Lying on the lawn

Not many things give me more pleasure than lying down on the ITPL lawn nowadays. After a hard days work (hard days work....I can hear the cynics!) a good lie down on a bed of lush green grass does wonders to the body. And more so to the mind. The process is a natural tension remover, the moment you lie down all mundane worries vanish with the wind!

I’ve been doing this regularly for quite some time now. An ideal time to do this would be in the evening around 6.30 to 7.30. A sunset can’t be seen from ITPL, but at least the changing light can be appreciated. You should take a stroll at this time, go down to the ITPL lawn and look for a decent spot. There used to be a lot of open space in ITPL sometime back. A big chunk of the grounds are now closed with construction work going on there. Presently there’s only a small rectangular patch of grass right opposite the Inventor building I work at. While the grass cover over here is not lush all around there are quite a few good spots you can find.

Picture this:
You are lying down on the lawn. As you look up you see towering steel and glass structures on three sides which seem to be welded at the edges. The U shaped monolithic block frames the deep blue open sky. There are a few Gulmohur trees on the lawn. Green leaves and few bright red bursts of flowers present an almost stark contrast with the unforgiving gray and glass all around.

Roll your eyes around and you can see chauffeur driven cars circling past you and your patch of green grass. A few irate cab drivers circle around the lawn waiting for passengers while other sleepy passengers yawn at passing cars hoping it is for them.

The lawn is riddled with muddy brown patches and there are places that are water logged. But all these just add to a sense of natural beauty that tries to thrive in the midst of computer filled concrete behemoths. As you continue gazing up, you see birds (and bats?) flying around at various levels in the sky. Some go in neat circular arcs, others make zig zag arbit flights. Many seem to be chasing what look like smaller birds or insects. As time passes a few mosquitoes appear from nowhere. Some get too close for comfort. They mosquitoes have a sense of taste (pun intended) too.. a selective few on the lawn walk around with black fuzzy clouds over their heads.

The light all around is diffused and golden - partly due to fading sunlight and partly due to the glow from the lamps encircling the park. Sometimes when there is a cloud or two, the lighting and scenery looks like its taken right out of an illustrated children’s book. As time passes the lamps grow brighter and white lights spill out on to the lawn from the concrete monsters. The sky meanwhile turns blue green orange copper purple. Somewhere in a corner a minuscule white dot becomes visible in the sky. With time more such scattered dots come into view and begin to sparkle. Things in the mind seem to become clearer as dots become stars become constellations on the sky above.

Some random building begins to emit a low pitched vibrating buzz. A wailing siren brings relief to factory workers somewhere close by and momentary irritation to others next to me. A steady white noise flows from the river of traffic just outside. In the background of such noises from man made jungles, happy voices float all around punctuated intermittently by raucous peals of laughter. People walk around on the lawn with cell phones - talking earnestly, arguing, cajoling, negotiating, flirting. The waterfall of voices around you is predominantly bubbly and soothing, quite unlike the crisp and somewhat harsh sounds within the buildings. Steady streams of people leave the buildings and pour on to the sidewalk. They look carefree and visibly happy.

A tiny wriggling sensation creeps up the ankle and moves on to the shins, cleaving a path towards the knee. Soon many such tiny tickles begin to be felt over various parts of the body. But you are comfortably lazy and decide to ignore them, taking in all the sensations. Time seems to stall and you are almost half asleep. In fact its almost time for the bus already! You stagger on to your feet and leave the lawn, whistling with the wind, kicking pebbles on the sidewalk……

ITPL. Traffic. Politicians.

The company I work for happens to be located in ITPL (International Tech Park Limited). It’s actually ITPB (International Tech Park Bangalore) and this is how you will find it on the web. ITPL is a huge place and with an aura of regality around it. But don’t let that deceive you. It’s almost like a city on the outskirts of a city. ITPL is home to many IT people in more ways than one – in addition to working , the people live here from morning to late evening, doing all their stuff in ITPL and returning to their ‘room’ or home only to sleep at night. If there were enough bunkers or cheap accommodation available, there would be a group of people who wouldn’t see the outside of ITPL gate for weeks on end.

The main pain in the backside about working at ITPL is the commute. This is especially severe if you stay out of a 5 km radius from ITPL, and it varies acc to the square (or cube ?) of the distance of your dwelling from ITPL. The two big factors exacerbating the pain in the pain in the backside are peak hour traffic (figurative pain ) and the bumpy roads (literal pain).

Peak hour traffic: traveling a great distance up and down to ITPL teaches you a great deal about time management (or conversely teaches you what a mega disaster can await you if DON’T practice time management). It’s a little like water surfing, only instead of trying to ride the crest of a wave; you try like hell to avoid the crest of the traffic. You need to time yourself just right. There’s a fine line between getting caught in a maddening peak hour traffic jam, and sailing through greeny traffic signals one after the other in a smooth flow. Like all other lessons of life this comes only with practice and experience. For example if I leave my home at JP Nagar at 7:30 am or earlier (on my bike), I can comfortably reach office in 45 minutes, worst case. But leave at 8:15 am, and I’ll take at least an hour and a half. Missing the time window has severe consequences, the time taken to reach ITPL leaving home at 9:00 am can easily be upto two and a quarter hours.

