Was it worth the Wait???

"Am I really stupid? Is it really that necessary to go so early and get?" was my first thought as the alarm rang from the phone. Even after that gung-ho I made with my previous post the true reason for me to get the book and complete was becuase I didn't want Anyone telling me the spoiler. Else who the hell cares about being part of the crowd???

Brushing my teeth I set out to FORUM. The guard at the entrance guided me to the parking lot from where I was sent to second floor from stairs. I was in for a shock. There was such a huge queue I thought for a while I was imagining. From the look of it I didn't expect so much crowd to turn out. Starting from the entrance the lining went around the 'Firangi Pani' to the 'Sweet House' and all the way back till 'Pizza Hut'. More was in store. What really piqued me was the "children" section was not the most rather there were more of teenagers and tweenagers. Not to mention old people too. Standing there I saw more and more people coming, some alone, a boy or a girl accompanied by a parent. I desperately wanted a Cam with me to take in that moment. I saw many of them taking pictures .Words of SwamiNaidu rang back "You never know when they (moments) come, when they do you shouldn't be at loss and cursing yourself". A phone with a cam is worth...(if you can rhyme it ...do it on the comments... :) )

Sunaina of Radio Indigo was there to start the proceedings and everything there was on air. The crowd cheered along as the curtains closed down with a countdown. The crowd started milling in slowly and it was excruciating wait. Finally I rested my hands on the book and went straight to Jash's room and began reading. On the way I picked up a big packet of Lays that was over in an hour of my reading...

Without wasting much of your time further...it is worth it...I mean the book is worth the wait and is one heck of a book There are more than enough deaths in this one and not all at one time. The action starts right from the word go. Harry, Ron and Hermoine fill the book entirely so much so that Hogwarts, their professors are all cut off from the narrative. So if you are expecting to see detentions, quidditch, some bantering just forget it. This should have been obvious given the way the last book has ended they have much more important tasks at hand that is to find and destroy the Horcuxes.

We get to see a more mature Harry who is faced with so many responsiblites and difficulties. Without Dumbledore and his advices I was hoping against hope he would resurface in a dramatic fashion akin to Gandalf the White in Lord of the Rings. With that in mind my impatient was brewing with every chapter. Before I set on reading , I wondered may be there would be someone else who might have taken up Dumbledore's place and continue to guide him. But it turns out all he has is himself and his best friends. Through series of violent (as I said there is much too action in this book...)and miraculous escapades the task of destroying the Horcuxes goes on.

This saga is a very very well thought out one and it shows a lot. All must have been familiar by now the intricacies and the links that Rowling patches up between the previous ones. This too has some that takes you back as far as the first one. You see Ollivander, Gringotts guard surfacing and they play a part in this.

There is utter chaos on the streets. Ministry of Magic is overthrown. Both muggles and non-muggles are under dangere. Death eaters are let loose, and so is the HeadMaster. You will get to know the REAL Dumbledore and Snape's tales in this that changes everything you know so far. Like all the climatic showdowns of sagas the battle of good and evil takes place with Hogwarts as the battleground. Who wins? Who Survies? (If you haven't read the leaked ones and also the blasphemous New York Times Review) I suggest feel the heat yourself. Don't let anyone spoil the fun for you.

The only glitch in the book is the Epilogue: whcih it could have been done without. All in all an enjoyable saga. Years to come one truly will miss Harry and his adventures. I for one would be reading all the seven in near future. Let me see how my thoughts are then..

Enjoy Reading!!!!!!!!!!!

THE Day before the H-Day

If your first thought is : What is a H-Day? Forget it...no wonder there are some illegal aliens roaming around.

H for Harry mate..you see..that simple it is. Phew...After having played an hour of t.t (losing all the matches excepting one ...10 matches in total ) I just couldn't help myself running out to my ODC to blog my feelings. There is exactly 45 minutes before I can catch a bus. So you got the setting now I guess. Am freaking excited.

A thought struck me when I was about to sleep yesterday. This probably might be my first and last time ever to be part of World-Wide frenzy. Hysteria sorrounding iPhone is probably when the whole media sat up to catch up the shopper's lurking around the stores to get their hands on. I couldn't be part of it. There might be a time when something extraordinary comes up which puts the people out of bed past midnight but 100 to 1 chances are it happens not in India. Again there might be a chance I might be there at that moment part of That crowd. But again there are many 'mights'....

