Cubicle change

After the analyse-my-urine incident, I decided I have had enough and decided to get a job that did not have anything to do with analysing. So I consulted a dictionary for the antonym of analyse. The dictionary suggested that I get a job that did not have any thinking to do. That was around the time when Jinku said his manager did not have any masala in his head.

For those of you who are not familiar with the role of masala in the head; masala is the primary intelligence ingredient in an Indian head. The more masala in your head, the more intelligent you are. Getting masala in your head is not genetic but is by eating spicy food. Masala is infact the base that is used to make any spicy dish. So the more spicy food you eat, the more intelligent you become.

I am not making up a story here. Statistics shows that more people get into the IITs from Andra Pradesh than any other state in the world. And IITs are supposedly the toughest colleges to get into at an undergraduate level and requires high intelligence levels. It is also in Andra Pradesh that you get the spiciest cuisines in India (you infact have a nose-watering experience than a mouth-watering experience). If you can not piece-up the rest of the co-relation, you should crank up the spice a bit in your dinner tonight.

Anyway, Jinku is not the first person to curse that his manager did not have masala. So I decided that becoming a manager was the best way to get away from thinking and therefore analysing.

What resulted was a flurry of applications to all internal jobs that had a manager in the title. My project manager interview lasted close to 2 hours. I had decided earlier that I will steer the interview in such a way that the interviewer only asked me questions to which I knew the answers. But it was a disaster. Every time I tried to steer the interview, I was outmaneuvered. I mean I answered questions such as why do you want to do this job? (Should I have told him my analyse-my-urine story?), what are your long term career objectives? (I don't think I will ever get away from this question) and what experience do you have in project management (Well! I project managed to run a half marathon). I have no idea on what I answered and I was not thinking at all.

On the way back to my desk, ruing my fortunes, I realised that if the interview did not allow me to think, then there would certainly be absolutely no thinking to be done on the job. The perfect answer to my analyst problems!

The first day at the new job started with a meeting at 8. I presume the alarm did not go off. Half way to the office, I realised I had forgotten to take my laptop with me. I saved the embarrassment and went back to get it. But it is not until 10 minutes into the office I realised I left back the keys to the desk. I couldn't have asked for a better start!

Metamorphosis

4th standard was a very special year. It was the year when I transformed from a boy to a man. Or atleast that was what I thought then. It was a year of changes. A year when I had to face many unpleasant challenges for the first time and also a year when many pleasant firsts occurred.

The new school in the new state did not provide with the luxury of skipping my second language classes. Instead, I was to face the most terrifying Tamil teacher I have ever had. She screamed at students, hit them with whatever she could get hold of and flung homework notebooks on to their faces.It did not help that I missed the previous two years of Tamil lessons. How I loved those Thursdays when I did not have Tamil lessons!

It was a year when I got my 'own' membership card at the local library. It saved me from the tyrannical Tamil teacher as I quickly learnt to read and write reading Siruvarmalar at the library. But more than anything, I loved the freedom of going to the library by myself and picking the book of my choice.

I wore my first analogue watch that year and the teachers asked us to bring fountain pens to school - the first thing that marked the men from the boys. A yellow belt at the Karate class also meant that I was the second strongest man in the world next to my black belt Karate master.

My freedom grew boundless when one afternoon my dad got me a top-of-the-line Hero Ranger bicycle after only 3 hours of pestering. At that time, owning a Hero Ranger was like owning a Ferrari now and owning a Street Cat was like owning a Lamborghini. Owning any other bicycle was just useless.

It was also the year when I swore at my science teacher on his face. A girl had sucked at him to give her mistake ridden test paper a 100 and my mistake less test paper a 99 so she could get the first rank. She got the first rank. Well, she was not a she actually. She was a he. But he deserves to be called a she, doesn't she?

Analyse this!

Since the time I started to work for money, my job title has been an analyst. My job title changed several times in the last 4 years, but it always ended as some analyst. At first it felt nice to say I was an analyst than to recite the usual 'I am a software engineer'. However, I learnt only later that calling oneself an analyst has its own disadvantages.

First of all, when people ask what an analyst does, I always struggle to quantify my work in less than a 1000 words; by then the person who asks me the question is in deep sleep. You see, being an analyst, you do several things. And sometimes you do nothing. So after sometime, when I told people only the nothing part, they were surprised that I was getting paid for nothing.