Bumpy Roads: Ah bumpy roads of Bangalore! No dearth of words can describe the wrath you unleash on the poor Bangalorean soul. The basic funda is : Don’t sit on the last few seats in the ITPL bus, unless you cant afford Dashing Cars at WonderLa (at least in dashing cars you can get down in 5 minutes). Also you are screwed at both ends because sitting too front near the engine will make your eardrums scream for mercy. But of course the option of the middle seats first goes to the traffically handicapped. These are the people who wear collars around the neck or carry special pillows to sit on.

Not too early to coin the word Traffic Related Injuries or TRI? Remember you heard about it here first. The unemployed youth can organize mass ergonomics classes with themes like

• Best Practices while travelling in the Bus
  
• Traffic Yoga – Calm yourself and make three hours of traffic a pleasure
• Rulebook of Ideal Sitting Postures while travelling (available for all vehicles)
  

This way we can solve unemployment and traffic related problems in the same breath.
But wait! This can give birth to a new economy too, which focuses on traffic.I can already imagine the brash young politicians talking..

Guptaji Dude “To hell with roti, kapada aur makaan ….the future is in traffic, jaan! We need to build more city outskirts and inject traffic problems into these outskirts, so that we can solve them later. ”

Mukeshji Dude “Now we’re in luck. All cities In India are built embodying the lofty goals of frugality and simplicity. So they have little or no roads at all.”

Guptaji Dude “Right … the small city will form the core of our master plan. All we need to do is to declare some fad announcements like SBZ‘s … “

Mukeshji Dude “It’s actually called Special Economics Zones (SEZ's) dude…”

Guptaji Dude “Ya Ya I know you have completed 11th standard your own, stop showing off. You know dad gifted me a MBA Degree for my birthday, so remember who you are talking too ! Anyway, we will make a lot of Special Economics Zones and similar things. And all the IT companies will fall over each other to set up companies here. While letting out this place we’ll just make sure the roads are not too big! Plan good enough? “

Mukeshji Dude “I don’t think we can build bigger roads even if we wanted to! (Polite heh hehs from the chamchas and politicians) Also we SHOULD not build bigger roads. Our forefathers have worked so hard for this; there haven’t been big roads in India since time immemorial. We may be the future, but we can’t forget where we come from! “

One chamcha gets up and starts playing “Yeh jo desh hai mera ” at the background.

Evil Bus Driver

It was a pleasantly cool Monday morning. I walked to my bus stop with a spring in my step and a song in my heart. I had downloaded some good songs on my I-pod didn’t have much work in office today. As I walked, I passed across people in sweatshirts jogging and doing exercises. Dogs some leashed, some unleashed took their owners for a walk. Kids were playing football in the playground. I glanced at my watch and slowed down a little. I still had five minutes to go. The bus was to come at seven thirty in the morning. The driver’s watch was 15 min late and he didn’t know how to change it, because he always came at seven forty five. It was seven twenty eight and I would still have quite some time to listen to songs in the relatively calm bus stop, without the default traffic remix the bus provided. I came to my bus stop and said the customary hi to my bus-mates (if that’s a word).

I was in the middle of my third song when a bus-mate got a phone call from a friend. It appeared that the bus had already left. Amidst groans and boos, all of us began to form groups of two or three. We had to now travel to the nearest bus stop in auto, about 2 km away. The morning was not pleasantly cool anymore. It was chilly.

I got up earlier than usual the next day. I hurriedly had cornflakes and milk, forgoing the one decent home-cooked meal I would otherwise have. Having ironed my clothes last night itself, I was left with ten minutes to spare before it was seven twenty, the usual time I left home. I didn’t spend the ten minutes at home. I grabbed a book and my iPod and left for the bus stop with a song in my heart but no spring in my step, more with a hurried scuttle across crisp black asphalt. I reached the bus stop at seven seventeen and only then could I heave a sigh of relief. I knew I had at least fifteen minutes to spend in the bus stop. Over the next few minutes some more of my bus-mates joined me at the bus stop, all hoping they hadn’t missed the bus. We waited, mostly patiently.

Seven thirty.

Seven thirty two. No bus at the horizon.

At seven thirty six we finally saw a Pushpak bus weaving its way through small obstacles like cars, bullock carts and potholes. As it came closer, groans and boos resounded again. It was not an ITPL bus.