You might be wondering are they not people thronging for the first day, first show or the people coming in hordes for watching matches at stadia round the world say for the next Soccer World Cup. Try to notice the difference here...these events are not about buying a Thing...it's not a consumerist hysteria. It is a collective mass hysteria. So in that regard, there is hell of a time before some thing like that comes up.

So I feel kinda of special being part of it and I sure would relish the joy. Oppurtunity did present itself during the time of 6th book release but Campus recruitment were going on, so had to postpone. This time it's different. It's the last book and from the suspense sorrounding either Voldemort has to go or....who else... Harry... This adds a bit more suspense and aroma to the whole flavor.

Now coming to the things at hand, I was bullied around like no other day. I, Karthik, who I think can contain my emotions and not get carried off by bullying was for once helpless. Begging around not to torment, pleading for patience, warning for further intervention, and almost to the verge of breaking THE very bonds that is hurting me even now, I went on with the constant refrains:

Mild:

'Please dude...don't do this...don't say anything...no spoiler at all...I just can't take it man...Try to understand...'

Average:

'What the heck...arey...let's not talk about the book at all..period...Anything but the book..please...

Anything ...'

The Limit

'Look it's not funny anymore...I am not like this...but this time I want the suspense to be held. Things would be bad if this goes on mate...between us that is..'

Jash,Joy,Ganesh, Adarsh and thankfully not Ranjit, Ms.Ponnan did try hard you see. And goodness me what a stroke of luck I had. POP ..came the message down under the tray bar:

'Adarsh has sent a mail '..I just clicked it...

The first words were enough to close the message down and press delete. Soooooooo close...what an escape. Poor guy...he is clueless even now how did I manage to escape the spoiler and he thinks there is some third party involved in the rescue operation....He he he he ...if only he knew...

I don't want to bore anything with my work, so nothing on that regard. Anywas as I was saying the excitement has just begun.

Watch out for what happened next.....................

(Arrey baba... I mean tomorrow: the day after the H-Day....)

to be continued...

What A Day!!!!

Well..well...
"She said, she is not sure when she goes" said Swati and damn I thought someone just shot right through my heart. As Ms.Ponnan rightly put it THE only motivation for us to come and do what we are doing even though what we are doing have been doing again and again for the third time and the sole reason being She might go. What the HECK????

Damn, this comes along when we hear Bhav getting into some other team. It is amazing how fast the mind can travel and when time becomes a non-entity just as if it doesn't exist. I was struggling hard to try getting the Circle name, and the total into a list item and the sorting it out independently depending upon the total. Trying for a structure, then going for an array I was going on experimenting. A little more of time would have been fruitful. But then Ranjit comes along and we end up in the discussion room regarding db design for Workstation. Frankly I didn't want to go but had to. Anyway half-listening to what they are saying, half thinking how to do the sorting time moved on.

Bhav comes along carrying the news of requirement in Motorola Project. God..if only she didn't ask us if we could volounteer as they needed to resources. The work to be done is so fully loaded thanks to HER that we can't say YES to anything. I mean either we work our ass off night and day continously, wrap the thing up or just quit on it. The second choice is ruled out what with Manu asking ever so politely 'when can i start using??' ..do we bloody hell have a choice ??. Coming to the first one we are fed up with seeing the same things again and again and again ( Man.. i love this phrase...it just so perfectly sums up my feelings...) that there is no enthu, zeal, that urge, that whatever to get it finished. The initial excitement has waned. Suddenly we just weren't there in the room. Time flew by. Heads down, happy for Bhav but ruminating on the future time flew by and that is what I mean when I said what a beautiful thing time is....

The time when we were of the type sacrificing Saturdays and Sundays getting the things on time. It just ain't there. Again thanks to HER it's-not-change-it-is-requirement bull shit. The other reason being as I see, hearing news of anonymous calls to our mates started drifting our minds off and something else is occupied in our mind now "We have to get out of this project hook or by crook whatever be the case". We have lost it. We are so freaking exhausted that we just want this thing to get over and take rest.

