Domain Maximus » Miscellany

Cubiclenama: The BlackBerry Spies

sidin — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 13:19:01 +0000

If you follow me on Twitter or on Facebook you’ve probably already received a link to the latest edition of the weekly Cubiclenama column I write for Mint.

But there is more value-add in this blog post. So don’t go.

When I first started writing the column, in December 2008, the idea was to poke a little fun at the workplace. Or, to paraphrase the column’s boilerplate, to look at the pleasures and perils of the workplace.

Since April the column has gone from being fortnightly to weekly, but my mandate hasn’t changed. I still need to file, every Thursday even though they really like it by Wednesday night, around 850 words of somewhat amusing prose.

Humour writing is exhausting. Especially so when my product, in this case Cubiclenama, appears on a page which has pretty high standards. For instance every Thursday the same space is occupied by the wonderful, curious and endlessly informed Salil Tripathi. How do you follow a top act like that?

Which means besides poking fun at HR and IT and Consulting and Banking and BlackBerrys and things like that, I also need to make the reader think a little bit. Somehow. At least by some form of free association.

Compounding this problem further is the fact that many people read excellent workplace columnists like Lucy Kellaway, and all people read Scott Adams. Kellaway is one of those rare writers who make you laugh and think at the same time. Her column for the FT is an institution.

Adams is God.

So most weeks I start worrying about the column around lunch time on Monday.

First I start to Google for offbeat news stories about murders or electrocutions or amputations in the office space. Many of them are not usable directly or indirectly. But they sometimes point at themes. They point at some aspect of the office space or office culture that I might resonate with. The trick usually is to find something that is obscure enough to be fresh, but not so obscure that few people connect with it.

So I can’t do anything with the IT or jargon used in a newsroom. Few people would be bothered. But Lotus Notes jokes are good. Bloomberg terminals can be touched upon briefly. Spam email is old news. HR is an unending fountain of delight.

Eventually I end up reading or discussing something with somebody that generates a small seed of an idea. And then I semi-think about it till Wednesday morning. At which point I think about thinking about writing about it. (I don’t know about you, but often the hardest part about writing a column is the writing of the column. The brain sometimes does anything to delay the typing. That and Twitter.)

And then around noon on Thursday I panic and begin to type. (For weeks now I’ve been using the excellent Q10 app on the office laptop to write. If there is a lot of noise in the office or in my head, I listen to Rainy Mood on my headphones. It makes me drink a lot of water and pee a lot. But it is most soothing. Too soothing and its difficult to keep the language funny. Too frenetic and I feel rushed by the music. Boring podcasts are very good.)

This week I didn’t have to Google at all. As soon as I heard about the whole BlackBerry-government imbroglio I knew I had to write about it.

Eventually I wondered what the government would do once it had access to BlackBerry messages.

Sometimes, when the idea forms perfectly, the columns write themselves.

I rarely link to columns or articles on the blog. But quite a few people seemed to have liked this one. So here it is:

Note: There is a small Cubiclenama group on Facebook. It has been dormant for a while. But I hope to ignite the existing community and attract new members by amplifying the experience with relevant and engaging content.

—

The BlackBerry Spies

Originally published in Mint and on Livemint.com.

Sometime in the near future.

Deputy director Kumar of the National BlackBerry Monitoring Agency of India (NBMAI) briskly walks into his shiny new office. The floor creaks under the weight of his shoes. The maple wood must be replaced, Kumar thinks.

The offices of NBMAI are located in the netball stadium custom-built for the Commonwealth Games. After the Games, the facility was handed over to a developer for maintenance. Who converted it into a commercial centre. Now NBMAI shared a floor with a KFC and the top floor of a Big Bazaar. Thankfully, the netball field itself remained untouched, and netballers from all over India were allowed to use the facility, whenever they wanted, between 6am and 8am on all Sundays.

Kumar marches through a vast warren of cubicles. Employees peer at computer monitors.

Every piece of data exchanged between two BlackBerrys in the country is routed through NBMAI’s servers. As per government regulations, NBMAI employees are allowed to randomly pick any voice call, text message, instant message, email or MMS from this flood of communication.

