The pink umbrella

I bought a state-of-the-art Japanese umbrella (or that’s what the vendor claimed to charge me a premium) in Singapore last year. It is big. So big that I can accommodate an entire cricket team along with the 2 umpires under it and we still can have a celebration. And then it can be folded down to put into my back-pocket when I am carrying it around. Its super cool so much so that I could use it as a pick-up line – “Do you wanna see my umbrella?”

Anyway, I bought this magic wand to Mumbai. I have been using it on and off in light rain. The first time I took it out in Mumbai torrential rains (we term it downpour, and it literally is – Mumbai rains are like someone in the sky turning a huge bucket of water all on your head at once!), that was the last time it ever worked. Now it is all broken and if I try to open it, the umbrella drapes around me like a burka.

Rains are expected to subside by the mid of next month. So I am not thinking of doing a capital investment in a umbrella now. I thought I borrow my mom’s umbrella. Now the problem with her umbrella is – it is small (I can hardly fit my stomach inside it) and it is pink. Pink as in bright baby pink. Now with the "I don’t care attitude" that I have lately developed, I thought it was okay to carry a pink umbrella and go to the crowded city (and for added effect, I was also singing Umbrella by Rihanna).

I was wrong. Absolutely everybody on the street turned around to look at me. I think the sight of a big fat guy with a pink umbrella didn’t gel well with the rest of the crowd, and I kinda stood out. My macho image suddenly got a huge beating. So to salvage the rest of my pride, I closed the umbrella and walked in the pouring rain. I held it in my hand as if I was carrying someone else’s umbrella. The pains a guy has to go through! Tch tch. Now I have decided to invest in a guy-umbrella, even if its for a day!

New species

Lately, I have been noticing a new species on Mumbai roads. The species resembles the females of the human race but are characterized by a mobile communication device either stuck directly  or wirelessly to their ear. They can be seen walking randomly, aimlessly and completely oblivious of their surroundings.

The species walks and talks oblivious of the fact that it is right in the middle of a busy traffic junction, in the middle of a busy street, or in a shopping mall blocking everybody’s way. For this species, everything around them is a nice quite garden with flowers, birds and bees for their company.

Now assuming that most long duration calls happen between members of the opposite sex, I always wonder, why don't I see equal number of men on the roads walking dreamily with their mobile phones to their ears? This thing has been bothering me for a while. And here is what I have concluded.

The sex ratio in Mumbai is amongst the lowest in India (838 girls per 1000 guys). That means there are a lot of suitors per eligible girl in Mumbai. Being the nice girls they are, every guy who approaches them is given an equal opportunity to prove his worth. So every gal has to entertain so many phone calls in a day and patiently listen to every suitor as he tries to prove his superiority over the other guy.

Considering that its a competition, guys sit in a calm, secure place away from all distractions and call up the gals. The gals on the other hand have to handle so many calls (as they are nice) that they cant sit at a place and take the call. That's why I see many of them walking around dreamily.

So next time when you are driving or walking in a public area, please do not lose your patience, they are just doing good to the males of our species.

Doggie days

India is a very dog friendly country. Especially in Mumbai these days if you are a dog, we take care of your food shelter and clothing (Hmm, may be not clothing – cause I didn’t come across a dog who was shy for being naked).

Food – We throw our garbage on the road. Even if we put it in the municipality provided dustbins, we make sure that we keep the lids open. So all the dogs can get in and eat at their will. Then we have dog lovers who on their morning walk serve left overs from yesterday to all the dogs that they meet on their way.

Shelter – we provide our crazily parked cars. Ever car has a dog sleeping under it. So each time before we get into a car we bend down and request the dog for permission to take away its shelter. Then of course we have all these covered sheds built here and there especially for all our doggy neighbours to sleep. Also in the nights, human beings are not allowed to walk on the streets. Doggies fiercely guard their shelters in the night (may be for little doggies to sleep – or may be they do not like humans invading their sense of privacy). After all, how many of us would like to have dogs in our bedrooms when we get all intimate?

But, all this food and shelter has made the rest of our roads (the ones left after the parked cars and the cordoned off areas by doggie pee markings) doggie dropping zones. So doggies attend their nature’s calls on the only strip of land left for pedestrians. So if you go out for a nice evening walk, either you smear your shoes in doggie droppings or else you hop, skip, jump around town. No wonder Indians who go for a walk are healthier than people who go to the gym.

If you are an exploited dog reading this blog and living in any other part of the world, please come down to Mumbai and I will be happy to help you.

Porter’s 5 forces

So I have had the unique opportunity to interview a few MBAs to recruit for my company in the last few weeks. Being a techie in my jobs before, interviewing was fairly simple. You have a set of your favourite programming related questions that you ask. If the candidate can answer 50% of them, you select her, else bye bye.