Again thanks to HER this looked so remote. I mean with her brainwashing discussion of 4 hours which was a spectacle in itself trying to make HER understand what exactly happens when we alter DB and how the changes happen was like :Making a LKG student understand how to ride an Aeroplane? Simply put Mission Impossible INFINITY. So all these things are somehow interlinked and the zeal is just ain't there.

Thinking all this each one of us were in a different world altogether (a real damp, dull and gloomy one ...make no mistake...). Hardly talking and laughing out at our own miseries the day passed...

And that day was Y-e-s-t-e-r-d-a-y.

Boy..o..boy... Excepting the time I had during the Techfest prep, there never has been so many ups and downs ...that swelling of emotions is worth living for. So hearing that SHE indeed is going to go, our joy knew no bounds. We were ecstasic to put it mildly and in the words of Ranjit 'Asalu EAMCET Lo first rank vachina inta feeling undedi kademo...'

Let's see how long this joy of ours is going to last but as long as it does I am going to relish every moment of it...what with Harry Potter finale coming the day after....It's like Icing on the Cake....

YUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

Conflict in the Mind

Some things are better to forget and it is better to move on. But things that are bothering me now are way beyond. How long can I go on before I realize I haven't taken any steps to correct it? What will I be if things go on the same way?

Am I like Shantaram interested in everything, commited to nothing? For a while I thought enough is enough and let me move on. But it is not working. It just is not working. Weekends were torment for me but so are the weekdays now.For that matter any day. This won't stop till I put an end, come to desicion. Whom am I trying to fool but myself in believing there is nothing wrong with me when the ties I have made are temporary and when I commit to nothing? Am I as again from the book mapped to the co-ordinates around and breaking up all the existing ones? Will I be the same once I move out from here with new people,new atmosphere, past being past? Only time will tell.

Here I pen down hoping to read this post again and again to gather strength and divert my mind as much as possible with books and work and making my self a promise to stay focused. After all, you can't clap with a single hand. As I see it I was always was single and will be too in the future.

If only I can move to some other place and live alone can I find peace and for THAT to happen
---three months more...

Does this put me at ease....well a little...

Apna Desi Style...

'Kite Runner' By Khaled Hosseini changed my reading habit forever. Somehow I made up my mind to get OFF the American settings and to venture into more Indian based novels.

Well here are some of the best and not-so-best ones and some blurb on it. (Fact of the matter is I guess I lost the habit of getting a review right and surprisingly I stopped at least three books reviews mid-way because I couldn't wrap it up in a page or two and the essense was lost..)


1. Inheritance of Loss: (By Kiran Desai)

The booker award being the sole criteria I picked this book. It was utterly boring book to begin with and never really took off. Most of the time I kept flipping through the pages to see when will it end. There are three or two ( or whichever i don't remember) parallel stories here. One about orphan girl Sai left to be cared under her aging Grandfather who himself has a very dark past and it takes quite a chunk of the book detailing his background which more or less is about the racial abuse of 60's. Because of some tragic incidents she has her studies cut out. The other is about this servant's son who somehow with all money poured in by his father reaches US of A and does every menial job possible working as a illegal immegrant and moving from one job to another in similar gruelling and worse conditions. The main plot involves the former one and how their lives (i.e. Sai, grandpa and cook...) are changed when things start going bad after a local revolution begins. There is a small romance between Sai and her teacher, aunt-bickering, racial discrimination, etc. all good enough for a nice pot-boiler but sadly falls short. Enought of it.

2. Life of Pi- Yanni Martel

A Gem of a book. This is one of those rare books - the books that at first I crib about page after page, and curse myself for how stupid I could be for picking such a book and at the end of it is a priceless treasure that is worth reading again and again just for the courage it inspires and one that makes you think hard about life. It is the story of Piscine Patel a.k.a Pi and a tiger and the wholesome adventure that follows. When their family decides to move out from Kerala to Columbia (some place) along with all the animals of the zoo a disaster strikes leaving all his parents and the entire crew of the ship dead and leaving behind Pi and the tiger. Reading the backpack I thought it is one of those family made movies churned out by Hollywood where you have animals talking with children and how it gets last and finally everything-back-to-normal happy-ending type ones. Surprise , surprise it literally meant the story of Pi and the half-ton Bengal tiger. My hopes went deep down after realizing it halfway through the book when no magic appeared and the only characters being Pi and the tiger.

