Domain Maximus

Dear all,

The decision to pursue writing for a living is not an easy one. In fact such a career move, in our society atleast, is one fraught with familial opposition but public appreciation. And sometimes that balance is not always pleasant.

But the response from the blog-reading public has been overwhelming. Even after I went public with it there have been moments of weakness and each time there has been a word of comfort and encouragement from people I have never spoken or met before. Not to mention the numerous leads and contacts. I am indebted.

Many people have written to me saying they want to go out and do their own thing as well. Which is awesome but that also means you have to do some homework before you set out. Take the risk but take the educated risk. While doing your own thing is all about heart, a little bit of head is not out of place.

So there. I wont sermonise and if you want sermons drop me a mail. I will oblige

And as you can see below its back to usual business on Domain Maximus.

Hang around. This place is going to get fun!

The other day I got a call from a long-lost friend of mine from college. And, as I always do when old college friends call me, I quickly asked him if he had seen a pair of burgundy and orange swimming trunks. I had lost them in 3rd year and have never seen them since except for a chance encounter in Bombay airport. Alas he had not and all he wanted was to check if I knew someone called Boris (not actual name) from Kanpur (not actual place) who may have studied with me in business school (not an actual school). He was apparently carrying out a secret background check on Boris for matrimonial purposes.

Let me assure you these are some of the most awkward phone calls you can ever receive. Even the most fun-loving (meaning mildly criminal) of people turn into massively self-rightesous zombies when they need to verify a person’s marriageability. Now my friend, who we will call Friend, had miraculously turned into this malicious Jesuit from the Inquisitions. Every aspect of Boris’s personality was ripped apart for the merest trace of moral weakness. The conversation was terse and highly unpleasant.

“So does Boris drink?”

“A little bit…”

“Good god…” said Friend. (Flashback to college when Friend routinely downed 7 bottles of beer and a couple of bottles of a whisky at a sitting. He even opened them sometimes.)

“But not too much, he was just a social drinker…”

“Thats how they all start. A few drinks in college, then a couple on the weekends at work. And before you know he is a wife-beating criminal…” (Friend conveniently forgot the time when he had one too many screwdrivers, picked up a cricket bat and beat the living daylights out of a goalpost. They later settled out of court.)

“And does he smoke? Tobacco? any of those other unspeakable plants?…” (To this day in Trichy they talk of the Great Smog of 1999, which was traced to Friend’s room. He had smoked his way through a whole 4-kilo sack of premium fresh, run out, and was imbibing, out of desperation, the vapours of unwashed bed linen when we found him.)

“Nope nothing I knew of…”

‘Hmm… I will need better sources. Sources who have more concern than you do for a poor girl’s future…” (Friend holds the record for maximum arrests for eve-teasing in Thuvakudi police station history. A women’s college was out on a “March for Literacy” and he was arrested for 43 violations in the space of 37 minutes. A plaque in the station commemorates the event and is a popular tourist attraction)

“But Boris is a nice guy. You have nothing to worry…”

“I will be the judge of that. And finally for 25 points did he have any affairs, romances and intimate interludes in college I should be aware of?”

“No da just the usual fooling around with the juniors…”

“Good god!! Sidin how can you speak of this so lightly??!! Wake up man!! Boris is a blackguard and a vagabond!!”

“No no he is a wonderful guy. Absolutely brilliant guy. If I could I would have married him!!!”

“What? Now you say he goes the other way?”

“No what I meant was any woman would want to marry him. He is a highly eligible bachelor…”

“Are you saying my little petunia is ANY woman for you?…” (Petunia was Friend’s nickname for his sister. In turn she called him Tinku)

“No no sorry sorry…”

“Hmm… fine… and please dont tell me he is one of those porn junkies…” (Sometime in second year the college was moving to bring down an illegal construction adjacent to my hostel. Only to discover that it was Friend’s bound collection of debs and playboys.)

“Well…”

“ENOOUGH!! No I think calling you was a big mistake… I know other people from your business school too you know…”

“But…”

“No I have heard enough…”

“Ok I am sorry yaar..”

“And just so that you know… I DO HAVE YOUR BURGUNDY SWIMMING TRUNKS…”

“Noooooo… sob”

Dear All,

Finally after weeks of contemplation and thought and watching Friends reruns I have decided to finally do it. A few days from now I will cease to be a consultant. Instead I will be a writer.

As we speak an email is hurtling its way across the nation to my HR and MD indicating my imminent departure from AT Kearney. From next Friday I will be a free bird and will immediately embark on a book, freelancing, columning and anything else I can force people to hire my writing skills for.

The reasons are numerous. But in the end I decided I needed to do what I was happiest doing. So if you know anyone who needs freelence writing, columning, both serious and the “Domain Maximus” type, drop me a line on sidinsv at gmail dot com. And do pass the word around.

