Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan| Ah, British Humour! This book is straight from the Wodehousian school of humour (although Wodehouse started writing later, in the early 20th century). If you are a Wodehouse fan, you will definitely like this book. Originally intended to be a travel guide, it is the author's digressive (and highly humorous) musings on a wide variety of topics that win it for the book. Unless you are a boating enthusiast or a history buff, the historical discussion of various towns along the route might not be very appealing. However, the author regularly will invoke a (slightly tangential) humorous discussion on everyday items/activities such as the accuracy of weather forecasts, sharing inn-space with a couple in love, German language etc that are sure to get your ribs tickled. The best part about the book is that the humour is still relevant today and does not require an understanding of 19th century England (as some other parts of the book might). A sample, from a passage where the author talks about his friend George and his occupation: “George goes to sleep at a bank from ten to four each day, except Saturdays, when they wake him up and put him outside at two” . At a few places, the book seems to drag on but its a fairly short read (~120 pages) and a hilarious anecdote is always around the corner, so overall the book does a very good job of administering some jaw exercise. For fans of British humour, this is a must-read, and for those not particularly enamoured by the genre, still give it a shot. It will not disappoint! Goodreads page for the book |
Well, firstly, the title is slightly misleading. This post is NOT one describing a typical college-to-company journey. It’s just that I haven't posted in a long time and the hiatus certainly didn’t warrant spending too much time on the title. Most of this post can be attributed to the fact that I spent the last two days of 2009 sitting idle in office, those being my first instances of the fabled Bench Time, and reading blogs and randomly surfing the web.
It’s been two months since I began working and while it hasn't been a rollercoaster ride - that overused metaphor, it’s been pretty smooth sailing (another overused metaphor). The transition from lazy-and-indifferent-college-student to formals-clad-office-worker has been seamless for the most part. And that's because, while the body may have yielded to the demands of the Corporate World, the mind is still in the right place.
The company (iRunway India Pvt. Ltd. for the uninitiated) basically (I’ve been told Indians use the word ‘basically’ a lot) plies its trade in the domain of Technology Consulting and IP Services. Anymore description and it'll get boring, so I’ll let it be. Work is different from the conventional Coding-Shoding OR Factory/Plant work OR Sitting-around-doing-nothing type of jobs. So, it’s been a pleasant change, at least thus far. The best part about office is the peer group, comprising of people exclusively from IITs, NITs, IIMs and ISB. The company being only three-and-some-part years old, our "Project Managers", are graduates of the 2007 batch and hence the whole hoopla surrounding Bosses has essentially amounted to squat. It took us only about 3 weeks to go out drinking with some of them and share stories regarding the company, scandals during college days and, the usual, MMS (music, movies and sports). The whole office environment is pretty friendly, what with some 100-odd like-minded people doing their bit. Office policy requires us to wear formals four-days-a-week, which give you that quintessential office-worker look. (I really don't know whether that's a good or bad thing). Also, it’s been good to start waking up before noon after a long time.
Life after office involves one or more of the following: Lappy time, TV, Sleep and Household-chores (including the dreaded grocery shopping). As usual, the week flies by and before you know it, the weekend is upon you. And vice-versa, I must add. Living with Bhaggi has its own advantages; if ever the house becomes too untidy, Bhaggi gets into the act, not too unfamiliar to Monica Geller. Plus, you’re assured of getting high-quality downloads with regularity and most importantly, you never miss out on anything important, because, as you guessed it, Bhaggi is there to remind you of that.
Weekends involve the usual sleepathons and lazing-around along with night-long sessions of Cards or Carrom, courtesy our neighbours-across-the-road, Jindal (of the Ankit Jindal fame), Binny, Pallav – my roomie from first year and his brother, Saurabh. Although, a consequence is that I’ve been forced to write this blog on Binny’s lappy while Binny, Jindal, Bhaggi and Swami are Snipin’ and Cursin’ in all glory while playing CS on our Wi-Lan. This coupled with the fact that the average age in office is 25, has meant that college isn’t ours to be missed. Yet.
