Running the Marathon..

It all started with Alice mail to participate in Marathon, he literally forced me to register for this. I had the option of 10K run and 5.7K run, and always as ambitious as I am, I chose 10K run.

Later some people told us that you could raise money for some NGO running for the marathon and then started this mad rush to run for NGO post. It was good hectic last week, to get NGOpost registered, to set up payment gateway and then to get the Tshirts designed and printed. It reminded of the time we used to do nightouts in college preparing for those cultural festivals.

Finally came the Sunday, I was able to run 10 kms in about 1 hour and 13 minutes, it was not bad. Though later in the evening legs had become very soar. I have never run so much before, but cheering and people running around you can made a lot of difference. There were so many people, army people, old ladies, some families standing outside their apartments cheering and urging you to go. It is funny that for something as physical dumb as running should be controlled by your mind and how the surroundings can make you feel.

So it was good fun and the event was wonderfully organized, but the only thing that bothered me was the picture on the right. There was loads of plastic litter'ed everywhere. Though it is true that they cleared most of roads of this, because I did not find any traces of them when I was driving later in the day. But I still wonder if all this can be recycled. Why use plastic when we can avoid it.

I also contributed three bottles to this, could not help it, it was so hot. But next time I think I am going to carry my own bottle.

(Picture: courtesy Murali)

Being Environment concious..

These days I have become majorly environment conscious. Whenever I see little bit of plastic, I keep asking myself, "Is there anyway i can avoid using this".

The other day, I had gone to Cisco. As soon as you enter Cisco and go around, you see various posters pasted which keep stating how eco-friendly Cisco is. It is good to see a big company as Cisco being environment conscious. But what saddens me everytime I go Cisco is the way they use bottled water. Unlike most other companies which have normal water bottle for each employee, which keeps getting refilled from water dispenser, Cisco has loads of half liter packaged water bottles. So most of the employees who keep coming to cafetaria pick up 1-2 of these bottles. Imagine about 1000 employees and the number of water bottles getting used per day. And how much waste that will be generated. Maybe they recycle it, but still why do all that when you avoid the situation all together. And what amazes me is that this is same campus which is filled with all posters of environment friendly quotes.

Then I go to meet a friend of mine in oracle the other day and I went in to their meeting room and they had this normal water bottles which had to be refilled from water dispenser. This made me really happy "Your company is truly environment conscious", I told my friend.

And we were generally discussing this, and then there was this friend from a top MBA school and he was saying that these days, lot of students before considering a company for placement also try to figure out how environment friendly the company is and how much does it score on its CSR. Maybe this is still a far fetched thought, and personally till now I never thought of such things before taking a job. But it does seem a good idea, and I shall keep this in mind next time I think of hopping job, and then Cisco probably has lost some points already.

Satsungs

The earliest Satsung that I remember attending was when I did not use to go to school. And the only thing I remember is that me and my sister were playing "Ichuk Michuk" (Some game you play with hands, cant explain it here). And all the people surrounding us were asking us to be quiet.

Today I went to "Radha Soami Satsang", it was held somewhere near Tumkur road. And I was surprised to see so many people there. It is organized by this organization (I like their tagline, Science of Soul).

With due respects, I really appreciate the efforts of the organization to do all the great work that it is doing, but I sometimes wonder if it is really worth it.

When people go there they break traffic lane disciplines to ensure that they reach first, without bothering about the traffic jams they cause, they would park the vehicle the way it is more convenient to them without bothering a bit about others, try to sneak in the line just to ensure that they get the best seat. It just seems to me that the ultimate purpose of these people is to attend to this function, and everything else does not matter. I find it so amusing because I guess the primary purpose of attending all this satsangs and temples is to cleanse yourself and think of others. The same thing I find with Tirupati as well, the atmosphere is anything but spiritual.


I remember once when I had gone to Art of Living, and then Guru Sri Ravi Shankar had come. And at the end of Satsung, he called for all the people who were having birthdays that day on stage, and there was this friend of mine next to me, who just went off. It was not his birthday. When I confronted him later outside, he said he did not care because he got a chance to see guruji closely it seems. To me that beats the whole purpose of coming to Satsung.

Not saying that you should not attend the satsungs, but most times I do feel that it is like getting a tick mark on their life's resume.

What if all these people instead of travelling all the way from their homes, and spending so much time, could just go to one of the NGOs in their respective town and donate some time/money. What could be a better satsang then making a positive difference in someone life.