Recruiting MBAs however for me has been very difficult so far. You are expected to evaluate their analytical and other MBA skills (read soft skills!). Now these skills are pretty difficult to decipher if you don’t lead the interview properly. Like most of you already know, most “MBA types” are very good at speaking and can very well lead you to their comfort zones in an interview.

Now, as a part of any MBA education, I am sure we go through a dozen or so different frameworks in each subject which aid in analysing or predicting certain factors. So be it Marketing, Finance, Strategy, Operations or Human Resources, there are a set of frameworks that have been defined and widely utilized in each of those streams.

However, ask any MBA to analyse anything in this big bad world and beyond, the only framework that they somehow end up utilizing is the Porter’s 5 forces (Yeah, I am exaggerating, some do use the SWOT analysis framework as well but that's all). In the last few interviews, I have seen Porter’s 5 forces being used to analyse anything and everything from company profitability, population growth of India, US debt crisis, European debt crisis to the effectiveness of the Lokpal bill. My understanding of the Porter’s 5 forces has been now so screwed up (thanks to the enterprising candidates) that I thought I sit and read the theory again to really understand what it means. Hence this blog.

If there is one thing I realized, I am never gonna use the framework in any interview ever, unless the interviewer specifically asks me to use it!

Internet Amnesia

Just read an article about how the internet is making us lose our memory. Now along with making me dumb, it is also the chief cause of memory loss (that reminds, what exactly I am writing about? Ahem, I forgot already!).

I have another thing to blame on the internet. Specifically on social networking sites. Facebook took away the charm of remembering birthdays. I used to painstakingly remember the birthdays of all my friends and wish them just so that I could make them feel good on their special day. Then Facebook came along and took away all the fun. Now everyday when I login, Facebook shouts, today is Ms Y’s birthday, go wish her!!

Now, everyday I wish a 100 people a very impersonal – “Happy birthday! Have a great day!”. Call me old, but I still miss the charm of receiving a physical card with a thoughtfully written message from my friends on my birthday. Which reminds me, just because I decided not to reveal my birthday on Facebook, most of my friends have decided that I am born no more and I have no birthdays.

Anyways, why the rant you ask? Well well, I forgot to wish a very close friend of mine on his birthday. And I have been feeling bad since then. Figured, if I blame the social networking sites, I will feel a bit better.

Rain Romantic

Long term readers of my blog know that I love driving and have this thing for rains. So when I get to drive in the rains, I generally love the feeling. But lately, nature played a very wicked trick with me about rains and driving.
My office has 3 locations in Mumbai. 2 out of the 3 are quite close to where I stay, but the third one is far far away. To reach there, I have to cross rivers, climb mountains, fight fire-breathing dragons and drive through generally very congested roads.
Last entire week, I was summoned to the farthest office. Last week, Mumbai also experienced some very heavy rain days of this season. Naturally, I was all excited about the opportunity of driving in the rain.

But I realized that driving in the rain though a romantic notion is completely different from “commuting in the rain”. The romantic notion assumes that you have empty roads in front of you, the rain is falling longingly on your wind shield and everything outside is pleasant, soothing and perfect.
While you commute, it doesn’t start that romantic. You are actually racing with million others towards your place of work. So there is a sense of urgency. For my commute, after I cross the fire-breathing dragons section, I get to drive through severely damaged roads. The only reason they could be called roads are because every other car is also on that piece of broken tar. I think this is the only place in the entire world where cars make a unique sound. The sound of your suspension bottoming out. That sound comes when your suspension is so badly compressed that the top end and the bottom end touch each other. My heart goes out to the pain that the car goes through when I drive in these potholes.
Anyways, after I am done with the crater section of the road then I come to the river section. I am not joking when I say that I have to drive through at least 2 feet of standing water in sections. Sometimes I feel, I should just switch of my engine, take out a paddle and start rowing my car in the river.
After I am done with all this, the last section involves getting stuck in traffic. That congestion brings out the worst amongst each one of us. No one wants to yield and we stick to each other’s bumpers so close that even a fly can’t fly between 2 cars. Sometimes I feel if we were not termed a “civil society” we would have pushed each other off the road to go ahead.
Anyways, the last of my romantic notions of driving in the rain is dead now. I have becoming a zombie commuting on Mumbai roads. Alas! Where do I go to seek romance now?

Lazzy

How to spot I have been bumming around and being lazy without doing anything at all? If you answer – by looking at my messy room – you are absolutely wrong. My room is always messy. I believe in the school of thought that says “Why should I clean my room when its going to be messy again?”

The only thing that I religiously clean every once in a while is my feed reader. Last month I have been ignoring it as well. Its soo messy now that there is no practical way for me to go through all the blog posts that are unread. Imagine! Even my favourite tech blogs – Engadget and TechCrunch have been lying unread for way too long.

