Post engagement woes

Pretty much everyone I know have been asking me how I feel about getting married. To the ones I am not close to, I lie saying I am feeling scared and weird. Ones that I am close to, well, I tell them the truth. I tell them that I actually am not feeling anything at all. I think after 3 months or so, one fine Saturday morning, I will wake up in cold sweat realizing that I am married. Or may be I wont. But as of now I am pretty numb. Pooja, on the other hand, not only gets questions but also advice. She gets pretty annoyed (I pretty much copied her title). I think both of us will be relaxed and back to normal once the event is over.

Also, never get into the mess of getting involved in planning a wedding from a different continent. Its very inefficient and frustrating, like working in a waterfall project for a big organization. I am sitting in the Hong Kong transit and pondering as to how much work I have left to do. If you want to console me with a bachelor's party, I will be more than happy. Go ahead, plan one.

Food Scene

So, I was living in China for 8 months and now in SF. Being a vegetarian, I had to cook bloody everyday to survive in China. SF is a different ball game. Pretty much every restaurant here has at least one vegetarian and one vegan option. Unlike other parts of the US, vegetarian doesn't mean just cheese between bread here. Its pretty healthy. People here are very health conscious as well. Anyway, I don't feel like a single working mother taking care of myself now. I just feel like a working "bachelor" again.

So, now that I don't _need_ to cook for survival, I go easy on what I cook. I experiment. I even went to the extent of letting Raghu, my colleague, cook today. Not that I knew if he was good or not. But, generally, I was prejudiced against him (I am old now. I don't beat around the bush anymore about these things. If I am prejudiced against/about something I say so) and hence hadn't let him cook. But today, he convinced me that I don't need to work and that I can relax and do the dishes! I had a momentary lack of control and before I know, Raghu was in control of the kitchen.

He asked me to cut spinach, onion, 3 different varieties of salad leaves, coriander, curry leaves, some carrots and green chillies. He boiled Moong daal in an oven. He fried some sprouted fenugreek seeds, mustard, chillies and asafoetida in a generous amount of vegetable oil. I had a feeling he also had something to do with a lot of cummin seeds and powdered coconut. Somehow, the very acetic smell that was coming from the pan was not reassuring. When the dal just wouldn't become soft in the oven, not before all the water in the bowl had overflown onto the glass plate (which apparently is the expected behavior. Software engineers never learn how to speak normally), the whole of the said contents were transferred into a big, evil looking vessel and copious amounts of water was added. All this was followed by the official covering of the lid and the infamous, "There is nothing left in our hands now" sigh. The fact that both of us were now talking to our girl friends over long distance calls helped only a little in getting the cooking done. He hurled statements like "All this smoke (aka steam) is not letting me see inside to figure out what's happening", "I will add lemon. It will definitely help" and "You add the salt" which did not do much to improve my confidence in the whole fiasco. Even by Indian standards, 3 PM was pretty late and I was hungry. Within 5 minutes, Raghu called it and pronounced the dish to be complete. And then, I took the bold step of taking the first serving...

It was fucking awesome. I have no idea how he managed to pull it off, but he is apparently pretty famous in Thoughtworks for his daal. The confused statements and requests for random ingredients are all to mislead the partner to increase the overall experience of the daal. This succeeds so well that you actually start imagining the daal to be more good than it may actually have been. Also, the careful planning of cooking late and making his friends very hungry never fails as well. All in all, it was a good eating experience today.

We were thinking of cooking some new food. Random cuisine. Lets see how well can we do it. Suggestions are most welcome.

I am back, I guess

I guess blogging is about discipline just like most other things in life. Sad but true. Most people who know me knows that I can't be the least disciplined about the conventional things, say, formal attire for a formal event, not reaching out for food from others' plates, treating my clothes properly in my room, to say the least. These things are, well, you know, so, useless. Then there is sticking to deadlines and being on time. This is I take are pretty annoying to people, but most people know that Indian Standard Time is an addend of an hour and a half anyway. Anyway (used twice in a row for an "not quiet clear what but I am sure it wont be bad" effect) now that I have established without any hard evidence that I am undisciplined which is not that hard to believe though, I will get to where the heck did I disappear.