Amazing thing about the book is the ten year old kid does things that I bet twenty year olds just can't imagine. The entire book is about the act of survival. The chances pitted against anyone in such a scenario being 2-3 months a the max following the survival guide, Pi goes on to live for 5 months and beyond. It more or less looks and feels like 'Cast Away' minus the land. The author must be commended for his brilliant potrayal of life and it's meaning. It also reminded me of the V forVendetta's V's torturing the reporter and settting here free because she feels afraid no more.

The ending could have been much more subtle by not including those funny Laurel and Hardy characters in the end with natural flow of events.

More to follow....

The Game .....A long time later

After a very long time I played football again yesterday. It felt really good to be back playing the
game I love the most. I didn't play well though. I made real bad fumble, couldn't tackle the ball
long enough, and almost all didn't hit any worthy shot that I can take back excepting a side kick pass that eventually landed in a goal.

It is in the player's physche I guess to judge how he/she has played. I remember how Jash used to complain during those BasketBall times how bad his rythm was, how he was missing the baskets one after the another while on other hand as spectator I thought he had played excellently that day and it was funny to see him crib. I was rushing all at once not organizing players around me or having none to follow up. On top of all this when my mind was furiously telling me 'Your game is pathetic' over and over again like a mantra they decided to make me a goalie. That phase was the worst. I felt like a fall guy among all the eleven players. All the people there being from different Ole's, Sub Ole's and Projects and in a simpler terms unknown to me I couldn't really command anyone else to take up the job.

Luckily enough Ganesh's IDPP mate was there to swap the place. Well we played the game on and on for an hour and a half and it felt great. Two injuries beset me as I write this one a swollen ankle, two a painful arm. 'Reebok' - a brand I thought is one of the best out there ditched me and the result of which I am suffering every step I take. They are too tight around the ankle and the uneven ground were the perfect conditions for the sprain and the oppurtunity was seized upon by innocuosly aloof Mother Earth...:)

Am I making too much of a fuss writing about a game?? ( yes, yes....) Apparently not...

Another Dose of Ten Minutes

Well from the first time I realized ten minutes ain't a small amount of time. It is large enough to caputer a day's event.

Well for starters this is the first time I would be blogging on a laptop. Went to office today and spent lot of unnecessary time getting the gui done rather than concentrating on the fate of the web page i.e. the functionality. What I thought would be a cakewalk turned out to be a herculean task 
in itself. This is not the first time this has happened. A few days ago I thought I would surprise
both Julie, Usha and all my team members by doing add/delete/edit functionalities in one go. I
guess I need more patience and understanding and the need to take decisions step by step.

As Paresh rightly said I think too much ahead than about the task at hand and trying to delve into multiple things at the same time is wasting too much of my productivity and thinking. Well I should make it a point to note down on the notepad what is it that I am going to do
and what are the targets.

The future ain't looking bright as Paresh, the only source of knowledge would not be as much
involved as he is now. And top of that the DB design has drastically changed. I wonder how the
business logic is going to be now. The tool is not going to be of much help and we will be left fending for ourselves. So the first thing to do would be to know how the Business Classes are generated, and start writing classes and procedures of our own.

Well putting things in perspective, I see no fault of Julie at all in the way she acts. She makes us
crazy with all those unnecessary things like Excel Sheet, Time progress sheet, her intervention in every aspect of the project. Though initially I was freaking irritated when she asked me to pump in at least five rows in all the 10 tables and another 9 Lookup tables doing that I realized how messed up the DataBase really was. I was practically chaning each and every database invovled and their relationships. A very valuable lesson for the future indeed.

This project immaterial of the fate (looks like this is going to scrapped again) has made me realize the real power of C#.Net and the sophistication involved in every aspect of designing. I guess without Paresh's help these things would have taken at least  a year and a half to learn. Experience, as  Bhav says, is all what we need. Even after so many days of trying to get grips and learn new things I am not able to progress beyond and any amount of R&D done in getting a problem is solved is going waste. Something should be done and I should make it a point to keep track of every new thing learnt....

