Of Broken Legs and Bad Projects

So I’m back and blogging after a reeaallllyyyy long time, just about 15 months to be precise (thanks Doc, for those encouraging words!!). Now I quit blogging as it was just impossible to post a blog at the precise moment when you had this really cool thought you wanted to share. But after breaking my leg and having it in a plaster cast for a while, I have realized that (un)fortunately I am now in a unique position to blog pretty much whenever I want to. Not that it means much, but still…

There are lots of things that I have managed to do after breaking my leg that I wouldn’t really have done otherwise – watching Friends, watching TV fairly regularly and writing this blog to name just a few. But the most interesting thing by far has been the opportunity to observe closely the repair/renovation work which is currently underway in our home. There is essentially a local father-son contractor duo which has been hired by us. The two come by fairly frequently, discuss what we want and give us their suggestions from time to time. They tell us what can be done and can’t be done, the time required and the costs involved. They have also shown Mom and Dad examples of their previous work in nearby flats. The father also has a nephew who assists him in his business. He stays ‘on-site’ all day and supervises all the workers in the house.

Now I know all this is really boring, but I can’t help but think that our home’s renovation is so much akin to a badly managed BCG project. We are the cranky clients, who sometimes are not clear about what we want and are obstinate about doing/not doing a lot of things which the contractor simply doesn’t understand. The father and son are like a senior and junior partner, or a partner and principal if you like. They keep trying to assure us that all is well, that the costs are reasonable, that they know what they are doing and that they can show us references!! The nephew is like the Project Leader, and all the workers are the poor hardworking case team, who probably curse everyone from the client (us) to their bosses about such a poorly planned, scoped and executed project...

Mumbai, again...

There were many things I felt like blogging about since the last post, but there was always something else which popped up and frankly I was a bit lazy too.

However, the terror attack on Mumbai has left me with an absolute mix of a lot of emotions; I am angry and sad and maybe a bit scared but most of all I am disgusted with our !@%@#$^ politicians. All they can think of is votes at this point in time. And it also makes me wonder, where the bloody hell is Raj Thakerey at this time? Considering how big a loudmouth he is I am sure he would like to have said something, like refusing assistance from other ‘non-Marathi’ parts of our country…

True, our intelligence is screwed up (considering we have been battling terror for ages, one would expect some capabilities to have been built up by now) and without decent intelligence terror just can’t be tackled but our politicians have no will to do anything except make fancy statements. As I was reading in the paper somewhere, you cannot expect to counter terror, which is getting increasingly sophisticated with a third-rate police force and intelligence; and it suits our politicos to not have an effective law and order system.

Anyway, this was just to let off some steam. A rather incoherent post I guess, but writing more would mean just going on and on.

PS – The only positive thing is the common man's response to the terror. But I wonder, when will people’s patience run out??

PPS – I still don’t get why the f*** the media were reporting everything live anyway, all our commandos movements on air…

Cleaning out my Inbox and Missed Goodie Bags

Was going through my e-mail inbox recently, and was basically trying to manage it as it had become quite cumbersome (apply labels, delete useless stuff etc). I wasn’t really reading mails, but mostly their titles which were usually good enough to remind me of what the mail was. There were instances when I re-read some mails, instances when I found unread mails which I wish I had read earlier and there were mails which made me a bit sad as well.

But essentially, looking at all those mails really sort of refreshed my memory, reminded me of friends I had lost touch with...and gave me an excellent opportunity to read some completely inane and stupid forwards.

PS – my latest really big gripe has been my failure to register for the Delhi Half Marathon in time. (I reached about 5 minutes too late at the bank. No, really, I swear…) Anyway, do note that I have said register and not run. This is because on registration you get a ‘goodie-bag’ from the sponsors full of (mostly useful) stuff worth at least 1500 bucks, and the registration charges are only 300. This has prompted lazybones like Mr. L who registered out of misplaced enthusiasm, and then quite predictably, did not run, to declare that in future he would be registering for all such marathons (half or full, who cares) and come up with a veritable goodie-bag collection!!