Freegans :

Quite sometime back I had read about this girl (in US), who would search in garbage bins for food and use it. Not that she was poor but that she was a part of community called Freegans. I had lost the link for it, but then today again it popped up in one of the feeds.  Freegans are community where people believe in using the minimum resources required for living and conserving and reusing stuff. 

More here

http://freegan.info/

An excerpt here 

"It's not a few bad products or a few egregious companies responsible for the social and ecological abuses in our world but rather the entire system we are working in, we begin to realize that, as workers, we are cogs in a machine of violence, death, exploitation, and destruction."

This is so similar to Story of Stuff. 

Sometimes I also wonder, being a hardware engineer about all the hi-fi tech stuff we keep making. Increasing speeds from Kbps, to Mbps to Gbps and so on. If all this is worth it?

 

Random thoughts..

My blog had kind of gone in hibernating mode, and these are just some random thoughts.

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 Actually these days I have been spending lot of time writing for this one magazine called Sattva. You can take a peek at this, it is not a masala magazine, it is a NGO magazine. It is a monthly magazine and every month  we do a focus on different topics, like education, health, alternate sexuality and so on. March edition was on Human rights. 

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Yesterday I was having an argument with my friend regarding buying a house in Bangalore. I am totally against it. My argument being, "Why to pay EMI for next 25 years of life, for something that I am not going to carry along with me. I mean think about it, all those small, no sunlight entering, kind of houses in one of the massive residential apartments, (they always give me identity crisis),  and when you die you cant take it along with you anyways. It may sound selfish, because my parents spend greater part of life trying to build a house, but it was different in those times.  And getting a beautiful house in the place you belong is different from buying this lunch box kind of houses in Bangalore. Home town houses are something nice and they are something that maybe people in future will cherish. Hence I find this mad rush for securing this ever expensive houses in bangalore not very meaningful. Sometimes I just feel that we get caught in all this web of buying a house, buying a car and before we know life has already gone by."

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My cousin in hyderabad is in ninth now, so this year that school finish their ninth class syllabus in feb and have started giving them rigorous tenth class education. I really find it so absurd that such big schools would think in this way, and put so much pressure on this poor kids as if tenth class is one massive exam and their entire life depends on this one thing. I think they did not see Taare Zameen Par, or even if they saw it, they just wept during the movie and came back and forgot all about it. Wonder if movies make any difference?

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The other day I was talking to one of the Maths teacher, in Ananya. Ananya is the school for underprivileged kids, and the school gives them basic education to prepare them for Open Schooling tenth class Exam. And he was explaining me that most of children there struggle with Maths, not with basic maths, but things like trigonometry and algebra. Not being from any regular school they find it very difficult to grasp these subjects. This could also be because they dont find much relevance of this in their daily lives. And then we were arguing if kids really needed to understand all these, and then if you think about it you hardly use it in day to day life. Further most of this kids dont plan to become engineer or doctors, they just want to get some basic education (like Home Science) and get some decent job and support their families. 

Also read this beautiful article called "A mathematician's Lament" related to above.  Swarna forwarded this to me and I absolutely loved it.

 

Story of Stuff,

One of my friends forwarded me this video and I really liked it. It is awesome. Do take a look. After watching this video , I have become very conscious, about the waste that I generate everyday.

Do take a look and Njoy.

Getting the driving license in Bangalore

IS EASY. You dont have to pay bribe, you dont have to stay in long queues, it is simple and straight forward. I had got my DL that way some three years back. Of course you will have to give driving test and get all your vehicle documents verified. So it would take about 3-4 hours, but the system works.

This post was prompted because couple of days back, I saw this skit, which was supposed to be humor. It was about how in India government system does not work, making fun and submitting to the fact that nothing can be done about it.

So I dont know about other government offices, but I do know that Karnataka RTO works fine.

Anyways I got the below in the mail from iVolunteer,

http://pgportal.gov.in/

"
Government of India has an online Grievance forum at http://darpg-grievance.nic.in/

The government wants people to use this tool to highlight the problems they faced while dealing with Government officials or departments like Passport Office, Electricity board, BSNL/MTNL, Railways etc etc. So use this grievance forum and educate others who don't know about this facility. This way we can at least raise our concerns instead of just talking about the ' System' in India.