Huh. That's why I need (its not a “want”, its a “need”) to be on the internet every single day. Now I have decided to do the inevitable. I am going to clear all unread blog posts in my feed reader without knowing what they ever contained. Imagine – more than a month of tech news, silicon valley gossips, takeovers, lawsuits and juicy unboxing videos will never be read. I shall never know the secrets behind Google +, the availability of Skype in Facebook and the product launches that happened in June and July 2011. Tch tch, I here by strip me off my wanna-be geek title. From now I shall just be lazy and live up to my title of the “God of procrastination”.

Its a man-thing

Other than my man-voice and man-beard, I am pretty much a chicken in man’s clothing. So you wont generally find me doing man-kind activities (if you are a damsel in distress, don't go all bachao bachao on me, I ain’t gonna come and help ya!).

That means, I don’t man-swear (f#$k, b$%ch), man-drink (hick), man-drive (zooooom), man-ride (yeah I look like a sissy on a motorbike), man-fight (I prefer running), man-flirt (yup, I suck miserably at that) or man-body build (the less I talk about this the better it is). All this, like you already guessed, hurts my fragile man-ego a lot.

So today after ages, I got to do a man-kind activity. Yeah, I changed my car’s punctured tire. Now for you man-beef guys its no big deal, but for me its been an accomplished. It took me well over 20 minutes and well, I was sweating, huffing and puffing, but I successfully pulled it off. And now my back and my wrist hurts, but well, those are minor inconveniences suffered while doing man-kind activities.

Yeah, I am that good!

Singing Sensation

Being an Indian, I am expected to sing at social gatherings, irrespective of how bad (hoarse) I sound. Its more like if you sing well – you are good, but if you sing bad (like me) then you are plain amusing. I think this is a very cultural thing. When 2 Indian people get together we bitch about the third one, and when the third one joins we sing. And if the third one is like me, we make him sing throughout the night or till he feels so embarrassed that he leaves.

Over the years, after having been the most popular singer (grrr!) in most social gatherings, I have figured there are some Hindi songs that I can sing without losing breath. I mean people still laugh, but they just LOL and don’t ROFL. So here is my list of sing-able songs for guys who bray like me. The songs are definitely very nice, but they just “can” be sung (badly) without losing your breath.

Allah Ke Bande – Kailash Kher

This song was my first chance discovery. We were on our bus trip to Las Vegas way back in 2006. Well, it was a Chinese bus tour, but all the occupants of the bus were Indians (with a Chinese tour guide!). So immediately after the bus started rolling, everyone had to sing. Now, I generally can fall asleep immediately in any moving vehicle, and I guess by the second song I was already fast asleep with my mouth wide open. Somewhere in the noon, I was jolted awaken by my co-passenger – “Girish, go go your turn to sing”. And in my semi-dozed state I sang this song. Rest they say is history (last heard the tour guide took up Zen and has retired from the tourism industry altogether).

Josh walon ko – Jagjit Singh

This one was during one of my birthdays in Uncle Sam’s land (after the bus tour). My friends forced me to sing (specifically insisting on me not singing the earlier song). I tried to sing this one. Now its a very deep and serious song. I remember all my friends were crying after I finished (the kind of tears that come when you laugh so bad that it hurts in your stomach).

Hum Bewafa Hargiz Na The - Shaan

While I was stuck in the hotel this time around (without internet), for days together I had no one to speak to. I missed hearing my own voice and decided to sing. The only song I had on my laptop then was this one. I remember singing it throughout the day on one Sunday. In the evening I realized that the entire floor in my hotel was empty. Coincidence I say, that all people checked out on the same day.

Blogger’s block

I dont exactly qualify as an “author” to have a writer’s block. But what I have been facing lately has got to do something with my inability to update my blog. I know I have had a hectic last month, but I am sure if I think hard, I could have easily made way for an hour of updating my blog. But each time that I sat down saying now I am gonna write something over here, I spent an hour seeing Lady Gaga videos and just generally fooling around on the internet.

I researched on the internet about “Blogger’s block” and if it exists. Mighty Google told me it does and I indeed came across some very well written articles about how to overcome it. Some of my veteran blogger friends might find these posts useful.

So I decided I blabber a bit here. One of the tips to overcome blogger’s block is to write outside of your niche. Now, long term readers of my blog know that my niche is – cracking fat jokes about myself. (I know I have repeated them to such an extent that most of you shun away when I open my mouth). So without further ado, I am gonna write about - Theology.

According to Wikipedia, Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths. Deep indeed. My knowledge of theology is limited to understanding its meaning. So I leave it at that.

While I was researching about my article about Theology, I chanced upon what does the ado (in without further ado) stands for. Apparently ado stands for “fuss” or “delay”. If you spell your further ado as “further adieu”, you are using the French word for goodbye. So your statements actually mean “without further goodbye”. Thanks fluffy for explaining that to me.

And this also means two other things – I came over my blogger’s block by writing this idiotic post and I actually got you interested in theology. See! Life is simple. Now if I keep this post as a draft too long, I am sure I am gonna delete it. So just as I finish this sentence I press the “Publish” button. Here it is.