Sick :-(

One of those times where you feel excruciating pain in both the ears and through the face, lose your voice, lose a couple of kilograms over the weekend and spin every time you stand.  Damn genes.

Saturday mornings and a dog-eat-dog world!

I have never really liked Hyderabad. It is not only the weather or the traffic but the very fact that it is in the middle of nowhere with almost no Tamil food unlike Bangalore where you have a Udupi restaurant at every street corner. There are no parks nearby, no places to really bike around without getting mowed down by a moron. The sun always beats on one's neck and you would end up fearing for life every time you get onto the main road mainly because of these gangs of dogs.

Back home in Madurai, in my childhood, my neighbours' dogs Saaliny, Subramani and Poornima clanged against gates and bared their teeth at the sight of me at any given opportunity. Once, the lithe and skillful Subramani weaseled his way out of a closed gate and chased me up the neem tree before my house. I had to rouse the entire street before the dog's owner came and told me that Subramani, who was being restrained from the pouncing, really had a thing going on for me. Even the stray dogs on road smelled my presence and Carpe Diem'd by barking their wits out. My wall climbing skills were put to general display, when a motherly stray dog whom I called Mrs.Norris, chased me through a series of ten houses. Pomeranians near my house, were generally snobbish, pampered and they looked down upon most people. If they were not seated on their cushy chairs eating cake, they were yapping at me while swiveling round and round with their little bodies. They did this so much that my neighbours asked me not to come to their houses as "Saaly" and "Jackie" became disturbed after my visit.

It won't be true if I can justify my cynophobia by telling folks I was a cat at some point of time in my eight births. This is because cats creep me out too, what with all the soul searching stare. I don't mind animals like elephants, hippopotamus or the friendly cow (Lakshmi) across the street. I recently read that human brain prepares the adrenaline even if it vaguely sees the presence of threat. It doesn't really put together the pixels before deciding to flee. Maybe this is why I get all prepped up to flee even at the sight of sheep, white gunny bags or anything that remotely resembles a dog at a distance.

When I was in Mountain View, I was shocked to see a flock of dogs as small as chickens lolling about in the Google campus. People brought their dogs to office and they usually had dog fences at their doors. All these dogs looked very well groomed and pretty like their Californian owners. Someone told me that dogs in the US never really bark and are very well trained. Somehow, the fact that the owners can be sued if their dogs bite a person greatly soothed me. I was having a mostly carefree summer with the only worry of mounting credit card bills. One particular day, I was carrying home a horde of things which were to become a part of the 110 kgs of I brought back from the US. On this day, among other things, I had gotten a jar of salsa, to modify it into Tomato thokku. I was waiting for my bus from Sunnyvale, when I suddenly felt something wet and soft on my ankles. I look back to find a monster of a dog, black and satanic, almost like the apocryphal buffalo of Yama, sniffing at my ankles. While a , "Here boy, come on boy" would have been an adequate response to deal with the situation, I yelled bloody murder and gripped a passerby's arm. This was a middle aged lady, who had come out for a run. The passerby now shrieked while the dog which got  more scared than I did, jumped on its hind legs and held on to me. It was so close that I could see the white's of his eye above me. The dog's owner who had sent him to fetch a stick, came to us and pulled the dog off me. It took sometime to calm the dog and the passerby and I ended up apologizing to everyone. The dog, clearly traumatized, picked up the stick, licked a bit of the Salsa and set off mournfully onto the park with his owner.

To get over the fear, I once stroked a St.Bernard puppy named Simba, making sure the owner, a 5 year old girl, held his mouth close. It gave me waves of thrill like playing with fire. The next time I went home, it had grown up to look like a fatcow and that is the last time I enquired about Simba.

After self-destructing my health for the past half a year with oodles of food, late night TV series and no exercising, I have finally woken up. For the last two months, I have started walking/jogging along the hi-tech city road early in the morning. It is a pleasant place lined by Dell, Oracle and Deloitte offices while lie deserted during the wee hours of twilight.  I have become incapacitated to enjoy this beauty without a bodyguard to protect me from dogs. My roommate, with whom I walk this stretch often finds me zigzagging to her either sides depending on the position of the stray. These strays follow us back home and get into a fight with the resident stray of our street for trespassing. Rest assured that I always finish my last mile with a sprint.