It really works, I myself lodged a complain against one Bank around 6 months back. Bank took an action immediately on that and after two months, I got a confirmation (by letter) from the following department that my complain has been requested.

Similar experiences has been reported by couple of my colleagues too.

The response from the department is bit slow at present but I have seen that it is active, which is good sign for future.
"

I dont have any personal experience with this, but will try it for sure next time.

So I guess government has lot of initiatives, just that we have to start using them.

Cheers.

PS: I have added a full post on how to get the driving license in Bangalore here.

About Me

My name is actually Rajesh, but since college people have been calling me Goli and hence so is my name now, and my blog name.

Professionally am an hardware turned marketing engineer now, but as most others I do feel that such jobs suck and I should get out of it and do something else in life, but dont have the courage to leave this job and leave all the corporate luxuries :D.

Apart from work, have tried my hand, at guitar, salsa, film making, writing, aerobics(ing), with moderate and no success at some.

Apart from this blog I do write for a monthly e-magazine called Sattva. Along with some friends am also involved in running the website called NGOPost.

If so thy wish, you can get in touch with me at togoli-at-gmail-dot-com

--
Goli

A small story...

He was half-awake, still on the bed, when Mr. Reddy called. "Please can you be at Indian coffee house at 8:30 morning", he could hear Reddy say. "Ok," he said and cut the phone. But he was in no mood to get up, he generally liked to lie in bed early in the morning, listening to the birds and thinking about his girl friends, atleast those who he thought of as girlfriends. He didn't want to spoil his sleep for some Reddy, and he got some satisfaction in making Reddy wait for spoiling his dreams.

He was wondering how people could be so selfish, seven in morning was not the time to bug people, especially when you did not know them and further still when you had to get some work out of them. But he did not say anything on phone, because Mr. Reddy was after all niranjan's father. He had worked with Niranjan on one project during college time and they had had a good time.

He delayed as much as he could getting up from bed, but then finally woke up and got ready to meet Reddy. Early morning MG road is deserted, and he quite liked to drive on empty roads, even parking is so easily available, and standing outside the coffee house was this middle age man, a typical shop-keeper-uncle type, with a big tummy, and sure enough he was Mr. Reddy.

"Mahesh"
he nodded,
"I waiting, 7:30 AM"? Mr. Reddy added,

"But I said 8:30 uncle", he blurted in a louder voice, He was in no mood to be guilt-tripped by some Reddy who was standing for one hour on a relatively cold Bangalore morning.

"Language problem, you fast English, less understand" he said

They went inside.

"15 minutes only, then you go office", Mr Reddy said

He was relieved, he had a important review meeting in office at 10 and he did not wanna get late for that. Not much that it mattered, but he still wanted to use this as an excuse to escape from him, and return to comfortable work desk with google talk and orkut.

"Lawyer from Guntur, you witness, give same, what you give in court, copy is there" Mr. Reddy said and handed him the copy.

He looked at the copy, and memories flooded of that afternoon in court, all those cross examination questions, "Did you see the truck coming", "Was it a cold night", "Was it a foggy night", all those things which he hardly remembered. He was actually sleeping when it happened, and he did not even realize it until much later, when he had woken up to lots of commotion, people shouting, in languages he did not understand, and he was sandwiched between two seats. He did not remember exactly when the realization had hit him that it was an accident. He only remembered wriggling out through the window, someone helping him out, and for some strange reason he was the only one out there wearing shoes, every one else in their bus was barefoot. His next memory was taking one of his colleagues to the closest hospital, in a police jeep. He was in a kind of semi conscious state in disbelief, probably in shock, but somehow the hospital, and then police station and everywhere else, seemed to be a dream. Only when he was at police station someone said Niranjan had died on spot.

Niranjan was his classmate and after that they had landed up in a job in the same company. Niranjan had planned the whole trip. He did not even remember the last thing Niranjan had said or his last expression. probably at the tea shop on the highway, after which Niranjan had choose to sit on the first seat and he for some reason was sitting on the third.

He did not even see Niranjan's body, he did not have the courage to see it. Days later he was still looking at the empty cube and half expecting Niranjan to appear suddenly. They said he had died on impact.