The first few weeks of NBMAI were turbulent. Kumar and his superiors slowly realized that depending purely on human agents to randomly pick messages would lead to chaos.

For instance, on one evening, in the early days of the agency, Kumar discovered that 23 of the 34 monitoring experts were all looking for threats to state security, especially photos, on Deepika Padukone’s BlackBerry.

A few weeks after that the home minister suddenly visited NBMAI’s office for a surprise check. However, an employee had already read an email Kumar sent to the home secretary, from his BlackBerry, about the trip.

When the ministry team arrived they saw a banner: “NBMAI welcome the home minister. We wish you a successful surprise inspection visit.”

In yet another case of blatant misuse, a Lok Sabha member convinced one of NBMAI’s employees to tap into an arch-rival’s Berry. A debate was afoot, and the MP asked this spy among spies to rush any dodgy messages to Parliament.

Damage, however, was averted at the last minute. The MP stood up and said: “Speaker sir, I wish to bring to your notice this message sent by the honourable member last week. In it the member says, and I quote: ‘Lolz u cnt hz 3G yt. Eeeheehee reg: MNP. C u at Nth Blck @ 8.’ My question to the House is this: What does this mean for the country? In fact, what does this mean in general? Anyone?”

Since then Kumar had made several changes. First of all, a computer program was installed that could automatically check messages and flag problematic ones. Second, Kumar made it illegal to target checks on any individuals. Yet, NBMAI still faced crises on a daily basis.

Kumar settles into his office chair and switches on his computer. Instantly he notices a series of emails. One is an emergency message. The letters glow red. He summons his CTO.

“Sir,” the CTO gasps, “our terror-attack module flagged over 7,000 terror messages last night. We need to do something about this.”

“My God! 7,000 messages! We must alert Home immediately!”

“But it was a misunderstanding…”

“What do you mean?”

“Sir, there was a national conference of management consultants in Mumbai last night. It appears that their BlackBerry messages are throwing up many false positives.”

“I don’t understand…”

“First of all, in the morning there were several messages that mentioned airports, drops, flights, transfers and even one that said someone was going to ‘crash on the plane’. Our algorithm went mad.”

“Assuming a plane attack no doubt. We must fix this. Then?”

“During the day they had presentations. So we detected messages about ‘blowing up charts’, ‘exploding the process flow’, ‘boiling the ocean’, ‘deep dive’, ‘drill down’, ‘critical path’, ‘go live’ and more than one ‘helicopter view’. The system decided that some form of airborne attack was imminent at Marine Drive.”

“Understandably so. And then?”

“During the evening we got bombarded with ‘mission critical’, ‘chain reaction’, ‘collaborate’ and ‘cross platform’.”

“Oho. This must have set off our rail terror alert logic.”

“Correct. But things got completely out of hand in the evening. When the conference got over.”

“Oh God…”

“Yes…”

“The military site attack sensor…”

“Correct. We fended off all the ‘ice breaker’, ‘break out’ and ‘north bound’ alerts. But when three thousand ‘touch base’ messages flooded the system, it immediately alerted Siachen.”

Kumar shakes his head in frustration. He stands up in order to say something. When suddenly the wooden floor, built by the lowest bidder, gives way, and he disappears into the ground.

Cubiclenama takes a weekly look at the pleasures and perils of corporate life.

The making of Whatay. Part 1: Padayappa clip

admin — Sat, 29 May 2010 05:24:09 +0000

I am asked very often why this blog’s URL is Whatay.com. And indeed, why I use the term so copiously. And, doubly indeed, how this term went from being inside joke to becoming part of local lingo at that business school I once went to. (Though I have no idea if people still use it.)

Today I wish to show you that scene from Padayappa, the Rajnikanth super hit, which first got a bunch of us southie folk saying “Whatay” all the time.

Only the first 14 seconds will play on first click, for your efficient viewing pleasure. But you can click play again and see the rest of the exciting 21st part of Youtube Padayappa.

P.s. Whatay can be used as verb, noun, adjective, preposition and gerund.
P.s.s Please note the tremendous head trauma scene at the 10 second mark. Enjoy audio accompaniment without fail.

A fresh new Whatay

admin — Sat, 23 May 2009 20:19:50 +0000

If you are going to screw around with your blog template at all, then Sunday is the best time to do it. Weekend traffic is the worst!

