Team meeting at Amazon

At 11.00 AM this morning, I attended my first team meeting at Amazon. My manager, Mike started the proceedings with 'So, our goal for the summer would be ...".
I started to drift off after some time and my train of thought was some thing like this when the words 'Screw that sh#$. That's so fu#$ing wrong. WTF does that even mean?!' brought me out of my reverie:
'Wow, this is cool. It's Friday already. Weather's nice and sunny too.'
'What the hell? It's Friday already?! I haven't done any progress on my project this whole week. Wasn't I supposed to finish up certain features this week?'
'Still, I could probably work on it over the weekend.'
'That must mean I should get my paycheck next week. Nice.'
'Can't believe I have just $30 in my account. Where did all the money go?!'
'Sir Alex is such a great man. Can't believe I'l watch him next month. Probably can take a pic of him too. Hope Giggs plays that day.'
'Wow, what was that? It's still Tuesday, u jacka$$.'
'Thank God Its Tuesday! There's so much to do this week!'

Have a great week everyone.
-Anirudh.
P.S. Swear words are a way of life in my team. They are just awesome :)

Across the yellow sea, reloaded (Part II)

Just had this great conversation. Thought I would share it.

lead: Any(Ani), our team's going out for dinner. would you like to join ?
me: no, thanks. i cant eat anything there. i am a vegetarian.
lead: ok, how about beef, chicken or egg?
me: no, not even that (thinking what was my answer again?)
lead: oh, u mean only vegetables then?
me: yeah (giving a customary smile and thinking how many inferences of being a vegetarian actually exist!)

Cheers,
Any(i).

Across the Yellow Sea

Strange things happen when one is lonely in a 'land far-far away' for over a month. I for one, am amazed (alarmed should I say) at how the month long stay outside India has affected me. Though I have never been an avid follower of Kannada movies, all of a sudden, Raghu Dixit's songs seem to be more enthralling than those of maiden and co. 'Gudugudiya sedi' has become my routine hear-once-before-beginning-work song. Even blogging, which I had stopped almost a year ago seems like an interesting option to pass time. I thought I would pen down (or key down and up) few lines about my first overseas experience as 4 hours of complete idleness has started to take its toll.

As with the state of most of things with my employer, where every moment is filled with surprises (due to lack of planning), I was glad that I was given at least 5 days notice that I would be travelling to Republic of Korea. My fear that I was in for a tough few months proved to be well placed as the air hostess informed me 'goto yolef thenyu' (in English) after taking a look at my boarding pass. The journey was pretty uneventful apart from the dosa i was given for breakfast in the Dragon-Air flight. I would advise any one flying Dragon-Air to leave the poor thing to itself and not to put yourself through the troubles of eating it. We had to switch to another flight that would take us to Seoul at Hong Kong airport. This is where it hit me that Indians must be considered as an omnipresent lot, as there was at least one Indian at every one of 80 odd boarding gates of the airport.

The immigration official at Seoul airport (pronounced as 'Sol') looked suspiciously at my passport for over 5 minutes before he decided to let me through. To convince myself that I was a tough guy, I decided that a jacket would suffice to fight the cold and strong winds in Korea. My first step outside the airport taught me again that I sometimes think too highly of myself. The chillness was beyond any of my imagination and sadly still is.

Another thing that struck me was that Korean roads seemed bereft of any populace. The population density in India places a strong impression on one's mind that every inch of earth is populated by humans, which I realized was not the case. I asked myself 'where the hell are people in this country?' question throughout the journey from the airport to Suwon (my current 'home') for the roads seemed too empty to be real on a Sunday evening.

One more interesting thing here is the multi-compartment aquariums in many of the stores, where fish, octopus and a variety of other sea creatures are kept. To my shock, these turned out to be restaurants, which serve freshly cooked 'food'. Since then, I lost the heart to even try the local vegetarian cuisine, though I doubt if such a thing even exists.

The stay in Korea has been pretty much work-lunch-work-dinner and sleep on week days, sprinkled with occasional late night strolls for playing snooker and bowling, which I have thoroughly enjoyed as I had never tried these sports and I must say that I am getting better with each passing day, particularly at snooker. I have watched some 12 movies until now, all on Saturdays, with Inglorious Bastards being the pick of the lot so far and Aladin being a reminder of all things that are wrong with this world.

Lotte world, an amusement park has been my best outing till date, with rides that range from the gravity defying to the extremely gravity-compliant(even to the level of free-fall) categories. Travelling in metro trains on Sundays has been real fun as you are free to talk your mind irrespective of time and place here as no one understands what you speak anyway. I burn with envy when I see the football stadia here as they have such a plush green layer of grass and comfortable seating arrangements.