Then he remembered the court case, he had already given witness once. That was for Shivkumar. Shivkumar was sitting next to Niranjan and had met the same fate. He had not given entirely correct witness then either, he had said that he was awake when it happened. He had said that it was not a foggy night, though he did not remember anything of that sort, he had also said that the other vehicle was speeding. In reality he had no idea how and what happened, he was sleeping blissfully. But he had done that because he felt sorry for Shivkumar's father. The insurance lawyers were very smart, and probably had he said the truth Shivkumar's father would probably not have got a single rupee, which did not seem right. Poor father, he was old, fighting a lone battle against those tricky viley lawyers. And he had not entirely distorted everything, had he been awake, probably he would have witnessed same thing. Surely Shivkumar's father could not be punished for his sleepiness. He had felt happy then that he could help the distressed father who had grown really old travelling in crowded BMTC buses for three months, trying to get some insurance claim.

But right now sitting in front of Mr. Reddy, he was wondering and questioning to himself if he had to repeat the same things again. Why did these fathers want so much money from insurance? And Mr. Reddy did not look that old - he could surely take care of himself. Why making him do the same things and repeat the same things. But he was afraid that if he altered the statement this time around, it would be difficult reconciling to the court what he had said earlier and what he would say now. He was getting himself in to trouble trying to help people and the questions inside him were becoming more probing.

He had decided within himself that he would try to get things done in the right way especially in government offices. He had done that for his driving license, he had got it without paying a single rupee as bribe because he was adamant that that has to be done this way. Then why not fight insurance lawyers in right way, but then how many things he could possibly take up inlife. And after all Niranjan was his good friend. Further still the the idea scared him that had it not been for two seats, probably his father would have been here with Niranjan. That was scary and disturbing thought.

So he slowly and carefully read his previous witness and kind of memorized it. And then off he went to court to give witness. And it did not take long, but it required patience, same old questions, same cross examinations, same senseless things, like "did you see the other vehicle coming", "how far was it when you spotted it", "what is your religion". He wondered why would religion matter, he had half the mind to say that he was an Indian and he did not believe in religion, but then he did not want to create a scene, and unnecessary complicate matters. It is not a great feeling to see things getting repeated all over again, and then it made me wonder, how difficult it might be for rape victims, every hearing to go over it again and again, and then all of sudden he was feeling happy that he was better off. Comparatively this was nothing.


All was done, and he was free again. Mr Reddy thanked him and said, "I get 80 Lakhs",

80 lakhs!!! his mouth dropped, all of sudden he felt that all his lying was only to satisfy Mr. Reddy's greediness. What was he going to do with so much money, especially after Niranjan was no more. It was little disgusting that all this fight and all this business was just for money. Everyone wanted money, insurance lawyers wanted to save money of insurance, probably because they get commision on what they save, this Mr. Reddy, wanted more money for this son. All of sudden he felt things very oppressive, as he was going down the lift of court building. He was wondering what was he doing here, probably and the realization that he also had the hand in all this shameful business. It was very bad feeling.

And amidst these thoughs when he was stopping an auto to run way from that shameful place, he heard some final good bye from Reddy, and he did not care to return the good bye. He was glad that he was out of all this shit.
But as auto started, he caught this words," Will call, when settlement done, Niranjan, said you work NGOs, with money, want start Niranjan trust which scholarships poor children for them studying "

Changing the mindset..

By,

Guest Writer - G Krishnan
gk(at)fireprosystems.com,

"

There is a small tea shop near my office and when we go for a chai, I always noticed that the used tea cups (plastics) are thrown into the gutter nearby. I have told the owner of the shop to keep a small carton box (trash box) and tell the people to drop the used cups into the box. But he was reluctant and it is understandable. But I did not leave it. I showed him the drain near by and there were >1000 used cups.
I told him that it is his responsibility too to educate people saying, when it rains all these plastic cups will clog the drain and we complain about municipality that they are not cleaning the drain. Drain is only for water to flow thru and not for any hard materials.
Tomorrow if it rains heavily and your shop gets submerged/damaged due to clogging of drain, it is because of you and not because of the Govt. Ever since he started keeping a trash box near his tea stall and I can say atleast the no. of cups thrown into the drain is reduced.
Also I take this opportunity to tell all that it is all of us who can make or break. If we decide to spread this simple message across, we can save the deaths of people esp children (since the poor children play in these areas), cattle etc. during floods/heavy rains.
Also since these plastics are not bio-degradable, it must be trashed in a proper way for recycling.
When ever I visit a road side stalls, I ensure that I spread this message.
To conclude I must say that I changed the "mindset" of the tea stall owner to "set mind". Let all of us set mind in changing this bad practice/menace.