So after many people told us that the old, warm orange Domain Maximus was boring and oh-so-Web1.0, we decided to clean up things a little and get a shiny new, busier template. The idea was to get something that would not only be easy to tweak and upload but also a design that would give a little more flexibility. Now we can not only highlight the latest post, but also pick a popular “featured” post, clearly list out the last five and also occasionally type out an Aside. Basically shorter posts in a para or two, mostly with links to something.

A lot of the randomness in the sidebar is gone. Navigation through categories is better and search has been improved. We are also trying to connect the blog to other columns and articles in a more meaningful way. (I am testing out a nice, visually pleasing embedding method.) It might all seem a little too comprehensive for a blog that is hardly ever updated. But the idea is to both clean it up and also use Whatay as a more useful tool in the months to come when a few newer projects will be announced. Wink nudge.

The blog has been on the back-burner ever since I started work on the book. But now that we have crossed that bridge, let’s hope things get busier here. With the new design done, pardon us while we go and work on a few new blogposts.

Recently noted around Delhi – II

sidin — Tue, 19 May 2009 18:21:10 +0000

First of all I solemnly declare that I really did like Watchmen. Decent story, nice snarky sense of humour all over the place and lots of things, like costumes and guns, for little boys to gush over. Also heroine in latex suit. And heroine out of latex suit.

But also I had the chance to laugh verily at that oft-overlooked barometer of the social zeitgeist. (No idea. Just sounds cool.) The customer service feedback book.

Once you’ve done many weekends of women’s clothing shopping with the missus, as I have, you learn to, discreetly of course, find other things to amuse you. And within the sterile enviornment of our malls and department stores this is no mean feat. So I end up hanging around reading the vision statements of retailing companies, memorizing the US-European-UK-Asia-Klingon size conversion charts for shoes and internalizing material on why the design irregularities in Fabindia merchandise celebrate the eccentricity of handmade production.

And sometimes I go to the LCD/Plasma TV department, where they have all the TVs wired to the same DVD player. If you stand facing the huge display wall and then the image on the TV’s suddenly flip to one side, like in an external shot of a passenger jet, you get this awesome dizzy feeling. Try it. Don’t throw up.

And then a couple of years ago, at a W store, I discovered the customer feedback book and stood at the cash counter reading it cover to cover. It was freaking awesome. Seriously, somebody should publish one of those.

Sure most of it is just the usual "SMS when there is sale" and "Customer service is good, but price is slightly high" variety. But every once in a while there will be this awesome gem of humour or human frailty that cracks me up.

Ever since then I always make it a point to flip through these feedback books whenever I can.

So imagine my glee when I discover one at PVR Saket. It was just lying there by the popcorn counter, unloved and covered in mysterious sticky patches. With hajaar time to go before the 11:10 PM show, the missus and I began to flip through the book. There weren’t many entries. Someone from the staff had ripped off a good one-third of the book from the front. But the dozen or so pages left had plenty to think about. I present a few choice, mildly amusing pickings in the form of blurry BlackBerry photos and associated transcripts:

No. 1:

Okay making fun of someone’s English is a little below the belt. But come on. If you can spell ‘ambience’ you should be able to spell ‘great’ too right?

Text: ‘Grat service, ambience is very good.’ Yup. Cheap shot.

No. 2:

Some customers can be very choosy indeed you know. For instance, a few insist that the staff maintain the highest standards of personal hygiene.

Text: ‘clean, friendly staff’

No. 3:

Don’t you just hate those movies that simply refuse to get along with you? They just refuse to listen to reason.

Text: ‘Nice place, reasonable movies, seating needs to be more comfortable.’

No. 4:

The best customers are those who leave clear, actionable feedback right? Right? Then these are the worshtest ever.

Text: ‘Its a fun place to hangout with friends!!’ Followed by ‘same’ and ‘same’. Thanks a lot!

No. 5:

This one is without doubt my favourite.

Text: ‘It is a beautiful and romantic place for 3 guys.’

Don’t ask me. I just report it as it is.

(P.S. Big scale blog redesign is being contemplated. We might post less frequently than usual because of that. Heh heh. Ayyo.)