 I have been jogging around the huge KBR park which is at quite a distance from my home, on Saturdays since last week. I found the stretch calming and soothing, not only because it felt so faraway from the maddening traffic but also because of the absence of dogs.

For once, I can walk free and feel the sun rays on my face. I could walk without the fear of inciting a dog fight or without worrying about my now reduced agility in climbing trees. Saturday mornings have been reinstated to their former glory! Woof!

Today's Google Doodle

There was a mail at office some months before to suggest India specific doodles.

This was my idea :)

I am so so happy! :)

One year at Google

One year at Google and I have already relapsed into the corporate mode. Looking back, I have realized how much I have changed in a year. There are three of such noticeable changes that I thought was worthy to blog about.

• I am so much lesser contentious than I was. I don't voluntarily participate in debates, arguments unless and until the argument directly affects my happiness or has the potential to change the way I see my day.

• If there is an incredible personal achievement, it is getting over my aversion for data/maths. Remember the days of CATs when I would skip questions with tables and graphs? In the past 6 months, I have discovered what had gone wrong. Since all those scary math questions always dealt with calculations and seldom with logic, I have been looking at them in a very wrong way.

• My Google moment of the day comes when I am sitting in a meeting with a huge graph and I make interpretations on the fly. It feels incredible to sweep lakhs of data points, find logical inconsistencies and also decide which data would support my arguments. I am hugely indebted to this place for making me realize a knack that I have always had. As I do more and more of data analyses, I feel that it is a pity in all these years, math was always about how "fast" I find a product rather than how smartly I do it.

• My idea about what to respect in people has changed oh-so-much. I just learned to distance myself from anyone who make me grimace at the start of the day. It is so much more easier to pretend some people do not exist than pick up fights with the said people to prove a point.

• Most of all, these days, I feel genuinely happy for others when good things happen to them. I think this is because I am very happy with how things have worked out for me. Trust me, this is my biggest personal achievement coming from a family who thrives on maddening amount of competition, putting freakish amount of pressure on everyone they know!

On a happy note, this year, I got

1) 1 "Gold Award"

2) 2 peer bonuses

3) an opportunity to work from Mountain View campus for a month (People who will be in CA during August, please let me know)

Also, this happened today :)

Some nice things that happened last year!

The work-station

The food

The football!

FB post -2 Saturday Mornings

Put the clothes in the Washing Machine
Remove last week's clothes from the line and dump in iron bag
Cut potatoes and put in cooker for lunch
Put three spoons of coffee powder in the percolator for the filter coffee
Stretch on couch and read one week worth of Phd,XKCD,SMBC, Oatmeal and Abstruse Goose
Read the FB walls of all those I have missed seeing
Fix up a massage appointment

Bask in the fact that it is only 9 am and there is an entire weekend along the way

=)

Something I posted up in FB long time ago.

The Word Cynicism is derived from kunikos, a Greek word meaning “dog-like"


If only I get a penny every time I cringe at the following.


1) Howard Roarks wannabes-



I do not think you are cool because you think you are Howard Roark, personified . On the contrary, I think you are a jerk because you justify your jerkiness by quoting Rand. I hate the fact that you do not think about other people because Roark set the trend and the thousand others whom you don't want to care about think that is cool.

2) People who put Hrithik Roshan/ Salmaan Khan photos as profile pictures

Is it because you want the girls to know that you look like Salman Khan or do you actually want to meet girls who would think the smart guy in the picture is you?


3) The Niceones

I know you are not interested in any aspect of my life, so why bother asking about my job, my house, my kitten and my parents, before zeroing on the topic you wanted to talk me about.

4) Serial Taggers
People will read the post if it is visible on their feed. If they have time to attend quizzes about their names/dogs/vaastu shaastra/lovology, they have time to stumble onto your note/post . It is not really necessary to tag everyone on your friend list in order that the post catches their eye.