Thanks for giving me an opportunity to voice out my story. Hope it benefits the entire society.

"

Have we become hollow?

There is a small church next to my house, a very small church. Most of the evenings when I reach home there are always car parked right in front of my gate because of which I cant park my bike inside. Worst still are days when i have to go out urgently and there are always car right in front of gate. I have to go in the church and ask whose car is it and get them to move it.

I have had frequent conversations with this people and I try explaining them, how much difficulty they are causing for me and other people. They dont even listen, sometimes even accusing look because I end up spoiling their prayer time. To me it goes out of mind, why would someone want to pray when you dont care a bit about fellow people. Worst still it is not that the church does not have parking, but it is in the side lane, and it means little more time and little more time in taking out. But yups no one wants to do that.

Even when I went to Tirupati, I got the same feeling, people were pushing, fighting, shouting. No one cares if there is a old person or sick person and lets give him/her right of way first. Everyone just wants to get that one certificate of "darshan" which apparently supposedly would do whatever to your life. Makes me feel that we are just blinded by outward things, and dont even stop to think or introspect.


Recently I met this girl, she was from srilanka. Had come down to do a project for three months. She just leaving this week for once and all, with the determination that she is not going to come back to India again. She says because people are rude, people dont follow lane discipline, people dont care. Maybe she got a raw deal here, but in many ways she is right, and I did not have any answers to give her.

From Beggars to Entrepreneur

Maddy pointed me out to this Video of Mohammad Yousuf which was posted on ngopost. This is really inspiring and here is the little excerpt from it.

"
I always insist that all human beings are entrepreneurs, without exception. it is part of human being, you cannot take it out, it is built in to him/her. Simply we could not build the society where we could unleash that potential, it remains dormant, because society never gave that idea, we do not talk about that in class room, in education system. Educations system encourages you to get good grades, and we say that if you get good grades you get good job. And it does not encourage entrepreneurship.

So this time we wanted to demonstrate that all of us are entrepreneurs, so the idea we came up with was that, lets have special program for beggars, our idea was you cannot be poorer than beggars,because that is last stage of survival, so if you can make entrepreneur out of beggar then there is nothing like it.

So we went to beggars and started talking to them, and we wanted to know at what point in time in life they started begging, what pushed them to beg and why they continues. Always the story was that I never thought that I will continue, when I started I could not find any other alternative, I thought next month I will stop but I did not have any solution and so I continued to be beggar.

So we suggested them as you go from house to house for begging, would you like to carry some merchandiser with you such as biscuits, cookies, candies, toys. etc, So that you can give a choice to the family, if they want to give you charity or they want to buy something from you, or they want to do both. So you are giving them choices. And you are going from house to house anyway, this is something you can add to your activity. And they liked it, and our thought was that we will have couple of thousand beggars in that the program and see how it goes and learn lot from them. It became such a popular program, today there are more than 100 thousand beggars in the program and more than 10 thousand of them have stopped begging completely, they are sales person, door to door sales person"

This and lots more, I have become a fan of this guy.

Santa's day out at Annanya

Had a small adventure at Annanya, just before Christmas. Dressed up Chander as Santa Claus, and with the help of iVolunteer and borrowed Toys from Toy bank to give it to kids at Annanya.
Pictures will tell rest of the story.

Impatience

The other day I was sitting at Hong Kong airport with one of my friends and as soon as the boarding announcement was made, he was practially running to get in to the plane, as if they are going to close of the gates or if he was not going to get the place to sit. I asked him, "Hey, chill what is the hurry?" He said, "No I wont get place to keep my baggage in the overhead compartment"

All my life I have done so many of flight trips, and I have not encountered a situation where the people asked you to throw out the baggage, because there was no space, there is always been space. Worst case might be that there is no space above your seat and then air hostess would come running to your aid and I would say that it is a plesant situation rather than an unpleasant one.

Sometimes I wonder why are we so engrossed with fear of losing something and hence rushing, rushing. Tensing ourselves to reach office early because else might lose the favourite parking spot, getting up as soon as the plane comes to halt and rushing to exit first just to save couple of minutes, getting up before the end titles of movies so that you are first to get out of cinema parking, getting impatient at the auto in front because of which missed the green signal by couple of feet and many more.