And now before you go please contemplate donating for a good cause. Choose from one of the many certified NGO’s at GiveIndia.

Romance ही romance

sidin — Sun, 05 Apr 2009 16:10:44 +0000

When we first met and got talking, it sounded just like another one of those coffee-shop mouth-off sessions with Pastrami. (No. Not that Pastrami. This is about the other one. Different business. Same complicated personality.)

Every couple of weeks Pastrami, the missus, a few other mutual friends and yours truly get together to, by and large, make fun of each other. Take each other’s trip. Now you might be forgiven for thinking that this sort of routine gets lame after a while. How much fun can you poke at the same people fortnight after fortnight right? Right?

Wrong.

Pastrami and I once spent an entire overnight train journey making fun of a particular female friend’s nose. Five, maybe six hours of purely nose-based humour.

It was quite a remarkable nose of course. Long, pointed and with a mid-stream course correction that made it hook downwards, and slightly to the left hawkishly before ending in a well-tapered, not at all chunky point. It was not a freakish nose. Some people could have pulled it off. Alas our friend was not one of those. And when extreme boredom struck Pastrami and me minutes after leaving Aurangabad station, we quickly converged on the nose for amusement:

“So does it echo a little bit when you sneeze?”

“Can you touch your tongue with the tip of your nose?”

And the classic:

“How can you possibly head-butt anything at all?”

Alas this particular evening Pastrami had other things to talk about. Which, if I had known about, I would have made up some random excuse, something marriage related perhaps, to avoid meeting him.

Let me explain.

As soon as we settled into one of the tables in the corner at the Costa(lot for) Coffee at Connaught Place, Pastrami squirmed a little uncomfortably in his chair, as men do in such circumstances. And then he said: “Sidin. I have fallen in love. I have asked her to marry me.”

I kept scrolling through Twitter updates on Blackberry hoping that the moment would pass and Pastrami would move on to something else. But he did not. He repeated: “Dude! I am in love. I have asked this girl to marry me! Dude. Listen!”

And so I had to.

Now in most cases when a close friend falls in love and decides to propose to someone, this is a cause of great joy for the entire friends circle. And naturally so. Aren’t we all glad to see a friend find that someone special to spend the rest of his or her life with in love and affection, till some form of gaming console or broadband connection do them apart?

Not exactly. In reality there are several base, negative and downright selfish reasons why we are glad to see a friend hook up with someone.

For instance married men love to see single male friends hook up because there are really only so many times you can laugh off other people’s bachelor exploits before slowly crying yourself to sleep on your side of the double bed. Single men also love to see other single men hook up because, thanks to the weird probabilities that govern male life, your friend is going to date some smoking-hot Anjana Sukhani look alike. A babe who is SO out of your league that she is in some completely other sport if you know what I mean. (Anjana will then fool around with you because you are harmless and call her “bhabhi” all the time, when your actual mental train of thought is more along the lines of “slutty nurse”.)

I am not one to hypothesize how women’s minds work. But when a girl decides to hook up with a guy, I believe her female friends’ mental flowchart is as follows:

1. Wow she is going out with someone!
2. The bastard better agree to marry her…
3. Because she would look so AWESOME on her wedding day (leading to the most important and critical next thought…)
4. AND THEN I CAN GET MEHNDI DONE!!! WOO HOO!!!

But in Pastrami’s case things are not so. When Pastrami tells me he is in love, my train of thought is along the lines of:

Oh. Shit.

This is because, for all the years I have known gentle, sensitive, prone-to-auto-accident Pastrami he always, without fail or exception, falls for the MOST CRAZY ASS WOMEN in the world.

I do not jest. These women are freaking night-mare inducing, restraining order generating insane. Stark raving. And that is saying something for that gender.

For instance there was the one that would always drop in, to say hi and possibly make out a little, by barging into his room without warning Kramer-like. Initially this was a cute quirk that temporarily suspended Pastrami’s “I will be naked when I am alone” habit. Later we discovered it was because she wanted to know if he was ever with any other women in person or on the phone.

Then there was the one that, in her spare time, wrote jolly comic verse about people who wanted to commit suicide.