My portfolio of services include:
1. Travel writing
2. Food and movie reviews
3. Random thought pieces and fillers
4. Captions, blurbs and marketing material
5. Professional party attendee and conversation provoker
6. Anything else that needs a creative mind and a cheeky pen

Also, and this is for all those corporates, business schools and colleges out there, I do pretty snazzy quizzes and quiz shows. So I can do anything from an India History quiz to a Cement Industry quiz. Quality and timepass guaranteed.

On a serious note drop me an email if anything interests you.

Sidin Sunny Vadukut.

p.s. The updates will be now be more frequent…

Pardon me for the delay. I swear I have been trying to write all day. If only my computer would not shut down every fifteen minutes. But I am sure it has a very good reason. Just a few minutes ago, for instance, it shut down a few nanoseconds after a sad, sober announcement. A pop-up window mentioned solemnly that “Machi there is a romba serious error in location E12333:34. Very sorry da.” (After a brief sojourn in a Chennai netcafe my laptop has never been the same again.) My CD drive made a little whirring sound. And then there was complete silence. This is, of course, is not a common occurrence. Most days when I power up it makes 7 beeps on working days, 9 beeps on weekends (except second saturday which, everyone knows, is holiday) and 11 beeps on bank holidays and shuts down instantly. But this silent demise was not a good sign.

So the other day my laptop, in a fit of entrepreneurial alacrity, decided to start up and shut down all by itself. While initially I found this rather proactive of it, it got tedious after 45 minutes. I was infuriated and gingerly hurled the machine against a particularly roguish part of the wall, from whence it bounced off, landed on my beanbag, slalomed down rapidly, elegantly bounced on the marble floor and landed squarely on the little toe of my right foot. The CD drive gave one last whirr of triumph before falling silent.

I have a history with computers. The first time I saw one in my father’s office I was fascinated. I was particularly impressed by the CAPS LOCK function and the floppy drive. My father sat next to me and taught me to how to use the mouse, type small letters and even how to use a wonderful little program to draw pictures. After a few minutes of incessant clicking and draggin I unveiled a rough, but imaginative profile of a double-humped camel to everyone in Mr. Vadukut’s office. They all nodded their heads in approval and there was wide consensus that, for my age, I had drawn an excellent picture of a sunflower.

Boom! one-nothing to the computer.

My first own computing device was an Atari TV game. I must have spend weeks in front of the TV with my trusty Atari console by my side. Then after two months I finally got the video to work and played a lusty game of basketball against the computer losing by a respectable margin of 240 – 12. I never recovered from that entirely. This relentless inferiority to computing devices often went public with disastrous consequences. Video game arcades were the absolute worst self-esteeming usurping exercise. My friends were all whiz-kids who completed Super Mario and Space Invaders several times between lunch and tea. I was however pathetic at all of them. So much so once, amidst a particularly hideous game of “World Cup Footbal 1990″ my team walked off the pitch and refused to come back till I let someone else take over.

Thankfully I was exposed to little by way of computing in school except for the stray class in BASIC or MSDOS. I was not too bad at that honestly and except once, when I overclocked the computer so much it burst into flames and took down the computer lab and an adjoining indoor stadium, nothing of note hppened. But this meant I was not even remotely prepared for what awaited me in engineering college. Engineering college was the absolute nadir of my stormy relations with computers, scientific calculators, and zippers, though here I wil talk only of the first one.

Now I was one who had deliberately decided to stay away from any degree courses that might remotely be related to computing, electronics or mathematics. Which left only courses like Metallurgy, Civil or Chemical engineering. Now besides UDCT, which I lost by a single mark, there were few chemical engineering seats of high quality. And, as anyone who has been around a large construction site may have noticed, civil engineering isn’t. So metallurgy it was. I loved chemistry and was told by a learned uncle that metallurgy had a lot of chemistry. That turned out to be completely false and taught me to never ask my uncle, a bakery owner and part-time landscaping designer, for educational advice. The only chemistry in four years of engineering was the little bit I had with a buxom little assistant in Basic Chemistry Lab. Boy, she was quite an item and was absolutely wicked when engorossed in titration. (For the non-scientific titration is a chemical process and not, as you might think, wife telling husband “No darling, one today and the other tomorrow…”)

But I digress. The point was in third year, to my considerable chagrin, I notice that we had something tucked away in our syllabus waiting to pounce out unawares. Computer Programming in Fortran and C. The effect this had on my morale was devestating. Metallurgy is otherwise a remarkably simple course to pass. You only had to turn up for class and the degree was yours. But Fortran and C changed everything. This meant we had to learn, remember and even be able to program. And suddenly all the Computer Science guys were looking at us and smirking.

