a yearly event where we would meet at a convenient location so we could chat and eat and talk about that about which we don’t talk about anymore (Readers: Vamsee likes to use these words "about which we don’t talk about anymore" a lot. Off the record, she sheepishly admitted she is a closet-fan of Night Shyamalan, famed Hollywood director. These lines are a shameless paraphrasing of dialogues from his latest movie "The Village") . But it turns out we were not spending enough time talking about other things, the real things we wanted to talk about. You know. Important things like recipes, finger lake wines, my obsession with mangoes, my husband's obsession with facials and imitating dances of Bollywood actresses (Readers: Bollywood is India's equivalent of America’s Hollywood) etc. The guys just wanted to get drunk and talk about their past. They are all pretty old, the men are.

Anyway, this year, we decided to meet in Vail after a long drawn out battle. There was voting, there was a recount, then there was a supreme court ruling. Heh, heh!! (After the reporter coaxed her on the "supreme court ruling" part, she revealed that one of these friends Tara has a 18month old son called Shtiram. It was his decision to stay put in the west, and the others so overcome under his spell of cuteness, agreed).Vail was picked since it was the boondocks of the west. The other choices were Finger lakes of upstate NY, North Carolina. Unofficially, I would have preferred Roswell, New Mexico or Area 59, Nevada. Both are equally desolate and we all needed to decompress and spend some quality time together. Also, if the going gets tough, there are aliens close by "to kidnap them". We rented a house big enough to house an army. We thought it would fun having the house all to ourselves. Then we realized we forgot to include other close friends. One thing led to another, and soon we had 45 gents, 10 little children and 2 dogs to fit into that house. So we decided to call it a convention and not a get-together. And so it was that we met up here in Vail, the whole posse. Coordinating the renting of hummers and tanks to aid with the logistics of travel and air-lifting of food by Apache helicopters was managed by Madhavi due to her connections with the US Army. Her company was doing some serious business with them folks. Alas, we had not accounted on the shortage of toilet paper. And the water supply. Food was abundant, and everybody ate to their hilt. And that was the problem. Need I say more: A riot broke out. Have you seen the Seinfeld episode with the toilet paper lady and Elaine ? Well, that was nothing. Tara and Kala may seem petite, but when they ganged up against bigger men like Murali and Bhaskar (their respective spouses),it was an impressive display of claws and fangs. The kind of hunting scenarios that show on Discovery channel my husband likes to watch. These men retreated into the woods with lotas. (Readers: You don’t want to know what the last thing meant. A word of caution to the readers to not venture into the woods around Vail for the next few weeks). Toward the end of the weekend, the men and the women were drawing lines in the ground and divvying up the TP supplies. The kids were ok since the diaper supply was enough. The dogs, well you know they are dogs. They went with the men. It was ugly. Tempers ran high. he noise roused the nearest neighbors 5 miles away. They called the police and FBI. Did I mention the suspicious looks we got from them when air-lifting the food supplies ? Guess 45 Asian men and women congregating in a rustic setting and speaking dialects that seemed mid-eastern, the men running off into the woods at ungodly hours, and the constant hooting and yelling must have raised suspicions beyond the yellow level. They must have duct-taped their windows too! (Readers: Vamsee is a democrat).

All said and done, 11am Monday morning, we were staring down the guns of 40-odd nervous uniformed SWAT team cops. By the time we explained our presence there, and sorted them out and got Ramanthan to return the nightstick he knocked off a cop's hand and the spaniel to let go of another's butt, it was ready for us to leave for the airport.

Next year, we have decided to call each other to chat about this year's events, and everything else, including that about which we don’t like to talk about anymore in person."