And who can forget that crazy girl from Goa who’d break up one day, drop in for the night the next, then break up again. And then sex chat with him on Google Talk only to break up again and then make up again and then sex chat again all in the space of a brief afternoon. She left poor Pastrami a mess of mixed messages and hair-trigger emotions for weeks. I’d ask him if he wanted to do coffee and he’d ask, reflexively, if it was because he’d ”screwed up something again without knowing.”

And in each of these cases Pastrami wanted to marry them immediately and have children and a house in the hills. Alas it would be left to his friends to pick up the pieces and console poor Pastrami and nurse him back to sanity. Largely by making jokes about unrequited love around him till his sorrow was spent and he laughed along.

So when he sits in a cafe and breaks the news that he is in love yet again, ideal responses would be to talk him out of it, hit him over the head with that humongous cup at Costa and hope he develops retrograde amnesia, or stab yourself in the throat with that ridiculous cheese twisty thing they serve there and then die a slow death. Anything but the crazy woman you’d have to handle for him.

Alas I was just in the middle of Retweeting something on the Berry and, before I could pick up an ornamental polished marble ball from the potted plant, Pastrami blurted it all out.

The young lass was well-known to all of us having been a year junior to us in college. She was of sound mind and had a penchant for some emotional poetry. And a looker to boot. So prima facie there was nothing to suggest a mental imbalance other than the usual womanly foibles. (Stuff like “You just like Yoda because he talks funny.”)

And then Pastrami began to speak of how they’d been in touch for a long time over email and chat—the lass works abroad. And how after a recent visit by her to Delhi he’d decided that they were meant to be together forever:

P: “Sidin, she came all the way to Delhi just to meet me. For a few hours. From XXXXX!”
S: “No shit. Did she say that? Did she say she came JUST to see you?”
P: “Well not in as many words. But she has no other friends. No other family. Only me. ONLY ME! DON’T YOU SEE! IT IS FINALLY HAPPENING!”
S: “Are you’re sure she did absolutely nothing else at all in Delhi?”
P: “There was this friend’s wedding. But otherwise every minute of her day was Pastrami-time!”
S: “Oh shit.” (Reaches for cheese twisty.)

And if that wasn’t weird enough Pastrami then narrated, in great unnecessary detail, about all the conversations that they had and all the subsequent insights into her personality.

For instance he was going to propose to her in Paris (The city. Ha!). Because that’s the place she’d got on her “Which is your favourite city in the world?” quiz on Facebook. Also he had discovered that her favourite poem in the entire world was Rabbi Ben Ezra by Robert Browning. So he’d asked for her hand in go-out-ship by quoting the “Grow old along with me, The best is yet to be.” lines from that poem.

Pastrami also said that the few moments they’d spent together in her hotel room was heavy with sentiment and emotion. They had hugged at some point and according to Pastrami it felt “just right”. And even the woman said that she “loved the hug”.

So far things seemed normal. Apart from a penchant for poems that are over 190 lines long, our lass seemed largely harmless. And then, just when I thought he’d finally found a sane woman, Pastrami said:

“Just yesterday she called me at 4 in the morning and asked me to write a poem for her on the spot. It was magical Sidin. This despite the fact that she is yet to come to a decision whether she loves me.”

Completely unlike the CBI, I was stunned by this new evidence. What? She did not love him yet? She was still making up her mind? Extempore poetry at 4 AM? WTF?

Apparently, Pastrami explained, our girl was still coming to terms with the fact that someone was in love with her. Apparently she did not know if she was ready to reciprocate. She was still not getting “goosebumps” when she thought about him. Also it seems she was sill trying to find out what the “concept of love” really meant to her.

Pastrami asked me if I got goosebumps when I thought about the missus. Because the missus was sitting with us at the time, I told him that in many parts of my body the skin was permanently goose-bumped, like a durian, from intense affection. I then asked Pastrami how HE knew that he was in love. He said that the magical moment had been when he had escorted her to Delhi airport.

They’d reached well in advance of her flight and he’d taken her to that shady south Indian restaurant near the terminal for a coffee. After snacking and chatting, presumably about weird poetry, they got up to leave. Both of them approached the cash counter and she’d insisted she’d pay. Suddenly her mind went blank calculating her bill, she fumbled for her wallet and, according to Pastrami, “she just looked so darned adorably silly fumbling with a simple bill.” Pastrami immediately swooped and picked up the tab.