I hated the Computer Science guys. They called themselves the CompScis (pronounced Komskees) and were often seen using computers and engaged in incomprehensible conversation. And within this group was an even more bewildering group called the Coimbscis. They were not just Compscis, but also were all from Coimbatore. I was frendly with many of them, but often they fell into long tirades I could never comprehend. For example a joke would go like this:

“So there is this guy… blah blah blah… Silicon Graphics… Device drivers… blah blah… and… (pause for punchline)

“…he finds that his RAM had actually overflowed 4.3 million schnitzelblimps!!!”

Everyone would burst out laughing with cries of “sooper” “ayyo” and “too much da machi…” I would laugh along whole heartedly as well but mostly at my own ignorance. So when JKR walked into class for our first Fortran lecture I was fairly tense.

But JKR was even more tense. JKR is the sort of prof who really knows his stuff well but cant speak to an audience if his life depended on it. Which meant JKR would completely go to bits in front of a classroom. First his palms would shiver, then his whole arm and before long his torso and limbs would have decided that it was better for everyone if they went their separate ways and saw other people. Once JKR walked into class and began a session on nested fruity loops when suddenly he stopped mid-sentence and started to slowly, yet with steady determination, topple to one side. Thankfully for him LKT was seated at the front bench that eventful day.
LKT was a monument of a man. He was huge and built like a tank. And he was scary. For example:

LKT: Hey guys lets go for lunch da
Me: Yup. I am damn hungry. I could eat a horse.
LKT: Ah then you must have it cooked in a cashew gravy with a roomali rotis. You don’t get good horse nowadays though.
Me: Gulp. Correct.

LKT jumped from his seat, walked through his table and swept the wilting JKR in his arms and off his feet. JKR was out of service for a week or so. LKT was teased a bit for a few days till he picked up a classmate and flung him over the compound wall to Dindigul, a place near Pondicherry.

I still cannot fathom why we were asked to do some of he things we did. For example we were asked to write a program that made prime numbers appear in the form of a symmetrical triangle. (Man even now I can never find out why we did that…) In another instant I sat in the computer facility for 47 hours straight, 3 of which awake, trying to write a program that took 2 numbers as input and gave the lowest prime number between them as a result. When JKT walked over to my terminal I was absolutely sure my code was excellent. He entered 4, 28. The code replied with surprising confidence: “glix@”. There was a minute of silence after which JKT confirmed that glix@ was not a prime number and I had to redo the exercise.

Business school was much better though. The extent of computational complexity was limited to making Excel spreadsheets do insane things. Now let me tell you something about spreadsheets. Spreadsheets, with some practice, can do some pretty amazing things. Besides a host of mathematical and statistical functions, spreadsheets can also graph, approximate, manage data, and in one memorable incident, finished a game of solitaire in a mere 34 seconds.

I used spreadsheets for a variety of uses and, in Marketing 2, with a lot of graphs in upto 3 colours, proved that the national demand for motorcars in India in 2008 would be 4.82 cars. (This does not include imports and, you must admit, is much more accurate than glix@)

After two years of using a little excel and a lot of “Web History Sweeper” I came out with a diploma and destiny full of powerpoint. But honestly Powerpoint is an amazing piece of work and makes even the most stupid statements like “Diversification often leads to dilution of equity and shareholder benefit-evaluation mental paradigms” seem like profound observations. Apparently you can also make graphs in Powerpoint, but I think that is a baseless rumour.

(A complete chapter will be dedicated to powerpoint soon…)

So there. Computing and the author have never got along quite well. We keep making jibes at each other every few days. If you are a technology-challenged person like me there is one gospel truth you need to know. This is the bloody crux of this post. Even if you dont take anything else away from this post, remember this: All computers…

WAIT… NO!!… Dammit… Beep Beep Beep. Whirr.

(p.s. Expect a startling revelation about career moves soon…)

It was one of those perfect weekday mornings. I fell asleep watching the TV, in a rather traumatic posture, and woke up with a terrible headache in my knees. At the driving school I was told the car had a puncture and would not be back till 8. Which meant I would have to miss class once again. I yawned in disappointment and walked across the road to drench my worries in Sambar and Rava Dosa.

Ram Mahal is a rather non-descript south indian eating place. It has the routine Formica topped tables, mumbling old man who looks like he has way too much left over coconut chutney, and simple, rapid service. There is always the radio playing and a couple of newspapers for the customers. Today the radio was playing that old south indian favorite, Don’t Phunk with my Heart y the Black-eyed Peas. I picked up the newspaper and sat at my usual spot in the corner where I don’t get to see through the hole in the wall into the kitchen. (Like the Backstreet Boys, I don’t care much for who my dosa is and where it is from.) When I came across the piece of news in the business section I was overwhelmed.