I have one more month of stay left and hope to explore more of the 'Samsung/LG-land' (which really should have been the name of this country as one is guaranteed to see either of these billboards every few feet on any street).

Cheers,
Anirudh.

The buck stops right here..

If you have been watching a television news channel over the period of last 3 days (after Mumbai blasts), you would definitely have come across the politician bashing that has been taking place. It is astonishing how every news channel has found the universal scrape goat for these attacks. Every politician who has a sense of power associated with his/her position has been advised to resign by our news channels and derided live on air.

Until now, it was always the ruling party that had to take all the blame. Now, it is the political community as a whole that is taking the blame. It is funny how it is always some one who is not seen as a common man (not a part of the mass) who takes the blame. It is either an ignorant cop or a corrupt power hungry politician, never a person on the street. The point I am trying to make is that we always find some one to blame, never taking the blame. The accusing finger always points to some one else, never at myself.

If the politician has become disenchanted with the mass, it is only because of the fact that we have stopped caring about what he/she does for a long time. 'Everybody is corrupt in the system. If my legislator also follows the same path, doing scraps of development work for the constituency, I am happy. I do not care.' is how most of us think (and talk, I have heard this so many times from so many people). This in itself shows how flawed and corrupt we as a community have become.

If a cop is corrupt, it is us who have turned him/her into what that person has become. We PREFER to pay him 100 bucks rather than pay the government a fine of 300 bucks if we are caught violating a traffic rule. 

We have made them feel that they can do anything and get away with it. For our own petty short term benefits, we have jeopardised the future of our society in general and our country in particular. 

I am neither supporting the errant political leadership, laid back judiciary and incompetent protective agencies nor defending their irresponsible actions and words over the past years. All I am saying is, we too are a part of the problem. Similar to 'You are never in a traffic jam, you too are contributing to the traffic jam'. 

It is high time that the buck stops with all of us and not with a single person, legislator, minister, political party, intelligence agency or the police. May this tragedy awaken the conscience of all citizens of India and contribute towards a better society. May all of those who have lost their lives for no fault of theirs rest in peace.

Regards,

Anirudh

When I dreamt of higher education...

It was about end of May, and two of my friends (without taking names, Foo and Bar) had got admits from the Carnegie Mellon University, Adelaide. I was inspired, motivated (and all that kind of stuff) to apply and get an admit myself. The university were handing out great fee waivers for very good courses and I would have made a fool of myself if I had let this opportunity go. 'Anirudh B Aithal, Master of (something)' has been a dream of mine since the day of my first appraisal meeting with my manager.

I had already appeared for GATE and failed in that aspect (89 percentile is not such a good thing especially for a guy with no quota what so ever). I thought, 'Why! This could be my gateway to professor-hood.' Becoming a professor at a college has been the ultimate goal of my life and I think it is unfair if my students hesitate to ask me for recommendation letters when they apply for these universities due to my lack of qualifications.

I booked a date for GRE during the last week of May, for the 20th of June. I applied online to the university on the 30th of June (which incidentally was the last date for submission of applications). My recommendation letters and sop (or essay) were prepared at lightening speed (with a great amount of contribution of Foo and Bar). These were submitted along with my GRE score by the 2nd week of July.

Then, it was the turn of IELTS next. Within next 2 weeks, I had booked, appeared for and got a score in the band of 8 in IELTS.

With a bunch of great recommendation letters and a fairly good sop and an impressive resume (which was made to look like that), my friends (Foo and Bar) were optimistic of me getting an admit. But, I had lost all hopes of that happening as my score was a meager 1170. However, as it turned out, recommendation letters, resume and sop do matter a lot in these affairs and I got a 40% fee waiver on the 18th of August (An admit in two months is a record time as Foo and Bar have informed me).

After this, I was in my dreamland. I was going to quit my job, return to academia and the three of us were supposed to reach heights in our professional lives, of which, we had only dreamed of. We hardly cared about anything except our VISAs for the next month and had a blast of a time for the next month plotting how to save money, procure education loan etc (We even Googled for accommodations in Adelaide!). It was such a great feeling of accomplishment as we had finally 'achieved' something.

This was the time, when we came across an agency called IDP, which aids students going to Australia for their education. A person whom we referred to as Newton was assigned as our agent/counsellor. I consider him as a very good counsellor as he had an incredible knack of conveying even the worst things in life in a calm, composed and carefree manner. It was in a meeting with him, where he dropped a bombshell in his unique way.