She said that her brain was suited more for poetry than mathematics while Pastrami’s mind was so analytical and fast. Never to let a moment like this go waste, Pastrami uttered a line that has never been used between a man and a woman in a romantic setting before:

Multi-faceted

“Darling I just love to see you doing silly things. And fumbling with math. Frankly my dear, I think my left brain is in love with your right brain…”

She was left speechless. Also all of us and one passing-by Costa waiter.

It was clear that Pastrami was quite pleased with his monumental pick-up line. He sat back in his chair at Costa and smiled smugly. He asked me what I thought. I told him that it was a great line. And then made a joke about how Pastrami and Poetry Babe had at least one good brain between the both of them.

The rest of the night all of us just sat and mostly made fun of Pastrami’s brain. Or the left half in any case.

As for their love story it progresses gradually. The lass is still waiting for her moment of epiphany when she suddenly gets goosebumps and realizes her passionate love for good old Pastrami. Pastrami spends most of his nights, pen in hand, ready to create magnificent poetry for her at a moment’s notice. This is what he wrote that day at 4 in the morning:

To understand a love that is unrequited
Consider a candle that is, at one end, ignited.
If you respond that it’s the standard way it is conflagrated
Wait! I’m not done. Let me make it a little more complicated.
This one-side-lit candle, further, balances about a delicate axis
and, as one side wanes the other, relatively, waxes.
And this creates an imbalance which, as we know, Nature abhors.
But what is to be done when one party is indifferent while the other adores?

And the only thing keeping this world from going completely crazy
is that while A loves B, B loves C all the way through till Y loves Z.
Though the As, Bs, Cs, all the way through till the Ys will complain
that, with one-sided love, imbalance is, only, a minor pain.
And when A speaks of B
you can clearly see
that B’s mere presence
justifies A’s existence.
But when B speaks of A
suffice to say
from how A is derided
Love is, clearly, one-sided.

Unrequited love also, it seems, makes the skin thick.
Words from B that would, earlier, have cut to the quick
no longer seem to affect A in any way.
Also rendered ineffective is any passion A might display
What A and B fail to realize
is that as each candle diminishes in size
A and B, inexorably, draw near
and where A ends and B begins becomes unclear.
And while B is resisting and A is pining
even this dark cloud has a silver lining.

Let the Lovers and the Loved always recall
that ‘tis but one wick that connects us all.

Yes. Pastrami is really, really in love.

Crap.

Dwarka’s believe it or not…

sidin — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 12:32:48 +0000

Over the last few weeks many people have asked us why we chose, of all the places in Delhi, to live in Dwarka. Isn’t it boring? Are there any restaurants? What do you do for coffee or IIT coaching? What do you do with the money you save on rent?

And we say:

1. No it is not. We have old men who come outside our window every morning and do laughing yoga. I have never had better digestion in my life.

2. There are tons of restaurants. KFC, Bercos, Moti Mahal, Colonels Kababz and, most of all, KFC.

3. There is a Costa right across the road from an Akaash Institute.

4. I buy Blackberrys. The missus buys blankets. We have two of the former and thirty-seven of the latter. Apparently blankets are a Delhi thing. The in-laws gift us three or four every weekend. We have no idea where they keep them. My ‘study and writing room’ is now mostly a ‘blanket and knitted goods room with laptop.’

But the single most important reason we have moved to Dwarka is for the cultural scene. Surprised? Don’t be. Peruse below the poster of one such cultural phenomenon snapped by the missus at Dwarka Sector 5 market, near the ICICI bank on Saturday. Watch in wonder. Also weep:

Faaaahhhhhhn Claaaahhhhhb

I particularly like those spectacles.

Those two heads at the bottom, if you are wondering, are the national chairman and the Delhi chairman of the fan club.

P.s. I do not mean to mock Kumar Sanu or his fans. That man was truly a bollywood phenomenon in his time.

P.s.s. But then so was Mamta Kulkarni. I am just saying.

