The long, long disappearance

I didn’t even realize just how long I had been away until I consciously saw the date of my last post!

A few press coverages, a wedding (our own!), changing the place, setting up the home as well as office at the new place, crazy search of people to hire and finally the hirings (we are 2 employee and an intern strong right now!) made the days crazy.

Let’s see if I can be more regular from now on.

Star One – Some Relief

If I remember correctly, I have talked about it earlier. The total failure of T.V. as a source of entertainment. Where is the genuine light-hearted entertainment? News, sports and Dicsovery channels are not entertainment for me. And sass-bahu soaps are more of a headache than entertainment. One can’t even watch them for just awareness’ sake – something one can do for news, sports and Discovery channels.

Star-One has some relief for me. There are four serials I watch these days

• Sarabhai vs. Sarabhai: I won’t say much about it. It’s an absolute master-piece. I can’t remember another serial, which had such intelligent humour! It’s not a new serial. What we see are repeat telecasts. But who cares. Being an old serial, they keep changing the timing, but these days it airs on weekdays at 8 pm.
• Dil Mil Gaye: If I remember correctly, they used to air a serial called “Sanjeevini” on Star Plus (?) long back. The serial had started off on an interesting plot with a bunch of interns in a hospital called Sanjeevini. But it hadn’t taken it long to degenerate into another saas-bahu saga. I don’t know how it had ended. Dil Mil Gaye has a similar plot. The hospital is called “Sanjeevini” in this one too, and Mohnish Bahl plays the head of the hospital like in “Sanjeevini”! The good thing is that unlike “Sanjeevini”, Dil Mil Gaye has stuck to its plot – at least till now. The incidents are not necessarily very practical, real life kind. The pranks they play, the way they behave, are rather comical and very unreal at times. But overall, it is what you would call a “cute” story. Nice to watch. Does not give a headache. Airs on weekdays at 8.30 pm. Repeated at 11 pm.
• Miley Jab Hum Tum: This serial is also in the category of “cute” serials like Dil Mil Gaye. This is set around the students of a college in Mumbai; the “cool” set of Mumbaites are joined by two “so-unlike-then-hence-so-funny” small town sisters and the events that follow. IITians can not be a great judge of how real or unreal the situations and incidents depicted are At least all the girls in the college swooning over one “cool dude” guy is beyond our imagination So is a girl, even if she is the Diva of the college, coming to the college in strapless, mini dresses. But let me not judge all that.

  What I really like about the serial are its well itched characters. Unlike sass-bahu soaps, there is variety in the characters. The four lead characters have their own personalities and characters. They are good and bad in their own unique ways. Not like our saas-bahu soaps, where all the heroines are carbon copies of each other and so are all the vamps. (No point even talking about heroes and villains there, right?).

  Plus they are not stereotyped like most of the serials and movies in India are prone to doing. The small town girls do not speak the flavor of Hindi, which is beyond the comprehension for everyone. But very realistically, they are shown to be using words and phrases, which baffle and amuse the Mumbaites. (expressions like “By God”, saying “chutkula” instead of “joke”, frequent use of Hindi proverbs by our small town girl Nupur). And unlike “Vivah” (the movie), they do not use words like “Jal” for water. Airs on weekdays at 9 pm. Repeated at 11.30 pm.

• Siddhanth: Now, this is some serious stuff. Again an old serial and this is a repeat telecast. Airs daily only at 12 midnight! This is a law based drama and a very bold one I must say. Has taken up issues like treatment of AIDS patients by the society, workplace discrimination against pregnant women, and even sex-change (which is illegal in India apparently). Extremely engaging serial. Highly recommended for some serious entertainment. The timing is not quite convenient, but the effort is worth it.

  On the sideline, the lead character (a lawyer) seems to get too much of female attention. But his character and personality is itched out in a way, that explains why he is attractive to women. Smart, handsome, intelligent, professionally successful, rich with pro-bono inclinations, comfortable in court-room as well as in high society parties, a subtle flirt, respects women – but is not a ‘chaplus’ either, sensitive, responsible, mature… Wow! That’s an unrealistically long list of positive adjectives. But the character does not feel like unrealistic at all. One reason is that he has been shown to be growing through time to acquire these qualities. He did not have them all by birth! Plus, he is shown to fail at times. He falls speechless in court, even falters and stammers in some tough situations, feels desperate and appears to be reaching nowhere is difficult cases.

  Anyway, that’s the sideline, which adds some light moments to the serial. But a must watch for the main drama around law, courts and cases.

Twittering, if not blogging

While I am unable to maintain regular blogging routine, I am restarting twittering. For the time being you can get quick updates – http://twitter.com/jayajha

And hey, if you haven’t yet voted for us at TATA NEN Hottest startup contest, please, please do so now. If you get us in top 30, we get some free PR, which we can very well use at this stage.

You can vote online as well as by mobile.

SMS HOT<space>171 to 56767 and for online voting go to http://www.hotteststartups.in/viewandvote.do?method=fetch&businessFn=viewandvote&startupId=352

You can do both

I am alive, and safe, and sound….