I got engaged. To a girl. To the girl even. I went from Beijing to Bangalore to Beijing to Bangalore to San Francisco in a span of 5 weeks. And I got engaged while this was going on. I was on a 15 hour a day customer support for 3 weeks which ended up being the biggest deal for our product so far. Yes, we were supporting before they had actually paid. I have packed and unpacked a lot in general. What little time I have been getting, I have been spending it between home, girl friend, friends, movies and hackery. Its been crazy hectic but its one of those nice hectics. The one after which you are happy that the phase is over, but you have no regrets whatsoever. In fact you are happy you went through it.

This being a come back blog, should traditionally be without any interesting things at all and one can basically ignore it, much like the rest of my blogs I am afraid. But, since I am not happy that one will ignore this blog, much like the rest of my blogs, I will add something almost but not entirely useless.

I have had more than one friend tell me that home is not just the house you own/live in. It is a bigger concept. The shops, people, annoying dog next door, kids playing in your street, the freaking annoying traffic jams, the rains, the summer, the power cuts, fighting to get cinema tickets or a parking space and many more. They all add to what is home. Comfort zone I guess. You of all the people, my dear reader, of course know this in theory. You might have read enough books, watched enough movies even had enough friends who have left home to do whatever it is that they are doing wherever you have met them tell you the same. But, its not until that you have experienced yourself that you realise what is home. The feeling you get when you do go back home, let me tell you, is something that you have to experience. No amount of theory is enough to make you understand how good it feels.

It will be a while till I come back home, but Bangalore is definitely where home is.

Quick Suggestion

I have a proposal to the Kannada, rather, all Indian movie makers. I watched about 4 movies now and all of them waste about 2 hours to show how the hero and heroin fight and then fall in love. EVERY GODDAMN MOVIE. So, please, spare me the horror of sitting through the same damn thing and lets just get to the point of the movie. That's right - THE POINT OF THE MOVIE. Oh wait, YOU IDIOTS DON'T HAVE A POINT!

Well, being a confirmed bad movie addict, I have a need to watch Kannada, rather, all Indian movies. So, please cut me some slack. Pretty please?

I am sure in about 2o years, I will look back at this and go, "Well, it was worth a try".

Missing Elections

I am very sad I am missing the elections this time. On the bright side, I can blame an estimated 69,99,99,999 voters if, rather when, something goes wrong. HA!

Idiots

I am so fucking glad I was not in PESIT. I mean, seriously, look at this! I am a fucking grownup when I am in engineering. Treat me like one ass holes.

The Law that no one talks about

I don't know about you, but I follow this unstated rule while using the Gent's room. I have seen a lot of other guys follow it as well. Its as if we have an unwritten understanding of the "Least distance of distinct urinal" rule. It goes, "You always choose a slot such that you are at a maximum distance from all the people who are currently using the urinals and any new person that comes in can choose a slot which is at a maximum possible distance from everyone else."

So, basically, if you have 3 urinals and all are empty, you choose the one on either end and not the one in the middle so that the person that comes next can choose the one at the other end. Similarly, if there are 5 urinals and 2 people, chances are that they know the rule and are at opposite ends already and you choose the one in the middle. Even if they don't know the rule, there are always legal slots that are optimized for given the situation. However, its a big problem with even number of urinals. That's when you face one of the most difficult philosophical questions of our era - "Do I go next to the guy who is humming softly or the guy who is wiggling a little?". It is a hard one really and there is no "Do I go next to the guy who is humming softly or the guy who is wiggling a little? for Dummies" book that has an easy answer to this. Every time you have to take that call and every time you have to repent your decision. This is what we go through. Seriously, these folks should cut us some slack!

Anyway, a really annoying thing is when you know the rule and some one comes in and starts unzipping right next to you even though there are a lot of legal slots. Its as if time slows down and everything is happening in slow motion. You think you are going on forever, as if you have had 2 liters of water, a coffee, a diet coke, some orange juice and green tea in a span of an hour (you are pair programming basically). The sound of the zipper feels a loud, prolonged, shrill shriek on your ears, physically hurting them. Soon enough, the pain becomes so unbearable that you go numb. You don't feel anything, even the fact that you are done or that you are being billed by the hour. You just stay there paralyzed. Annoying and painful.

And oh, you guessed it right. There is a formula that calculates the discomfort experienced by a person who knows the rule and the next person coming in breaks it. Its "The amount of discomfort caused when the rule is broken is directly proportional to the number of legal slots that were ignored and indirectly proportional to the square of the distance between the given slot and the newly occupied slot". The constant of proportion is called "Yuri's constant", named after the famous, "Yuri Gotta-go-ri". He was very infamous for his strange bladder condition (he had to go once every 15 minutes for 45 seconds while humming softly and wiggling a little) and was inspired by the not so famous Kannada poet B L Lakshman Rao.