Strangers on a train

sidin — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 10:09:40 +0000

Yes, yes I have finally moved bag, baggage and missus to Delhi and have spent the better part of the last week sneezing in our flat in Dwarka. (Thinking of the mammoth savings in rent I make here compared to my place in Wadala is somewhat comforting.)

But before I launch into blogging-as-usual-from-Delhi I must drop a line about an interesting incident that happened on the Metro a few days ago.

So there I am with the in-laws and the missus on the blue line from Connaught Place to Dwarka. The train is crowd-less but there aren’t any seats free. Somewhere mid-way, after Rajouri Garden I think, the mom-in-law gets a seat. She is wedged in between a Japanese mum with a PSP-clicking child, and a couple of African guys.

One of the African guys get up, my dad-in-law ushers the missus towards the empty seat. But before she can sit the African guy mumbles something and and scrambles his way back to the seat. The dad-in-law is very miffed and begins to say something when we calm him down and tell him to let it go.

Someone mumbles something about “better not take pangas” with “these African types”.

There is much wrathful eyeballing happening all around till both men get up just before Nawadah. Both the missus and dad-in-law take their place. I still stand. One of the guys comes over and says: “I give the old man a seat but he give it to that young woman. Young woman can stand. I want him to sit because he is old. In our country we respect old people.”

He sounds half-offended when he speaks.

I tell him that we respect old people in our country too.

Soon, but of course, we begin talking about India and Nigeria, which is where they are from. “Some things about India we like. Some things we don’t,” they say honestly when I ask them about living here. Turns out both guys are professional footballers with the Ruia Royals, a football team in the local Delhi league. (Anyone who can throw light on this please do. I could’nt Google up anything.) Both of them live in Nawadah and they were just back from a match.

When their station came we shook hands, patted backs, traded smiles and then they were off.

“These African types” were actually very nice people indeed.

I felt very, very sheepish after the whole incident.

Regular nonsense postings will resume from this weekend. Have a fantastic 2009 everyone!

One weekend, much drink, considerable embarassment

admin — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:53:17 +0000

Two unfortunate incidents happened over the course of last weekend.

The entire weekend was spent with Pastrami, BhaktiBong and IntercontinentalMan over the course of a wedding reception, a movie marathon on Saturday and then finally a cocktails by the sea thingie in Juhu on Sunday of which I have very little memory.

Incident No. 1:

We run into an old friend and his paramour at the cocktail by the sea thing. We’ve run into them together once before, at an early stage in their relationship, when he was trying to charm her at the Costa Cafe in Juhu. That evening I did the honourable engineer thing by not walking up to him, interrupting their romance or crimping his mojo.

Instead I walked out, then around, then stood outside the window, her back to me, and made faces at him, mimed kissing and hugging motions and, finally, thrusting movements with my hips. It is, as I mentioned, an engineer thing.

Back by the sea this was the second time we were seeing them together. I make polite conversation with him and then she speaks to me for the first time ever:

She: “Wow Sidin. You’ve REALLY bloated up man!” Her eyebrows go up and she rolls her eyes.

I repeat: THESE ARE THE FIRST WORDS THIS WOMAN HAS EVER SPOKEN TO ME.

“You’ve REALLY bloated up man!”

There was a sizeable crowd when this transpired. Pastrami fought back laughter by downing a Kiwi Cajpiroska. BhaktiBong was already drunk and was at that time hitting on a slim, expensive looking table fan.

I briefly contemplated poking her in the eye with a cocktail sausage on stick. I was dumbstruck. I didn’t know what to say. In fact I didn’t speak for several minutes. It took me several drinks and one Oye Lucky Lucky Oye on the dancefloor to get over it.

Homework: Imagine if I had said the exact same words to her. Now where approximately, in my body, would she have disposed of the table fan? Why are women like that? Why do they even bring up the word “bloated” in normal cocktail party conversations?

Incident No. 2:

We’re driving to the Imax in Wadala to watch The Day The Earth Stood Still. There’s Pastrami, IntercontinentalMan and IntercontinentalMissus in the car. IntercontinentalMan is a batch mate of course but his wife is not. So she has plenty of questions about campus and all of our lives there and we respond with plenty of anecdotes.