And then one day, when a pretty girl asked me the usual 'So what do you do for a living?' question, I geared up to impress her with yet another 1000 word I am the king of the world speech and started with the 'I am an analyst' line. To my surprise the girl did not ask me the 'What does that mean?' question but instead dived into her handbag and gave me a bottle.

I took the bottle from her and asked 'What is this?'
'That's my urine sample. You said you were an analyst right? So could you analyse my urine and tell me if I have swine flu?'

Cough syrup for calf ache

Kiran: So do you still train for the marathon that you are not going to complete?
me: yeah
Kiran: How is it coming?
me: Okay. But my calf muscles ache like hell
Kiran: Drink some cough syrup. That is what I do

Contraceptives for Climate Change

I suggested to Boston that we go Banger racing. This is after his wonderful idea that running around Hyde Park with our tongues lunging out like dogs will fetch us dates. Poochi fell for it and took a train all the way from Milton Keynes. All we managed to get was cold stares from old women as we entered the tube with our smelly sweatshirts.

For those of you who do not know Boston’s roots, he is from the Stone Age. When Marty from Back to the Future once drove to the Stone Age, Boston accidentally transported himself to our age and that is how he is here. Although he has made substantial progress in his lifestyle, including riding a bicycle, he is yet to fully assimilate into our culture; which is why he hates motorcars, thinks internet robs him of his life and runs for hours together at a stretch.

Anyway, the evil influences of the internet got hold of his unsuspecting soul and he now believes that driving cars is bad for humanity, depleting our non-renewable energy resources, raising sea levels through global warming and causing pollution. So have many other unsuspecting souls been led to believe; which is why I am going to clear all your minds and tell you it is not true.

All humans must become petrol heads - If not for himself/herself but for world peace. If you looked at all the wars that have been waged in the last few decades, they have invariably been for oil (in the pretext of bringing democracy to the war stricken communities). So if we finish off all the oil as quickly as we can, we can end these wars and save millions of lives. (Will this concept bring me Nobel Prize? or should I have to be the president of USA to get one?)

How many of us do work today which can be postponed to tomorrow. I am sure only the quotation writers will raise their hands. So long as we have oil, we will use it sparingly and make incremental improvements in hybrids and the likes. But if there is no oil, we will do something out of sheer necessity.

Even if we did not find an alternative, it is good for general world health. The millions and millions of human beings succumbed into their current unhealthy lifestyles will come out of it and walk to offices instead of driving their 2km journeys. Yet another Nobel for that!

I am not asking everyone to be selfish and use all the available petrol and rob the future generations of the pleasures of roaring an internal combustion engine. I am only asking everyone to help them indulge in it. You may wonder how that is possible if we finish off all the oil.

I have come up with a new theory that will illustrate that all the oil that is burnt is not actually lost but just waiting to be reused.

If you remembered your Deepavali days (The Deepavalis when you woke up at 4 AM and fired crackers till midnight and not the ones where you sat in front of television all day), you will remember that there certainly was a couple of hours of rain on the day. The carbon from all the rockets and 1000 walahs we fire gets caught in the rain clouds and comes back down bringing the rain with it. By the same principle, all the carbon emissions we send out will accumulate and eventually come down with rain and settle as sediments. These sediments after a few hundred years will solidify or liquefy to become coal and petrol again. So by not using petrol optimally, we are breaking this cycle of forming new crude.

I understand your concern that more rains will increase the already rising sea levels. But won’t the rains be filled in the empty oil rigs that we have dug in the last 100 years? By the same token, even if we didn’t use petrol cars and used hydrogen hybrids (which combine hydrogen with the oxygen we breathe to make water and energy) will the water from these cars not increase sea levels? Atleast by acting on my advice, we will have only increased water levels, but if we used hydrogen cars not only will we have increased water levels but also decreased the total breathable oxygen available in the atmosphere.

For all you know, global warming and the subsequent rise in sea level may not be our fault at all. If you happened to use Wikipedia as your primary source for worldly knowledge, you will know that the sun's output varies with time, which scientists refer to as the 11 year solar cycle -sometimes the sun emits more heat and sometimes less. The current period could just be a period where the sun is working overtime.

Whether global warming is the sun’s fault or not, I believe the whole thing could have been prevented if there was general awareness among the people of the 60s to use contraceptives. If only we had less people to use what is left, we would not make any fuzz about the whole thing but instead be Banger racing in Olympic Games.