The course that we had chosen (MSITM) was a one-year course. And, here was the root of our problem. In his unique demeanor, Newton said with an air of a guy just about to comment on the day's weather, 'You will have to come back immediately after the completion of your education as you will not be given a work permit, which only accompany a two year course' (and even smiled after this). As with all good things, the dream that we had cherished too came to a grinding halt here.

Returning to India was not our problem. In fact, all of us had planned to return after earning for a period of 2-3 years there. It was the fact that we would not be repaying even a single Paisa of our education loan and return to India as unemployed youth.

Then, it was all plain and simple. Anirudh would not become Master of Anything for another two years and unsatisfied with his current work. Foo, who had dreamed of everything up to his marriage (a 5 year plan) would also postpone his plans. Even Bar would continue functioning as his usual bustling self. We were down in dumps for about a week after which, I started job hunting and Foo went abroad for a month (on official trip of course).

Things have returned to normalcy now (in fact, for about a month), and I have learned many lessons in my life. As they say, 'The journey is what matters, not the destination'. I certainly enjoyed the process of applying to a university until the crazy immigration rules did me in.

I have learned that life is uncompromising, cruel and asks us to be tough and sacrificial to achieve 'something'. So, next time, while doing any grandiose planning about my future, I will certainly think ten times and then leap ahead.

Regards,

Anirudh.

Belated wishes

I am as proud as any other Indian as we continue our journey of development and success. It is such a great story in itself that India has always been ruled by a government that is elected by her citizens and not by a power hungry dictator. The story gets even better when we realize that we have remained united in spite of speaking different languages and being intimidated by power hungry lunatic politicians. There has never been any question of any loss of integrity and let us hope there never will be one in foreseeable future.

The pace of our development has brought even the most powerful of nations to their knees. We can stall a WTO deal and even demand a nuclear deal signing NPT. Globalization has benefited us greatly and there have been innumerable India success stories as far as entrepreneurship is concerned.

I faced an awkward situation last week at work. We follow the Agile model of software development at Symbian and half of my team is in Britain. In the kickoff meeting of this iteration on Monday, we (the Indian part of the team) duly reminded the Scrum master (at Britain) that we would not be working on the 15th of August. When asked for a reason, we said that it was becuase of the Independence day and the Scrum master added (read with a British accent) "Um, Independence from Britain, isn't it?". What followed immediately was an awkward minute of silence and moment of awkward laughs from both ends of the teleconference device.

I wanted to tell this story to emphasize the level of development and respect that we have garnered in the past 61 years. People who treated as slaves of a petty colony are our business partners today and take a bow at our skills. This was the proudest I felt of being an Indian in my life and hope to cherish more such moments. Wish you all a very proud and prosperous Independence day.

Regards,
Anirudh.

P.S. Could not get this post on time as I was in Kemmangundi on 15/07/2008, which will be the topic of another post.

Life's like that.

The week leading up to the Bangalore blasts had been a dream epoch as far as my professional front was concerned. Anirudh, the "graduate" software engineer had won a Value Recognition Award for demonstrating the Symbian value of Excellence and also had been bestowed with a very good mid-year appraisal. I was on a high as gift coupons too accompanied the award.

Around 3'o clock on that fateful afternoon, my office was buzzing with news of bomb blasts in Madivala, which I dismissed as some sort of rumor. Then, news of serial bomb blasts in Bangalore started trickling in and to my horror, I found these to be entirely true. The ibnlive website confirmed 4 blasts in Bangalore and all the happiness drained out of me.

One could argue that these were low intensity blasts and had caused very little mortal damage. But the fact that some people could go to the extent of killing innocent civilians, who do not even know these people and then mask it with a religious name and label it as crusade disturbed me the most. I am hard pressed to find a cause that justifies these murderous acts.

However, what followed this was even worse as serial blasts rocked Ahmadabad the next day. I thought the perpetrators of these blasts had succeeded in their motive of terrorizing the mass as I was praying to god to save the next day off any news of more deaths or blasts.

As far as some imbeciles who run this country were concerned, they could do no better than utter those cliches of 'we condemn this heinous, cowardly acts of terror, blah, blah blah'. I hold them as much responsible to this as much as the people who executed this plot. Intelligence failure on our part is the main reason this machination succeeded.

People may call it freedom struggle, revolution or even fight against oppressive powers. Nothing can justify these acts of terror. May god bless every soul that has suffered because of this violence. A bright sunny morning always dawns after a chilly dark night. Life is really like that.

Regards,
Anirudh.

P.S.
I would like to thank BSNL for repairing my modem, which was out of order for more than a week. Their swift action of redirecting me to numerous telephone numbers, people and offices when I approached them for not taking action on the complaint registered is highly appreciated.
"2 mbps super speed, BSNL is all you need!"