5) Mixed Cappers
WrItING LiKe this is NOT funky. It does not make you any cooler than the fake Adidas/Puma/Reebok shirt you are wearing.

5) EmotiConned.

:) - > ^-^ ? !

6) Men in Poetry

Please do not start blogs and write poems for picking up girls. I have known instances of blogs morphing in to cupid.coms where the hero wept to several heroines in poetry.

7) Re-Re-Viewed
Okay, you saw the Inception and the Black Swan. You don't have to review it on FB before your popcorn becomes cold. Yes, Yes we know you have a very expensive Android phone by which you can access the internet.


There are some more, but it being a very tiring day, I cease here


Feel free to un-friend.

Of Shruthi Boxes and Sunk Cost fallacies

The unexpected discovery of the fact that my mother has donated my "Shruthi box" to the Hanumar Koil Bajanai, has brought back a flood of memories. The box had stood as a testimony of eleven years of struggle involving industrial quality yelling and slamming doors. In the ripe age of four, I was inducted in to a music class taught by this old man near our rice-mill, which made us refer to him with a sobriquet of "Rice-mill thatha". Three days after the first class, he sent for my mother and told her with deep regret that it was impossible to induce in to me the sense of tune and music. My mother was deeply up-fronted. She should have known better, as our genetic predisposition makes us sleep in the first rows of musical recitals.

She then decided that there should be someone who was a better teacher. She found another lady , who was very rich and taught music in the evenings because she was bored at home. My mother bribed me with a colouring book version of Thumbulina and dragged me to the said teachers' house. We hit off from the first day and my mother was convinced that she has gotten the best teacher around, impressed by the rows of "cups and shields" in the showcase. From then on, I had to finish school at three everyday, cross the road and go to this music teacher's mansion. The family had been one of the richest in Madurai, in the days of yore and the mansion was super cool with hidden corners and crannies like the one in "Five go to Finniston farm".

The best part wast that the teacher was an excellent cook. She would prepare the evening snack, just by the time I reached her house. She would craft mouth watering delicacies like Malai Koftha and other fancy North Indian stuff that no hotel in Madurai served in that time. I immediately started raving about her amazing voice and training methods at home and told my mother that I might even win that prestigious "Sathguru Samajam" thingy. I spent the next three-four years in her kitchen, where she taught me while she cooked. I sang "Ra Ra Venugopala" inhaling the cloves and chillies and rhapsodizing about good food.

Four years later, my musical talents were still hidden and my mother found me complaining more and more about the food she made at home. She decided that I would fare better if I were to change schools and start representing school in music competitions. This is how I ended up in TVS. This is how I stumbled into quizzing, where there were lesser girls who sang Aarahonam of Shankabaranam without batting an eyelid. My mother gave up on the school music and started entering me in her intradepartmental, under 12 music competitions. I sang something in Sahana (Remember it because it makes a pretty name :D ) and even got a second prize. There were only two people in the under 12 category, but hey, the year before my runner-up stint, they had canceled the second prize despite my singing.

My mother was a very optimistic person. Every time I was asked to study, I would offer to practice my singing, our own version of Morning/Evening raaga.She would sit before me with rapt attention. She would bring me hot water first, to clear my throat and would keep a jugful nearby incase I wanted it in the due course of my recital. In 1997-98, days Shruthi Boxes were like like the Louis Vittons of modern day dudettes and all the Music Jaambavans seemed to carry one. My mother bought me one and thought that it would do some good to my "image" as a singer than having a discoverable function of its own. We had absolutely no clue so as how to operate the device and it whined like a Moaning Myrtle when the dial was turned from one end to another.

This continued for a year and then, my mother decided I needed a shift of teachers who would "shape" me up better. I was then put into the able hands of one Mrs. Jayalakshmi whose husband was a violinist and who sang in All India Radio all the time.