And of course, there’s the thing about living in the awesomeness that is Bangalore. Never mind that there aren’t enough good movie-halls (Long live BitTorrent), that the autowallas are daylight robbers (we’re not alone) and that the ‘Cinderella Law’ forces everything to close by 11.30 (Nothing still beats the good ol’ in-house DPs, with custom playlists and random bakar). The company (pun totally intended) is good and then you have the Bangalore Weather (Note the Capital ‘B’ and ‘W’, indicating a proper noun). It’s like the Sachin Tendulkar in a team of 11 Salil Ankolas. Enough Said.
Hence, the journey thus far has been good. Of course, there are certain things that are left behind when you leave College, but hey, who wants to be in the IITR E&C Dept. for more than 5 years?
P.S: Roorkee Junta, unless something urgent comes up in office or Priyanka Chopra agrees, I will be in R-Land from 23-26th Jan. Giddy Up!
I’m probably expected to write something senti here, about how my three years in Watch Out were full of memories that I’ll always cherish and how I’m reminded of Bryan Adams singing ‘those were the best days of my life’. However, I’ll not delve too much into that because it would amount to me taking the role of Captain Obvious and also because I’d rather not highlight my gross ineptitude at that kind of writing. So I’ll share with you an incident that happened during my third year.
This was the day of the Watch Out interviews, where we select the new team from the first year crowd. As always, we’d done our share of running around RPM and RK Jain, for that elusive early date for the interviews in a bid to say “Muhahahaha” to other groups on campus. So, every thing was in place for the auditioning of people. Or atleast, I thought everything was. As it turned out, the same day, a cousin of mine was getting married in
Hence, I made a slight change in plans. I would leave late night, reach
Needless to say, the gathering comprised of highly impressive (an earnest attempt to tone down my real opinion) women, whom I’d heard of in wedding-related fairy tales recited by my friends. Finally, I was surrounded by a swarm of highly impressive (again, same thing) women whose average beauty was a few orders of magnitude more than what I’d seen in Roorkee. I pinched myself twice, both times happily concluding that this wasn’t God’s way of mocking me. It was natural then, for my mind to wander and think furiously of intro one-liners, conversation topics and in one case, the awesomeness of the female form of life. But hang on, wasn’t I supposed to be back to Roorkee in a few hours, interviewing innocent first yearites, asking audacious questions to throw them off? My first impulse was to call Tejo, tell him that I’d quit Watch Out, effective from that instant. However, better sense prevailed and I decided, rather sullenly, to stick to the original plan. I know you don’t go to weddings for trying your luck at highly impressive women (a blatant lie, that), but hey, maybe those were ‘happy hours’ in God’s court of justice. In hindsight, that was the correct decision, because you don’t stand much of a chance of befriending members from the opposite sex if you possess the social skills of a raccoon. Anyhow, the disappointment was made up for by the aforementioned eight-course meal with more kinds of Paneer than there are countries in the world.
Finally, the time came for the goodbyes and the see-you-arounds and also for sadly closing the door on a much-awaited social interaction session. I picked up my bags, went to the bus terminal and started my journey back. I was keen to come back for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’d missed the previous year’s interviews to a similar social obligation. So I wasn’t around when Lefty and co. were picked up. Hence, I was in no mood to miss it this time around. Plus, I feared that if Tejo happened to be experiencing one of his routine mood swings that night, well, then god bless us.
As you would expect, the bus found a way of getting stuck in traffic, true to Murphy’s theory and got delayed by an hour or so. So I began calling people, trying to know what was going on, and as expected, I found out that nobody was present at either SB or RJB. This was followed by a series of phone calls, coaxing people out of their laziness and some threatening-with-dire-consequences. In a moment of genius, Tejo and I had decided to send that wonderfully reliable trio of Pulkit, Shubham (of the kelvinator fame) and DJ (of the pink cellphone fame) to SB to conduct the interviews, hence I was all the more eager to get back as soon as possible. Ultimately, I did make it back without being too late and we managed to pick a pretty nice bunch of people (political correctness is the ‘in’ thing these days).
All said and done, I’d definitely say that the magazine has progressed during my five years in Roorkee. The overall look, the kind of articles etc are much better than what we could come up with. On the personal front also, I feel there’s been an improvement. The bonding between the current lot is really nice to see and it’s a piece that was missing in the years gone by. It’s a matter of pride for me to have been a part of Watch Out, and I wish I’d be writing something like this for the silver and golden jubilee of the magazine as well!