At some point she decides to ask all of us about our dorm names. (Dorm names are the nicknames they give all new joinees at IIMA each year. It is a crucial part of tradition and many people stick to their dorm names for years after they graduate. Like “Vindi” Banga, I am told. Some more details on a newspaper piece I once wrote.)

Remember that we’ve been hanging out with IntercontinentalMan and the missus for a while. We’ve had a couple of dinners and so we’re not strangers by any means.

So InterconinentalMissus goes around discussing various dorm names until she comes to me. I am squirming now because I don’t particularly like mine: “Khujli”. (Don’t. Ask. Ever.)

InterconinentalMissus: So Sidin… what is your real name?

Sidin:

IMrs.: Tell na… What is it? And why is “Sidin” your dorm name?

Sidin: It isn’t.

IMrs.: “Sidin” is your real name? Not a dorm name?

Sidin: No. “Sidin” is my real name.

IMrs.: Oh…

Pastrami: CHOKE LAUGHTER CHOKE CHOKE

Homework: Do you have a normal name like Ravi, Abhishek, Omanakuttan or Bhaskaran? Go kill yourself.

Most influential aspect of yours

sidin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 10:16:48 +0000

Sorry if my typing reads hoarse. But I’ve been ill all of Sunday, took Monday off and came in today over-helmed by a sense of duty and obligation.

But I always have time for a little blog post.

So Saturday Pastrami, the missus and I spent a rather productive day consisting of bagels, foot massages and Dostana at that Cinemax in Bandra with the bargain Lazy boy seats. While we were biting into our bagels and sipping on our Doppio’s pastrami suddenly sat up and ran to the counter to ask for the day’s Bombay Times.

“You must read the horoscope in today’s BT man. They are howlarious!” Pastrami panted as he flipped the pages.

Now I was prepared for the worst you see. With all these job cuts and banks in trouble and financial turmoil we all try to laugh as much as we can when Pastrami cracks jokes. Even the weird, banker-type jokes where the punch line involves phrases like: “And then he said why don’t we just look at perpetuity after five years and finance the whole using convertible debt warranties! HA HA HA HA HA HA! Phew!” or “And then the prospective girl’s parents asked him what desk he worked on and he said structured debt and they all got up and ran away…even the broker…”

Which is just sad.

But lo and behold. Pastrami was actually right. The horoscopes were hilarious and mostly completely pointless. I have intrepidly managed to track it down:

Finolex Fortune

Gems include:

Leo: You may choose to get out into the world and to grasp all to learn, can become negative and selfish. The energy of the day will require you to be more outgoing. You are probably having the most influential aspect.

This was either written by a bad machine or dictated over the phone to someone who hates his job, sitting on Friday night writing the horoscope. Eitherways it is a masterpiece of… I don’t know really.

Please click on the image to read it in full.

Also, when time permits, read this fascinating article in October’s Smithsonian Magazine. Its free and available in full.

Maybe I should get my DNA checked as well. What if I was related to…shudder…Mark Knopfler?

Later crocodiles.

PR kiya toh darna kya

sidin — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:43:42 +0000

Foot where?

Transcript of conversation with anonymous public relations professional on newsroom phone a few days ago. Edited for readability.

(Phone rings)

Sidin: Hello… Sidin (It is a miserable habit of mine, that line. So many people respond by saying: “No.”)

Random PR professional: Hello Sidin! This is from !

S: Hi. Tell me.

RPRP: I have been reading your work for a long time now. And I am impressed.

S: (Sensing a catch somewhere…) Oh thank you very much.

RPRP: Especially the wonderful work you’ve been doing in the area of Law firms and legal services…

S: (What the…) Oh I see. Which stories in particular?

RPRP: Oh the one… err.. you know the story… this particular one… I mean the one on…

S: (Aha! The plot thickens…) Oh you mean the one I wrote last weekend?

RPRP: EXACTLY! That one. It was so, so, so good…

S: On legal services no?

RPRP: Yes yes.

S: Ah but I have NEVER EVER written a single world in my entire career on legal services and law firms…

RPRP: Never?

S: Not once.

RPRP:

RPRP: Maybe I have my information wrong.

S: Maybe you do.

CLICK!