Well... i guess i exceeeded the ten minute mark by at least another ten minutes...
next time i will stick to the timings....

10 Minutes of Anguish PART I

On 15th i.e after 2 weeks of thinking and making up my mind to blog I finally get to blog. I thought I will test myself

Time is ticking... i got ten minutes exactly now...

Well to start with I should have seen the signs much earlier. The cracks have appeared and they don't seem to erase anywhere near the future. Well before my life becomes invaluable and worthless it's better I do what I think I can do the best. Chitti did tell me long ago to capitalize on my writing.

In days to come this blog is going to be my lifline.  After a agonizing 1 month of BENCH where all I did was while away my time at the office doing net and nothing else I have entered an altogether different life where I find it difficult to find time to while away. What an irony??

The work is excellent and the challenges it throws upon are immense. It is only now I realize whatever was taught at Hebbal was only 1% of .Net universe.

We started off first by creating a dummy website required for the PEOPLE  working for EA. Ranjit and me were initiallly assigned to reporting services (another whole branch of technology to deal with). We had an amazing time doing R&D to get simple things sorted out.  With help of Roop Ranjan , we were able to sort out many issues and that is when  I realized how much I lacked behind in SQL Syntaxes for quiries. I was in the background for a while.

The task was preliminarily assigned to Prachi and Ranjit but I volunteered myself for it helping Ranjit out in his task. It has proved to be a very decisive move as it has landed in a place where excitement, fear and yearning for learning are all mixed and am having a ball of time with such a mixture. Just when I thought I could brush up on my skills on the basics we were bailed out and put into data pumping job ( which I came to know little later was what Amit & Co. were assigned to initially).

Praneet, a TeraData Expert, and another guy Rahul both were there to make life simpler for us by knowing some simple tweak formulae for the pumping. That being done we moved on to the website from where Sari (the bride-to-be left for marriage) left her innumerabl traces. It was haphazard and it reminded me of the way we developed the dummy websites under Raghvendra guidance. We took care of it and did so many things (which are better left to part II blog of the series)

Well at the end of the day what we developed is not they wanted and we were left to lick our own
wounds.
 
Not bad 10 minutes is too much of time for a blog.....

My First Indian Thriller

-- Quite a Shocker of a Book

Edit- 10-May-2014, I just realized throughout the entire post I never mentioned the book name and for sometime I felt I may have written it for some other blog. Let me tag the book for future reference. The book I took up is - Bougainvillea House by Kalpana Swaminathan.

Thanks to Hindu’s Literary Review I found such a book does exist. Truth to be told I took this book as it costs much less than ‘Fireproof’ and also has more pages to it than the other. I know that’s dumb but money was tight.




Anyways it is completely different kind of thriller that I have ever encountered. As one of the reviewers said it is psychological thriller that plays with your mind as you read along.
Clarice is an old lady suffering from motor neuron disease which has over the years has weakened her sense of well-being. She is taken care by her daughter Marion and her maid
Pauline. Marion is 37, still a virgin. Clarice is lady who wants nothing Indian and always craves for western ideologies and embraces their culture to the tilt in manner of food, clothing or general behavior. Marion’s and Pauline’s life are lead by her leash, each controlled in a different way. Her character is a myriad composition of doubtfulness, shrewdness, guileful and utterly lacking any feelings of love or compassion. It evokes so much hatred and you start wondering how a person can ever be so unpractical and cruel to fellow beings. This is one character that stays with you long after you finish reading the book.
The other principal characters that hold the book together include Detective Perera, Sharifa - Khan’s Wife, Sister Abby and Rajesh (the man from police). Sister Abby is someone who provides much needed mental ease needed by patients and who plays a greater role in bringing out the dead skeletons from the closet. Sharifa is a practical lady who understands the distress faced by her husband and provides a meaningful interpretations and good advices to ease the burden of her husband.