To my disappointment, I wasn't offered succulent treats anymore and the teacher was rather too intent on teaching me the finer aspects of Kalyani and Mohanam. Now that I could see that there were no more inputs from her for my very bright culinary career, I started protesting to my mother about music classes and how she was wasting my time and the teacher's. This triggered off a huge war in my house which continued for the next five years.

I was then shifted to another famous teacher in my part of Madurai, Shruthi box et all. She was a strict disciplinarian and was known to deal cases like mine with an iron hand. Needless to say, I loathed those three hours every week and spent all my time concentrating on the clock before me willing it to move faster. We choked and stuttered thorough Paapanasam Shivan, Thaigaraja and Muthuswamy Deekshithar's Keerthanas. She would make me sing the demned Aarohanam/Avarohanam thing for an entire hour (I had been referring to the later as 'Arakkonam' earlier). She was the lady about whom you read only in novels; The ones who would never succumb under obstacles such as the girl who sat before her like a rock. In retrospect, she would have made it great in corporate what with that indomitable will, but in those times, I would fume like a short circuited Shruthi box.

After we ploughed through a single Ada Thaala Varnam for 6 months, my mother had given up on the vision of me going to a Margazhi Kutcheri . She came to this teacher and asked her to quit teaching me arcane Varnams and basics and get me started on songs that I would be able to sing in Navratri/Golu places and marriages. It was then we started more on the lines of Nalungu/Oonjal songs to be sung in the weddings.

Thankfully, when I reached my tenth standard, I told my mother that I would want to "Put total concentration in studies". We stopped the madness that had started 11 years before, wasting enormous time, money and energy and it stood like an unfinished government fertilizer factory. I spent my days at home blissfully reading Gone with the wind and P.G Wodehouse henceforth.

Till date, my (dis)ability to sing is a closely guarded secret, and one can find me in the dining halls during the times of Nalungu/Oonjal. Younger women with mellifluous voices have taken my place as the official Oonjal singer. The only time I sang after that was in this competition in one of the nearby colleges. It had a series of rounds, one of which was "talent" round, where I couldn't find anything worthwhile to put on the table. I sang (for 15 thousand rupees, I would have done a somersault if required). My friend, who is rarely shaken by anything and whose mother is one of the famous music teachers in Chennai was scandalized at my notions of Carnatic music.

Yesterday, my mother did an elaborate calculation to find how much profitable it would have been had she invested the 1000 Rs she spent on my Shruthi box, on Infosys shares. She was surprisingly flabbergasted that I have no notions of raga and is as numb as her to music. I explained her about sunk cost fallacy.

The hot news is that the next generation of my maternal family (my cousins) have started on music classes and the kid goes around yelling "Baarukkulle Nalla Naadu" over and over. I sincerely hope this musical pursuit, that has started with the bar, would raise up a bar and does not end in one.

Bicycle diaries

Cyclists are the least respected species on the roads finishing right behind the stray dogs.

Functional cycling in Hyderabad is a myth unless one possesses a geared cycle.

If one is not mowed down by the ratty buses (which stop within whispering distance behind you), one might be, by the share autos.

The famous "Cycle gapla auto ootradhu" seems to transcend all linguistic and cultural barriers in the autowallah world.

After a fall, one loses trust over the cycle and always expect it to Murphy at the most critical time.

It is always better to get down from the cycle and roll it across the road in case of traffic jams.Waiting with ill-mannered, bellicose drivers who give a hoot for the traffic rules may make the one on the cycle very nervous.

The infinite undulations in Hyderabad speak thus: "What goes down, shall come up and shall break your backbone, while pedaling up ".

Never let the cycle zoom on the downward slope for the fear of cracking already cracked craniums . Hyderabad is NOT Madurai.

Exploring by-lanes is a bad idea without Google maps installed phones.

Cycle bells are useless. Portable loudspeakers MIGHT work.

If you can't procure one, yell at the pig who drives his fancy car like he owns the universe.

Also, don't hesitate to use the choicest words in your vocabulary when the said car owners reverse without knowing the existence of rear-view mirrors or the fact that they could actually turn their heads once in a while.

When in doubt, park.

Sigh, and take the share auto.