Working with some cool books, interesting people and some business too

Check out Sally’s World. Although written by a 11 year old, you don’t have to read it simply because ‘oh a kid has written it’. It is genuinely interesting and holds your attention through out. With professinoally designed cover, professional editing and proof-reading and suitable formatting, it is going to be a good read for adults and a perfect gift for a book-loving child!

Sorry for the advertisement like sound of the above, but I was genuinely impressed by the book.

Many avenues, Please contribute

We have been able to collect information about a bunch of avenues to contribute in the blog http://biharflood.wordpress.com Please choose one of your choice and contribute.

If you know me personally and are okay forgoing section 80G benefits, you can also help by sending cash for the medicines, first round of which we are planning to send by 2nd September. Get in touch, if interested.

In any case, picking up one of the avenues from the ones listed on the blog should always be possible.

If you are in Bangalore and would like to donate old clothes, please leave a comment. You can also coordinate such collection for your office and we’d be happy to figure out the logistic of collecting it from you.

If you want to coordinate some efforts of sending relief items in your city/area/company/college, please look at these posts, which have information about the things needed

• http://biharflood.wordpress.com/2008/08/30/requirements-and-address-of-aid-volunteers-in-patna-and-araria/
• http://biharflood.wordpress.com/2008/08/29/narmada-bachao-teams-relief-efforts/

A list of medicines required is available here – http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pXkYURrkCSy7Cd6zB4VmMQg

Given the number of people affected (Approx. 30 lacs by now) and the extent of devastation (Many comfortably placed families are on roads! Don’t even talk about those who already had very little!), combined with the fact that water is going to take couple of months or two to recede (to allow any kind of repair and reconstruction), it is going to be a long drawn out battle. How many people can be saved? How many can survive the mental trauma they will go through even if they survive physically? We don’t know. But at least many people are working on the ground and rest of us can help with resources.

There would be time enough for blame games in future. This is the time to do whatever we can!

More on train…

Trains have changed too. 3AC coaches are now named as B1, B2 etc. Then, there are those indicators on the platforms for where a coach would stop. One of my colleagues at Google had told me about it, but I had dismissed it as an old thing that did not work. They used to have those static boards with coach numbers, which did not mean anything. And you best bet for guessing the location of a coach was a vendor or your coolie. But no, it wasn’t that old thing. This was an electronic indicator. And the coaches stopped pretty close to those indicators even though not at the exact place. I am wondering if this is a more wide-spread thing or whether it was only New Delhi Railway Station.

The ticket. I was traveling with an e-ticket for the first time, although it has been in existence for a while now. For the uninitiated, e-Ticket is different from the i-Ticket, where you get the actual ticket through courier. In e-Ticket, you just take a printout of the ticket and carry an id-proof with you while traveling. Now, in a series of goof-ups that have happened till now in this journey to IITK (starting with the rescheduling of my flight to Delhi by 3.5 hours, making me fear that I am going to miss my train), after boarding the train I lost that printout. I had the soft-copy on the laptop (hence I wanted to save that little bit of battery), but I wasn’t sure that would work. As it turned out that since I was carrying my id-proof, it won’t be considered a ticket-less travel. For the lack of a printout of the ticket, I would only have to pay Rs. 50. What a relief it was. If you lost a regular ticket like that, there is no proof they’ll accept and you’ll have to pay the fine for ticket-less travel. Hail e-Ticketing!

Anyway, finally I am at IITK. At the Old GH – the GH of our first year. Now, called GH-2. Ironic, isn’t it? Well – it was converted to a boys’ hostel after we moved to the new GH. But after the female student population outgrew the new GH, it was reclaimed as the Girls’ Hostel and called GH-2. This reclamation happened after I had left. It feels good to see it back as GH

More in coming posts.

Online on Prayagraj Express!

I am on my way to Kanpur. Life has changed, has changed so much since I visited IITK last. Getting on to a train has started feeling like an alien thing. I had forgotten to carry paper-soap for example. Thankfully a vendor walked right past me and I noticed. Bought it. It has been a little over one year since I have been on a train last. But then I was boarding from home, my father was with me and hence I did not have to worry about preparaions, except for ensuring that my baggage is packed correctly for the flight I had to catch from Kolkata. So, it has been over two years since I have been on a train on my own. Funny, isn’t it? Thanks to the cheap airlines, whom you would curse everytime you board them, but you end up using them anyway. Despite delays and everything, the time it saves – you feel like shelling out that money. And of course, when so much of your travel is official, even that isn’t a problem. But then on certain routes, catching a flight just does not make sense. If a flight to Lucknow from Delhi gets delayed by 5 hours (as it happened to me once), you are certainly better off taking a train. And for going to Kanpur, first flying to Lucknow and then a 4-5 hour road journey did not make sense. It was a much better deal to just take an overnight train from Delhi.

