Yesterday I watched "War of the Worlds" .. captivating movie, what with the alien ships sucking human blood, spewing intestines all over the place, vaporising humans into thin air and all. 'This is total extermination !!' claimed an actor in the movie who looked more alien than the aliens. Anyway this movie is not going to be the interest of this blog.
A thought continued to linger in my mind after the movie .. what if humans were to really face their end, it has happened before to the Dinos, it can happen again. NatGeo claims an asteroid is hurtling towards the earth and is predicted to make contact in 2880. If humans are 'exterminated', what happens to their beliefs, their Gods ?? . Didn't the Dinos have Gods to protect them from extermination .. may be they were not smart enough to invent God.
History has shown that a new religion was born everytime a good man preached his way of life to people .. he was eventually declared God by his followers and worshipped through the ages. The most widely accepted religion was adopted because of many wars waged by it's crusaders over many centuries.
Now we have a separate God for every religion ... lands divided on religion ... humans obsessed with 'exterminating' people of other religions .. humans destroying others' places of worship, the list never ends. Ayodhya is such a tragedy, two religions in constant conflict with each other just 'coz a wily ruler wanted to get a kick out of a sadistic idea. Now the only thing anyone has to ever do to put this country into total turmoil is to remove two bricks each from the mosque and the temple (while all the cameras in the world are watching, mind you). Humans will go beserk even in places that were never heard of before. The recent bombing attempt in ayodhya got all such guys worked up, hooligans in small towns like Hassan came onto the streets 'protesting' against the bombing, holding up the traffic, breaking a few window panes, taking a representation to the local government office, threatening the officer/government with dire consequences if the bombers and everybody involved was not brought to justice. (why dont they take their butts and placards to terrorist camps in kashmir and protest there ?? ). Woww .. what an arousing sense of devotion towards their religion, pity they had to destroy their own property and cause harm to their own people whilst showing this devotion. What happened in Hassan is the mildest form of rioting, in other places where bigger religious psychos flourish, the results can be devastating.
The neo-humans have even gone hitech, they form newsgroups, do painful research ,publish their ideas and beliefs in fabulous sentences with hard hitting words, they assume they bear the burden of enlightening people about the greatness of their forgotten religion (Does neohinduquest ring a bell? there are a million other ways to help humanity than harping about religions to young school children).Amidst all these thoughts, I wonder why can't this highly evolved animal called man live and let live while he still roams this planet ??
Thursday, July 14, 2005
Monday, June 6, 2005
As raw as they come
This one's a travelogue, well .. an instance of it rather. I am not going to talk about what time we started, what time we reached, how beautiful the world seemed .. no poetic verses on how the nature seemed to cradle us in her green arms ;) .. no emotional outbursts on how the beautiful surroundings livened up the hidden love that we nursed for the whole of (wo)mankind and how our hearts ached to sing nature's glory .. blah..blah..blah.
Every trip has one experience that stays with you forever, you may forget the places you went to, you may forget your comrades on the trip, but you never will be able to forget that experience .. and that is what i am going to write on this blog.
As dusk was setting in, we drove through the thick mutthodi forest range and reached the nature camp in the middle of the forest. That place houses the ranger's office, a dormitory and 2 cottages. We had not made any reservations, so we had to literally plead with the guys there to provide us accommodation. The ranger was a good man , he finally relented and gave us the dormitory. Surprisingly, it had a luxurious setting, neat and clean, a far cry from what u might expect in a jungle.
Now, we were 5 guys weary from all the travelling, and seeking some sort of nirvana (uninitiated, read Whisky) to help while away the night ... But the sad thing is, none of us had any forethought to carry along the necessary supplies. Now the nearest trace of civilization is 12 kms away, it was pitch black, and we were not too keen on driving through the jungle at night, having seen Kaal just a few days back. So we decided to coax the forest gaurds to get us a bottle of McDowells', the forest guard was more than happy to be of service to us (happy about the tips he was getting, that is). He did not have petrol in his vehicle, so we extracted some from our vehicles and filled up his bike. We gave him a precise list of what we wanted and stressed 10 or 20 times that we wanted a can of sprite (or any softdrink) that will help drown the whisky down our throats. The guy went along with his accomplice and vanished into the thick darkness of the forest. We all sat down and chatted our hearts out about the whole of the universe (in other words, girls). Our guy came back after an hour, banged on our room's window and slid across the McDowell's, before we could even ask him about the can of sprite, he was gone !!!, fled, vanished !!!.
We were left with only a bottle of McDowell's with us, so how do we drink it then ,without sprite ??? .. We were not hardcore drunkards who could gulp it down as it is .. And with water, it would taste yuck!! .. So we looked around the room to see what options we had ..one guy spotted a packet of citrus glucose and suggested we make a glucose drink and take our McDowells with it. At first, it seemed an absurd idea, but with no options left, we decided to try that out. I guess we should be the first humans to mix whisky with glucose and get a kick out of it :).And in the sanctity of our drunkenness, we again began to feel an overwhelming love for all nature .. blah..blah..blah.
Every trip has one experience that stays with you forever, you may forget the places you went to, you may forget your comrades on the trip, but you never will be able to forget that experience .. and that is what i am going to write on this blog.
As dusk was setting in, we drove through the thick mutthodi forest range and reached the nature camp in the middle of the forest. That place houses the ranger's office, a dormitory and 2 cottages. We had not made any reservations, so we had to literally plead with the guys there to provide us accommodation. The ranger was a good man , he finally relented and gave us the dormitory. Surprisingly, it had a luxurious setting, neat and clean, a far cry from what u might expect in a jungle.