Why are we always running to secure the future, study hard to get in to good college then take a job, after two years of job, start looking to buy the house, find and buy one, which would would take half of salary practially till retirement, buy a car, scooter, or whatever, and then when you are left with 10% of your salary that save for education for the kids.

Please dont use that grashopper kind of story on me, and tell me what happened to grashopper who did not think of winter, but I do think that we are all to obsessed with securing and double securing future.

Earlier whenever i used to drive down to office I used to keep thinking about the mails that I will have to reply, the things that I will do in office and so on.. and day never used to turn out like that. Now I have conciously stopped doing that, I want to notice and see things, and I realized that the world is not going to come to end if I dont reach couple of minutes ealier to office.

Happy new year.
--
Goli

Stories from Hong Kong...Origin of word Good...

First day in Hong Kong, and I was sitting in the bus reading the newspaper, and I found a section there called, some origin of words and learn chinese kind of thing,

So found the following entry which was talking about the origin of hte word good.

Good is written as,
好 and pronounced as (Hau)

and here is how it is formed,

The first character in the above word

女
means woman, girl etc. (Pronounced Nu).

And the second character
子
means a boy (zu)


And you combine this together to get
好

which means good (Hau)
So a girl and boy together means good.

Isn't this interesting.

Stories from HK..... Food

Hi,

Now about five days in Hong Kong, and I have realized two things..

1. I used to boast in Bangalore that I can eat everything, but after coming here i have changed my mind, there are some things which need lot of courage to eat. Went out for dinner with all my collegues, (most of them are chinese or taiwanese), and we went to some thai restaurant, I tried almost each and everything until she got a full plate of crabs, and then my courage failed me, and I simply could not get myself to eating that.. But trust me apart from the scary look that most of the food had it tasted great. It is so different from anything else that I have eaten in my life
2. I also realized that all the chinese restaurants in India are completely non chinese. That has got no relations to the food that you get here. Fried rice that I keep seeing in all Indian chinese restaurants, I could not find it here in any of the menus, it is another story that most of the menus were in chinese and I could not read them.

But over all my dining experience has been great. Here you can get any kind of sea food. Food that I have never seen before. It is exotic and colourful and whatever I have tried I have easily managed to gobble up everything.

A sample picture of lunch. It is one of the most colourful lunch that I have seen. This is called Japenese Sushi.


You can read more about sushi on the web, Have not seen any restaurant in India which gives sushi.

More later, these last few days have been terribly terribly busy. lots of more stories to say but may be little later.

Fraudy Rai University ??

Yesterday I was just listening to CNN IBN citizen journalist, and this piece of story caught my eye. A story about how fraud Rai University is. This story has been done by couple of students, of the Rai University campus which was closed down after one year of education, because supreme court canceling its affiliation.

I was shocked because, I always thought that Rai University was one of the better private colleges in India, and at one point of time was even looking at it for my cousin. But this video has a separate story to tell.

I also googled and found that, a old story (2005) also about similar stuff happening in Rai University Ahmedabad.

Maybe some of the campuses of Rai University are good, or maybe this is one off case, but do be careful when next time you try to choose a university.

Look at the video below, click on the extreme right side.

Did you see RDB?

The below is one of the mails that I had written to a friend, and then had ended up forwarding to loads of friends, but posting it on blog.
"

On one of the jobless sundays, I had gone to cancel a railway ticket of one of my friends. It was a tatkal ticket, and he had not travelled, because it was waitlist...(dont bother about the technicalities that much, it was actually quite complicated).


First I went and stood in the railways reservation queue.... it was quite a long queue, and I was there with a book in my hand..remembering the good old hostel days, when we used to stand in queues to get those concessions. I reached the counter after quite sometime, but Oopss... he said for some reason this cannot be cancelled at the counter, the software did not have any such option, I would have to go to the station master. I could not blame the operator.


Well I went all the way back to platform, went to station master, and he casually asked me to go and meet some railway inspector, again in the reservation building. I nimbled back to the reservation building, this fellow was not there, I had to sit there in his office, my book giving me company. He came after some good half an hour, I was little irritated now, asked him. He asked me to go to Accounts section in main railway administrative building.


I dont know what made me go all the way to the main adminsitrative building, (if you familiar with Bangy, you would know it is about 500 meters from the reservation buidling), I guess the good mood of the morning, or may be wonderful weather prompted me to go there. Reached and there was not a person to be seen. Ofcourse it was closed, it was Sunday.