And for the record, I completely intended to run the 7km run…but now I think L’s choice is the way to go :D

PPS – That was rather a long PS, wasn't it?

Obamania??

So Barack Obama has finally created history, and people in the States are (understandably) going ga-ga over him. Now I am happy as well, that democracy shone through etc etc, but I would be happy even if it was the first woman President, or if it was any other African-American. What I can’t understand at all, is why people in India are going ga-ga specifically over Obama.

Obama hasn’t clearly said what his policy on India is going to be, except the usual bit about India being very important and a strategic ally; he hasn’t called on our PM so far either and he is a Democrat. Democrats have traditionally been less favourable to India than the Republicans, and the last time a Democrat occupied office was Bill Clinton. To be fair he did visit India, but apart from that all he really did was impose sanctions on us post-Pokhran, and provide all sorts of weapons to our neighbours.

Btw, it just may be that everybody is going ga-ga over him for running possibly the best Presidential campaign in history; and for becoming President despite admitting to drug use and smoking!!

Space and Time

This last month has been full of travel, which has afforded me many chances to just look out of airplane windows and think (I am capable of that sometimes, despite what this blog might suggest!!).

I was recently returning back to Delhi from Calcutta and was looking out of the window as usual. It was night and there was this city below, all lit up (not sure, but I think it was Lucknow); and I thought that it looked so nice and orderly. And then I thought all cities looked nice and orderly when I saw them from the air, even though up close and personal they are probably shitty and stinky and dirty and disgustingly full of hatred and crime. It was like the magnitude of the distance seemed to make all those things irrelevant, just like a long time helps heal all wounds. And in that respect at least, the two are similar.

I don’t really know what Einstein’s space-time theory was, but for me, I guess this is about as close as it gets to understanding it.

The Forgettable Show

Some people just don’t know when their time is up. Yesterday Dad and I were embroiled in a little tug-of-war over the TV remote. Dad wanted to watch the Unforgettable Show, while I was more keen on watching the England-Kazakhstan World Cup qualifier. Now, before anyone jumps to conclusions, the ‘some people’ I am referring to does not include Dad, but most definitely includes Amitabh Bachchan. As a result of the above tussle over the remote we came to an agreeable compromise which involved switching between channels (what else!!), which meant that I was forced to watch that boring (and flop, if the media reports are to be believed) show which is nothing but an excuse for the Bachchan family to try and mint some money. As it is AB baby’s acting career is going nowhere (and whoever thought he could play a superhero, but more on that later).

Having explained why I was wasting my time watching that show, I will come back to the point i.e some people just don’t know when to stop. So as I was watching the Unforgettable Show (absolutely and completely forgettable from the 15-20 odd minutes that I saw) all that was going on was –

• Jaya Bachchan being introduced in extremely flattering terms, which convinced Dad to promptly change channels, without any instigation from my side
• Amitabh Bachchan being introduced with an almost 5 minute video showing clips/pics from various stages of his career, and describing him in extremely flattering terms as well, which convinced me to change channels (and Dad didn’t complain)
• But what I found most irritating was that once Amitji came on stage, all he did was sing his old hits and sort of moved his feet a little here, a little there while staying rooted more or less to the same spot. I mean since when did people want to hear him sing? Everyone knows he is past 60 now, and so can’t really jump and dance around, but that doesn’t mean he starts singing randomly on stage. We kept thinking that there will be more, surely people are not paying money just for this; but we were wrong. Dad finally agreed that watching England play boring football is a much better option (although 6 goals in the last 40 minutes of the match did make him happy). And I was left wondering, whatever happened to aging gracefully, goddamn it?

This btw, is not just specific to Amitji. The some people I have been referring to can easily include so many more people in the limelight, who simply do not understand that there comes a time in everyone’s career (however glittering it might have been) when you need to factor age into the equation.