Now, we were 5 guys weary from all the travelling, and seeking some sort of nirvana (uninitiated, read Whisky) to help while away the night ... But the sad thing is, none of us had any forethought to carry along the necessary supplies. Now the nearest trace of civilization is 12 kms away, it was pitch black, and we were not too keen on driving through the jungle at night, having seen Kaal just a few days back. So we decided to coax the forest gaurds to get us a bottle of McDowells', the forest guard was more than happy to be of service to us (happy about the tips he was getting, that is). He did not have petrol in his vehicle, so we extracted some from our vehicles and filled up his bike. We gave him a precise list of what we wanted and stressed 10 or 20 times that we wanted a can of sprite (or any softdrink) that will help drown the whisky down our throats. The guy went along with his accomplice and vanished into the thick darkness of the forest. We all sat down and chatted our hearts out about the whole of the universe (in other words, girls). Our guy came back after an hour, banged on our room's window and slid across the McDowell's, before we could even ask him about the can of sprite, he was gone !!!, fled, vanished !!!.
We were left with only a bottle of McDowell's with us, so how do we drink it then ,without sprite ??? .. We were not hardcore drunkards who could gulp it down as it is .. And with water, it would taste yuck!! .. So we looked around the room to see what options we had ..one guy spotted a packet of citrus glucose and suggested we make a glucose drink and take our McDowells with it. At first, it seemed an absurd idea, but with no options left, we decided to try that out. I guess we should be the first humans to mix whisky with glucose and get a kick out of it :).And in the sanctity of our drunkenness, we again began to feel an overwhelming love for all nature .. blah..blah..blah.
Friday, May 20, 2005
Chaotic order
Some people might see this big bad world as a chaotic place where things only seem to happen at random .. no patterns can be associated to anything .. perfectly working code mysteriously stops working once you have your team lead by your side for review .. the sweetheart you had been pursuing for years chupke se, behind the screens, mysteriously disappears (you come to know that she has flown off to u-know-what with her new hubby later anyways). But I've been able to attach *some* order, *some* pattern to *some* things in life.
- When you are travelling by bus from mysore to bangalore and you have a free seat beside you, you always end up with a fat man who will not allow you to rest your hand on the arm-rest.
- When you are travelling by bus from mysore to bangalore, you will invariably have atleast one whacko who experiments with all the ringtones in his mobile over and over again (at max-volume mind you). I've always felt like stuffing that mobile into that person's puny brain so that ringtones are all that the person's ever gonna hear again, but I usually settle down for an irritated shout.
- When you arrive at the bus stand (mysore to bangalore again) at peak time (6 in the evening) , you will find a hundred more people waiting but not a single bus around.
- When you arrive at the bus stand (need i tell ??) at lousy times (11 am - 5 pm), you will find 10 buses, 10 ppl and each bus starting the journey with 1 person (slightly exaggerated, but you get the picture, dont you).
Thursday, March 17, 2005
15 .. till i die
15 .. this is the number of interviews I've taken till date .. since it's an ongoing phenomenon, it's only apt that i start my blogs with the subject that'll never have an end.I'll start off with my campus days, the ppl who endured the torture with me (ranjith for one) will identify with those emotions. Six big-shots - Cisco, Oracle, ANZ, Tektronix, Delphi and SLK .. in that order .. got thru the tests and preliminary rounds for the former 5. When u r still studying and u are one step away from a job at a high profile company, u start to imagine many things, u can see no reason why u cant land that job in your laps.
But ... I was proved wrong five times over, somehow this 'jinx of the penultimate' hung over my head. I tried to reason why this was happening, could not find any convincing answers, wasn't I doing something right, I didnt know !! , it's terrible to have self-doubt creep in, it was simply the most terrible phase of my academic career. I had some guys for company all along, vipul hung around for a short time .. supreeth was around till tektronix .. ranijth and GC till the end (both of them are better off than me now :) .. finally it was SLK where the wheel stopped, 'twas a simple affair with a test-interview sequence.
An obvious whiff of disappointment loomed, I knew i deserved better than this, but this was enough to spend the next year at college in peace.Post BE, the story continues, but this time around, the fortunes had changed, I seemed to have the midas-touch. I got offers wherever I went ... after 6 months at SLK, got offers from TCS and Oracle (2nd time lucky) ,joined Oracle, got home sick at Hyderabad, started to look out again .. got offers from Delphi (2nd time lucky), Accenture, EFI, Novell, HP, AOL, NetApp..they were spread out in time though .. finally settled for HP
But ... I was proved wrong five times over, somehow this 'jinx of the penultimate' hung over my head. I tried to reason why this was happening, could not find any convincing answers, wasn't I doing something right, I didnt know !! , it's terrible to have self-doubt creep in, it was simply the most terrible phase of my academic career. I had some guys for company all along, vipul hung around for a short time .. supreeth was around till tektronix .. ranijth and GC till the end (both of them are better off than me now :) .. finally it was SLK where the wheel stopped, 'twas a simple affair with a test-interview sequence.
An obvious whiff of disappointment loomed, I knew i deserved better than this, but this was enough to spend the next year at college in peace.Post BE, the story continues, but this time around, the fortunes had changed, I seemed to have the midas-touch. I got offers wherever I went ... after 6 months at SLK, got offers from TCS and Oracle (2nd time lucky) ,joined Oracle, got home sick at Hyderabad, started to look out again .. got offers from Delphi (2nd time lucky), Accenture, EFI, Novell, HP, AOL, NetApp..they were spread out in time though .. finally settled for HP
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