I was laughing at my folly, all my good mood was turing in to equivalent irritation against that railway inspector, against the station master and against everyone working in railways. Everyone just wanted to sit in the chair and take a nap and skip work.


But as I was leaving, somewhere down those empty desks I found this lone guy working. I was so happy to find him, this was the target to vent out all my frustration of last three hours or running around here and there. And I melted down everything on that poor guy. But that fellow to my surprise turned out to be quite nice. He explained me the relevant rules, he even showed me the website of railways, which explained the rules of various corner cases of reservation and cancellation, and said the final authority was that railway inspector, and I had to go to him.


Yups another direction... I was in no mood to go there again...I wanted to go home and finish rest of the book, I could let go 200 rupees...after all it just means one pizza or two DBCs, I already had wasted so much time. But I guess he read what was on my mind.


He asked "Did you see RDB?", (RDB is Rang De Basanti ofcourse)

I was surprised at this question, I said "Yes!"

He said.. "Either you complain about this, or go home grumbling"


It struck like a sting. I could almost read him, almost hear him say "this IT poeple of AC offices, cribbing all the time, making comments on how a railway inspector should behave, commenting on his lack of manners, on his ethics and so on". He had that look in his eyes.

He was a relatively young guy, someone who had perhaps recently got married, and I could feel that in a way he was telling me, "help me change the system" kind of stuff.


But he had hit me, I could not go back now, I was determined to complain. But I did not have any proof, so what do I do.... So I again decided to go back to the reservation office and back to the reservation inspector, this time around he was there.


This time, I said "Please write it and give me". As it turned out, he finally looked carefully at my case, and got my work done, he mumbled something that rules have changed recently and he did not quite understand last time what I wanted to say and so on. I got my 200 rupees.


It is little hard to describe, but that day, that fellows words "did you see RDB?", did hit me, I did not even take his name, and I dont even remember in which of those infinite corridors of that administrative building that I found him. But I think will remember him for a long time to come. And from that day onwards I have been using this technique of "please write and give me" shamelessly.

I would strongly suggest that you too use it..
"

Cheers and have a great weekend.

Cant find time...

I was trying to talk to this friend of mine recently, and for a long time I had been trying to meet him. And he was always like, I cant leave office before seven or eight there is loads of work. This has been going on for a month now.

Not that I blame him, probably he is one of the most reliable employee of his company, and also I am not dying to meet him so I care less. But it keep wondering how we get so engrossed in our job that we start neglecting everything. We all want to go out and meet friends, we all appreciate people who have got time to do all kinds of other activities, and we wish that there was less work. But when some call comes,"Lets do this stuff", we always have, "nahin yaar bahut kaam hai",

I still remember once when I was talking to one friend, (not the same friend of first paragraph) and there was something every important, but I had so much work. And she only told me "Goli, tum nahin rahoge office mein to tumhara office bandh to nahin hoga na", and I still remember that, because this is so true. Working in MNCs and all, I know practically I hardly any value to the company, if I am sick, they will find hundred other alternatives to work, if I cease to exists, I am sure company will exist. But I guess for my family I mean much more, friends mean much more, bdays and marriage anniversaries (recently this has been added,since more and more friends getting married) mean more.

These days I just have a easy attitude to work, I know it is going to happen, I know that next day i am going to put little more effort and finish the work, and over time I have realized that it has nothing to do with your work and how your boss is or which kind of job you are, I think it is just the mindset.

I hope my boss is not reading this.. :)

have a great Deepawali.. :)

Minister Jam

There have been so many times, where I have been caught stranded in the middle of the road in the traffic jam, waiting for some ministers to cross. I kind of call them "minister Jams".

But I was wondering if there is any rule which says that ministers should be given the first preferences on the road or it is just power that they use for their comfort. I do understand that ministers time is more important than my time so in a way giving some preference to him might be justified, but I always wonder the fate of those ambulances which get caught in this so called Minister Jam.

I distinctly remember that sometime back when I had done the interview of traffic policeman, he had pointed out the pain and the tension they have to undergo when ministers come. Not only they have to hear all the grumblings of people, but a single mistake is like great sin.

So thinking if there are any such rules, of clearing roads for politicians, or whatever? Tried to Google, but I dont know right terms to search for this, it gives all kinds of hits. Does anyone have any idea?