But then more things have changed. Thanks to my E90 and Airtel Mobile ofce, I am online on a train in India!! I remember the days, when my hutch mobile phone did not use to work in Bihar and I just did not have anyway to connect to anybody on my way home from IITK, after I entered my home state. Or even the day when somebody having a mobile phone used to be a news in campus. Today I am online on a train! I mean, this may sound very odd, but I am unable to express how overwhelmed I am feeling with the changes. And its not that I am going there after 20 years. It has been only four years.

There are more things, but guess what. My laptop is running out of battery. And for some reason, about which I will write later, I must save this last bit of battery. As a reminder of the good-old train days, the socket near my seat is not working in the train.

So, how was Google?

This post was written a while back, but decided to post it only after my last day.

–

March 5th is my last day at Google. I have resigned, serving the notice period. I am starting up finally. The usual reactions:

“Oh!”
“Good.”
“Really?”
“Hmm…”
“What? Why?”
“Achchha…”
“Sure – you want to do this?”

Followed by

“So, how was Google?”

“It was a mixed bag” is what I would say. Cliched and diplomatic, as it would sound – this is the truth.

There have been times when I have felt ecstatic in that organization, and there have been times when I have felt totally disillusioned and frustrated. But I haven’t talked about individual experiences in past and I won’t talk about them now or in future.

There are problems in the company (there are reasons I left) but again, I would avoid talking about those. Despite the problems, there are things that are really good about the company and I would like to list down some of those. As and if my company grows, I would like to see these things there too -

• Nice and Smart People: Yeah – that’s a rare combination. But I have come across several smart, but nice and down to earth people. There have been some in the “smart and not-so-nice category” (and very rarely not-so-smart people), but the general ratio is tilted towards the smart and nice. This is an amazing experience to be with so many smart and nice people.
• Excellent support staff: Google is known for its Engineering Talent, isn’t it? And free food. What is often not talked about is the excellent staff they have in IT, Facilities, HR, Finance and other support functions. A bad accountant in the company can make the experience miserable for you. Patient, well-behaved and competent support staff creates a positive difference in the work environment engineers experience. And they ensure that you get the nice, free food, massage coupons, timely cab services etc.
• Trust in people: Employees are generally trusted. Things are not questioned for the heck of bureaucracy. Once I lost my blackberry and I was given a replacement without any questions asked. People could misuse it, couldn’t they? But they don’t. That’s the beauty, when you have smart and nice people and you trust them!

Being at Google has been like being at IITK for me. When I joined it, I really wanted to join it. When I left, I really wanted to move on. I am happy to have gotten the chance to be there and I feel like I have grown up in the time I was there. I think I have met some wonderful people there. Just like IITK.

So, that was Google from my point of view for you! Not particularly informative, was it?

About going abroad and all…

Some of the comments on my previous post about not wanting to live in the US made me think about writing this little disclaimer. I am not xenophobic I have no problems in visiting other countries, meeting people etc. Working and living in the US is not something I would enjoy, but that does not mean I would not welcome the opportunities to travel anywhere in the world. On the contrary I would look forward to doing it. But after every travel, there has to be a home to come back to. And that can only be in India.

Btw, totally off-topic, but I can not hold this any longer. If you have not checked this out, why don’t you take a look at Google News in Hindi?

Homesick – after a long time…

Three weeks – and I am home sick! After a long time in my life. Or shall I say homeland sick? Just three weeks in this country of aspirations, and I know that my decision to not live in the US need not have only the patriotic-nationalistic basis. It has a very individual element to it. This is not a place where I can live.

No, I do not hate everything American. I have nothing against America or Americans either. I am not a fanatic swadeshi supporter or a communist who hates America for it being America. No, none of that. But I don’t want to live here.

Yes, in India car-drivers do not stop for pedestrians. But in India I do not have to feel miserable if I do not have a car! My world is still reachable…

Restaurant waiters or any service providers there do not act like my best buddies. Yet they are more involved in me than the ones here whose seem to have been waiting for only me to make their day meaningful and yet are so impersonal in reality.

The streets do not have signs there, but I can always stop and ask people for directions. Nobody would think of that as strange.

Diseases may be easy to catch there, but I do not have to bother about an insurance as the first thing if I fall ill.

When I walk out of my home there, there is a much better chance that I will see some life, some people around.

Vegetarian food does not mean eating “Ghaas-Phoos” quite literally in India!

India has been unable to maintain museums and heritage sites, but we have a history to talk about.

You have to buy a ticket to enter the airports in India, but you do not have to take off your shoes and belt for boarding the flight.

India has Himalayas to protect people from the chilly winds from North!

You do not have to be a prince or princess or heir/heiress of a big business to stop worrying about cooking and cleaning in India.

But most importantly, I have grown up there. I am used to India. I am comfortable there. I do not want to make adjustment right and left. I just want to be there. That’s mine!

–

This is not the most rational rambling one can write, but I hope you understand that while feeling home-sick, rationality is not the thing expected. But that does not mean I am being apologetic about not liking the place I have already shortened my trip by one week and am still counting days before I get back.