Coming to the story, she is brought to Bougainvillea house, Goa because of some of the unfortunate events that took place at Mumbai that has affected all the family especially Marion. Her well-being is taken care of Dr. Liaqat Khan. He recommends another doctor by the name Justin who is at Goa for Clarice. Justin resembles a lot like Clive, Clarice’s late husband and this upsets Clarice a lot as she sees fondness growing between Justin and Marion. It is then we see deaths happening one after the other. And somehow each death makes Clarice more and more weak to a point where she goes deaf-blind-and numb at the same time.

Why are these deaths happening and how are they related to the family? What is it in the past that rankles her mind so much as to make her so protective and over-caring for Marion? How is it that 56 year old lady who finds so much difficulty to stand on her own needing more than enough hours to sleep is somehow linked to all the deaths happening? Is she really capable? Are there going to be any more deaths? How safe are Sister Abby, Pauline and Marion? When should we draw the line between being sane and insane? There are many more unexplained things that slowly start to unravel themselves as the story proceeds along and this forms the crux of the story.


When I came across some of the medical terms in the initial part of the book I thought this might turn out to be one of those Robin Cook’s book with predictable escapist formula. But it is not so. Those are given as an idea to the readers to impart certain facts about the old age disease as the author himself is a doctor.

The book is not without a dose of humor though especially the parts with Liaqat and his wife or when he is with Perera debating whether he has done the right thing or the wrong thing. The suspense is well maintained throughout the book and the climax is one of the best I have ever come across since ‘Messiah’.

An highly recommended book to read. Don’t miss it.

Irrelevant Musings

“My name is Karthik. I completed my Engineering at Vasavi College of Engineering, Hyderabad in E.C.E. I love blogging, reading novels and watching lots and lots of action movies…” and next was Ganesh who did his introductions and things moved on. It was such a relief to find Mr. so-and-so not enquiring about how often do I blog or what do I blog. Even if he did this is my explanation.

The day is 1st Feb and my last post dates 25th of September.
That tells a lot.

It wasn’t that I completely gave up on the idea though. I did pursue it in Lakshya Infotech ( the place where we were trained…more on that if time permits and more importantly if my brain works right…) by writing about the Biblical story of Jesus Christ in simplest of simplest which alas, has gone without a trace and I can find only the sequel to it. Even that I dragged on writing for a month and you know the rest. There was the time when I was on phone talking to NewAger urging her to at leas for my sake write one post a fortnight for my sake and blog sake. She did and I couldn’t. Such a waste.

I wouldn’t even have cared had it not been for the small time I browsed through pagalguy.com and landed upon this truly superb blog yourstruly.blogsource.com. As I was going on reading from one post to other I felt really pained and sad. Every post of mine gave me such pleasure that would keep me happy and composed for at least a couple of days.

And it is at those times I begin to see things in different light and enjoy new found enthusiasm and spirit within me. I become more keener and focused reading the editorial daily (which is one of the yardsticks I keep to gauge myself and that’s because I belive in the dictum : Knowledge is Power and with power comes enlightenment) , some part of the novel and less of T.V. Essentially by doing these things I tell myself : you are sane and you are doing the right thing and not wasting time or bluntly put nuvvu mast great ra baabu pakkanolatho compare chesukunte… blogs rastav, paper cheduvutavu, novel cheduvutav… baap re…asalu too much…

And that’s how my ego is satisfied. Apart from that it is also because I want to see how I was and the progression of my life in due course of time. I feel empty and wasted just thinking about what sort of man I have become who can stand for no principles, a man without a definitive goal and who can’t make up his mind and stick to the convictions. Now I would be too hasty if I said I am going to start off with a clean slate from now because IF I do the end will come sooner too. I decided I am going to put this up on “air” at least ten days later and not on the same day.


Here I am sitting at my workplace with no work to do and idling my time browsing through the guest folder, searching for some funny videos, ppts or movies for that matter. If not this the next would be my fascination for the gadgets which strangely started affecting me of-late. Thanks to wired.com- the place to know about the latest news and gossips about the tech-world. In that regard too the retention is proving to be a great hurdle. That’s another part of the story.

Well that’s my present state of mind and man am I not glad to fill a page for the blog….
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOH…….. PARTY TIME……….