When I was a child one of the highlights of our annual trips to my village in Kerala was the thud-thud-wheeze of my uncle’s Bajaj Chetak. And now this newspaper was telling me that Bajaj rolled out the last Chetak two days ago and was moving on. Tragically I wasn’t ready to do that. That blue, sturdy and awesomely cute scooter just meant too much to me.

A Chetak was probably my uncle’s first big buy after he started working for his bank. It was the regulation blue Chetak and like a gazillion other people he too waited for it for months before getting it. My uncle is the quiet, pillar of the family types. When, and only when, something could not be communicated through gestures of fingers, eyebrows and head and combinations thereof, did he speak. But every one in a while, and too rare nowadays now that all the kids have grown, he will sit on the armchair on the portico and regale us with stories of days gone by. Often they starred his reliable little Chetak. It was like a member of the family and when it was brought home I daresay it received a welcome as grand as any new-born. The Chetak was religiously parked in the firehouse (where they roasted coconuts into copra) and received a thorough washing down on the weekends, even during the monsoons.

When the taxi from the airport ploughed through the muddy kaccha road and climbed up the steep driveway I often exploded out of the car to climb all over the scooter. To this day I can feel the stiff rubbery feel of the buttons and the flip switches on the handlebars. And almost certainly I would fall off the scooter in some obscene fashion thus spending the rest of my one month vacation with a swollen lip or a skinned knee. The scooter was a novelty for us “persians” as our grandma used to call us. (For some reason that whole generation called us NRIs “persians”.)

But more than memories of the scooter itself, there are so many sensations I remember. The smell of petrol when my uncle opened the tank between the seats, a pretty dexterous endeavor in itself. Or the thrill of wind in my face when he took us to church standing on the footboard in the front. In “persia” you never got the wind in your face. Pavlov would have been proud of us the way we salivated, every evening, when we heard the scooter shoot up the incline, loop around the courtyard and glide into the firehouse. For there was no doubt my uncle always carried a small packet of Lacto King, Eclairs or Five Star when he came from work. When I grew older and finally gave up trying to learn cricket or football, he would bring back copies of Sputnik magazine that would invariably be stained with some gravy from his lunchbox. After all there was only so much storage in a Chetak.

The Chetak set limits on the size of his lunch box, the amount of vegetables he could buy and how many people could go to Church with him on Sunday mornings. The house rules were simple: the best behaved kids got taken to the church on the scooter while the rest had to walk with grandma to church trying to explain that persia no longer existed. After Sunday mass there was a mad rush to reach the scooter as only then could you make it back in time to see Ramayan. (Which is pretty cool in a secular kind of way.) Being a non-athletic Sputnik reader kind of guy I often ended walking home and just catching the last scene, which thrilled my grandmother. She was not as secular as the rest of us and thought growing up in a Muslim country was corruption enough!

But the all time best memory ever was when on some special evenings my uncle took us all on high-speed rounds of the neighbourhood. All my grandfather’s brothers lived in adjacent compounds and my uncle twisted and swooped through the houses and in between the trees. We screamed in joy and waved at all the uncles and aunts and domestic helps who jumped aside to avoid being hit by us. The noise a Chetak made when you shifted up gears was thoroughly satisfying and more than a little macho. We took good care of him too and for many years every scratch was well-mended and only original spare parts were ever used. Not one drop of adulterated petrol either.

But then the ambassador car came along and the scooter slowly got less and less attention. Well-loved but not attended to at all, like old Bryan Adams tapes. My rather enterprising cousin, who till then merely disassembled and put back together his bicycle, now got his evil fingers on the Chetak. The scooter had to be massively over-engineered, for every time he pulled out a few parts, he could only put back half of them or so. But the scooter still managed to run like normal. But middle of the night if you needed to get some Lacto-calamine lotion the Chetak was ever faithful and would start in a jiffy, albeit sometimes after a comical “tip and straighten” routine.
Then one year when we came home my uncle said he had sold it. No one was using it anymore and he couldn’t bare to see it waste away. The lacto-calamine phase had passed as well. Now we all go to Church together and come back and we really don’t think there is a point in trying to drive an Ambassador at any great pace over gardens and between coconut palms. And I am sure most of our elder relatives and domestic help wont be able to jump out of the way of a careening Ambassador without atleast a couple of days of notice. Sometimes my uncle still talks about his Chetak and of maybe buying a new one.

But then those heartless people at Bajaj wont let us do that anymore. Sob.

Bye dear Chetak my friend. May thou pass into that auto yard in the sky having lived a full and well-loved life. Farewell and thanks for all the rides.