Anyway, now you know how to annoy the hell out of someone you don't like and who you know knows the rule. Be warned. I don't mind biting you if you break the rule with me.

Quick Question

What do you do when you realize someone you are related to, like your father, reads your blogs? Do you feel strange at all?

Pavan the thief

So, when you are in a country where you don't speak the language and not know the culture, it is very hard to understand what's going on around you. But, over time you feel confident enough to make simple assumptions as to what's going on and try to pitch in. Especially, when you understand the odd word here and there, you think you know what's going on. Boy, can you be more wrong.

We went out for team lunch to the same place from where I order lunch everyday. Going to the place itself is nicer. Like most of the restaurants in Beijing, the place is filled with people who smoke and yell at the top of their voice "Fú wù yuán" which means "Waiter". This is completely accepted and in fact, the waiter attends to the one who shouts the loudest. So, its like an yelling competition which is so tempting that you do not want to be left out. Anyway, we finished our lunch and everyone left while I was still collecting my coat and drinking water (read forging for the remaining pickled peanuts). I wear my coat, which was under this head resting silk cloth, the kind that they put on fancy chairs to avoid stain from dirty heads, one of those. They apparently think putting a coat on a chair reduces the aesthetic value of the noisy smoke filled, its allowed to smoke in public here, restaurant that smells of pork, fish and a myriad of other dead animals. So they just remove the cover, put your coat there and then put the cover over it. I just thought "Hmm. Weird" to myself while munching on my, oh, drinking water and pulled it out, put on my coat and started to leave. When this "fú wù yuán" came running and said, while smiling, something with an animated body language. I had no clue what she meant, but like a jack ass, went "shá ma" (what)? . Then, she repeated the same words very fast thinking I actually understand what she is saying. I just assumed that she was asking me if I liked the food, gave her a thumbs up, said "zài jiàn" (Goodbye) and left. She was confused, but finally said "zài jiàn" herself. I happily walked back to office having a good time in general and reached back the table and removed my coat when...

An yellow silk table cloth fell down my coat. Here was the problem. There was an extra one of those things that was stuck in my coat and the waitress was trying to tell me to hand it back or she will call the security. When I said "What", she said that I really don't want to be stealing in daylight, especially when China and India doesn't have a good relationship and things can turn ugly. Also, that Chinese prisons are not a nice place to be in and that she was sure I am not here to visit them. Finally, if I leave the table cloth as is, she will not report it but then, I could never go there again. Ever. All with a smiling face. At least, I am convinced now that this was what she said.

Anyway, I did get it back with me and now, it sits on a chair, the chair of dishonesty (going by the theme of Forbidden City) which no one uses. We are planning to decorate the chair further. May be I can pull it once more. May be.

Breakups

One of the second toughest thing a person goes through in life is a breakup or heart break. One of the toughest, however, is going through your best friend's breakup. Now that, let me tell you, is a real big bummer.

When its your breakup, you are allowed to make mistakes, to do stupid things, to not be responsible or responsive. You are, but of course, depressed and heart broken. But if your best friend is going through a break up, then you have no excuses. You have to make sure that your friend is not smoking a lot, not drinking herself to death, not doing drugs or if was doing has not stopped, doesn't take sleeping tablets to sleep, doesn't binge nor fast, doesn't hit on random people - men or women, to get back at the bitch who broke her heart. No sir, you can't let your guard down. The worst part is not to get ticked off when you try to make the guy look bad by telling her how pathetic he was and be yelled at because you are judging him. Oh, how could I forget - Make sure your friend goes to work, not picks up fight on the road or the mall, make sure she goes out on to the road or the mall in the first place, skip work with a very short notice and sit at home with her, keep talking to her once every 4 hours (frequency depending on how crazy she was about him) and in most of the cases, not let her parents or any others know that she is going through all these and cover up. You basically have no room for mistakes else something bad would happen about which you would feel guilty for the rest your life.

Trust me, your best friend's breakup is the most demanding phase of your life. It doesn't happen because of your friend's sin. Its your sins, my fellow reader, that cause your friend to breakup. You are responsible for it.