Apart from that, I finally saw A Wednesday yesterday. A tad late, but well worth it. Good script, great acting, and some fantastic editing which makes it extremely crisp. For those who haven’t watched…I would really recommend this and Aamir as the pick of the lot from Bollywood this year. And at the other end of the quality spectrum, I have heard Drona is topping the not-to-be-watched-at-any-cost list (though Hello seems to be giving it competition).

Thankfully I haven’t seen any of them myself, and as I wrote above Goldie Behl must have been deluded when he thought Abhishek Bachchan could pull off a superhero character – he simply doesn’t have the screen presence for one, has a perennial frown on his face and doesn’t have the physique to carry it off. But what I find really perplexing is Priyanka Chopra’s role in the film. Apparently she plays Drona’s bodyguard!! Huh?? Since when did superheroes need bodyguards?? Goldie must have thought he’d take the age old concept of princess-entrusted-with-secret-protected-by-superhero-bodyguard and turn it on its head to come up with an ‘original’ story!! :D

But whatever you say, both PC and AB baby’s careers seem to be going nowhere at the moment, and maybe Big B is just trying to do his fatherly duty by providing for his son!! Who knows…

A Bit of This, A bit of That..

This is probably going to be more of a ramble (not a rant though) than anything else. I feel sad that I wanted to post a couple of times in the last 10 days or so, and I had some good ideas as well but unfortunately work and sleep (what little I can manage nowadays) are a priority.

So my dear friend Moti has reached and settled well in Stanford (I would really love to define the settling well part, but sometime else I guess :P) but he sent me a really cool link which is like the clearest and most jargon free AND funny explanation of the subprime crisis ever. I know this might seem hopelessly outdated but with the way banks continue to crash left, right and centre I just thought it would be an interesting thing. Here it is, definitely worth a dekho –
The subprime primer!!

It’s almost as if every weekend all the bankers get behind the scenes and decide which rotten apple (read bank) is going to go off next. But even funnier is how the US has approved a $700 billion bailout package. I admit it was rejected first, but my first thought when I came to know about it was that it’s a positively brilliant idea – an ex-Wall Street ibanker creating a solution to solve problems created by a bunch of current Wall Street ibankers (at least partially) using up the poor public’s money. Now I might be wrong, but still it’s a really (darkly) funny situation.

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All these blasts which are happening around us really made me think a bit (unfortunately I am not capable of deep thought). For the last God knows how many years pretty much all terrorism in our country has been attributed to ‘external’ agencies like the ISI. But in this case, the bottom line is that it is home-grown, and even if the ISI were involved it is only because people here want their help. There are as many different ways to bomb places as there are people (and sometimes even the threat of a bomb is enough to cause mass panic and stampedes) and you can’t really stop these attacks unless you nip them in the bud, and that needs some really good intelligence.

Right now I get the feeling that the attitude is that most of this is being controlled from across the border, so there is only so much that we can do; and people are probably not trying as hard as they should. Or maybe our intelligence has been so busy looking at ways to counter the ‘external’ threat that we have ignored the issues in our own backyard.

I am not really clear myself, but there is probably this feeling of fatality in our society which has learnt to accept these things too easily after all these years; and I don’t think that is very healthy.

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I had also gone to IIT recently, although as pointed out by someone it was more as an employee than as a friend. But as always it felt good to be back there, although the few hours I spent for that just had to be cut from my sleep.

Its been a while since I have seen any good movies, although the last one I watched was Righteous Kill. Even though I could predict the story in about 15-20 minutes, there were a couple of nice twists. But basically it was worth the money for just watching De Niro and Pacino together.

But to me, books are more important than movies, and I still do manage to read a little every once in while. I finished A Case of Exploding Mangoes (thanks Doc) a while back, and would strongly recommend it to everyone. Has some brilliant satire and dark humour. Currently I am slowly going through Shantaram. It’s my third really good book on Mumbai, apart from Maximum City and the Sacred Games and I am just wondering if I could find something similar on New York.

Apart from that ManU are back to winning ways, and Berba has broken his duck. But there is a midfield injury crisis looming, and I don’t really like it at all. And I am also going to be off to Goa soon!!