It would have been interesting to watch how people react to irritation and anxiety, had I not been in the same situation myself. Some stress busting techniques I noticed were quite quirky. A started cleaning his ears compulsively, using up up to six ear buds. B was having an argument with her husband. From what I made out the kind hubby wanted to wait till B got into the bus physically, but B was bothered by this for some strange reason and kept shooing him away without success. C seemed to be unprepared for an important meeting and after several minutes of deliberation, decided to open up his laptop and start working on his ppt. Seeing street urchins seeing him, his face reddened and he hurriedly closed the laptop before the urchins could have a good glimpse at the laptop. I, for my part had taken to straining my neck and glancing up and down the read much like I would probably do in a tennis match. This was because our bus stop was such that the bus could arrive from either side of the road. I’m not kidding.

There was a brief period of time when we all decided that the bus would come at the usual Indian standard time of seven forty five and we relaxed. I say brief because just a few moments later seven forty five passed us. Without the bus.
Till now all had kept mostly to themselves. By seven fifty however, there were signs of group protest. Most people probably thought” So its seven fifty now. The bus is officially late. I can speak ill of the driver with a free conscience... ”. A whispered murmuring broke out followed by heated gossip which then culminated in intermittent outbursts of raucous laughter aimed at the driver. All jobless people at the bus stop almost had a very good time with the attention their jokes got.

One or two people decided to take a rickshaw to the nearest bus stop. Finally the bus came at seven fifty. We got in, each of up competing with the other to give an evil stare at the bus driver. We reached office forty minutes late. The timing of our trip was perfect; we didn’t miss a single traffic jam that could have been possible on our 28km journey to ITPL.

Sniffer Dogs at ITPL !

The security at ITPL is going to the dogs. Literally.

Today, as our bus entered the ITPL premises, we were pleasantly surprised (some cynophobics alarmingly so) to see a white Labrador and his (or her. I don’t know.) owner climb into the bus. People sitting close to the passage had to hurriedly tuck in their arms legs, briefcases, purses and stomachs in some cases to make way for the dog. Most of the people were curiously amusedly watching the proceedings, almost hoping the dog would find something, just to add some excitement to their mundane lives. But the dog found nothing.

Anyway, the whole episode made me feel guilty. I’m provided with such good security until I’m safety sitting in my cubicle. My body guards have braved all kinds of dangers and done their job of protecting me. Now its my turn. And instead of shaking the world with ground breaking work that I’m supposed to do according to my destiny, I sit and write a post about the bodyguards! I suppose however much you straighten a dog’s tail, its going to curl again…

Visit to the Gym

I turned up at 1 pm for my physio at the gym, little knowing what to expect.
It started out quite ok, I thought. I met the physio Yograj. I looked forward to the procedure with a jaunty air, everything looked encouraging. Yograj asked some simple questions about my medical history etc. He was almost pitiful when heard my report.. no major illnesses; no surgeries ; no smoking ; no drinking, no untoward incidents. I could read the thoughts in his head as clearly as daylight.. stupid software guy does not have a life!! “ I’m a hardware guy and you’re only partially right about the 'does not have a life' part” I wanted to correct his thoughts but decided against it. The initial session went ahead without any further incidents.

Then came the height, weight and other measurements section. The height was no surprise, since man is not biologically known to vacillate in height every now and then. But the weight! Ah the weight.. waxing and waning asymmetrically (more of waxing in my case), always in flux and tormenting me in its uncertainty. The weight turned out to be 71 today. But this was not a the surprise.. The biggest surprise was when Yograj told me my weight was a little on the lower side!! What? I asked him twice aloud and 14 times in my head. How can I not be overweight?? Something was very fishy here, and I’m not talking about the smell my shoes and socks sitting innocently at the corner were radiating. Anyway the expert had manipulated data in my favor. Good for me! I could feel my self -esteem burgeoning into a big balloon over my head.

Then next, I was supposed to go through a number of physical tasks or mini exercises. Having categorized me as just another IT professional who's more interested in filling company coffers than in improving the temple of his soul i.e. his body, he proceeded to systematically puncture holes in every possible way in the hot air balloon that my self-esteem had become. He made me stretch legs, do push ups , touch the toes, balance on heel, balance on toes and what not. He was delighted that I couldn’t do more than x pushups (x being close enough to negligible to warrant not mentioning it). Paining at the hamstrings he he? he asked. My brain shifted gears in a effort to recollect where my hamstrings were, but since I was aching all over, it really didn’t matter where those hamstrings were, they were paining all right.

Here’s only a partial list of my physical fallacies he mentioned:
1) Less body strength (Ok fair call. Considering that I hardly do lots of things other than lifting the mouse and laptop)
2) General Flabbiness in upper body ( $#%^&*?? I think this guy is really pulling it now! After running 3 km daily and eating paltry fruits as lunch for two weeks this guy says I’m flabby. I'll ignore this one)
3) Limited Flexibility in muscles
4) Slightly high Skin Fat content

All in all it was a terrible session; he made me feel completely naked though I was only partially naked during some times of the session. Gym Instructors and dentists, they’re all the same!!

Hardship of the Hardware Engineer

Signal signal on the screen
Why the hell don’t you turn Green

Always in a high impedance state
Is this all that’s written in your fate??

Every day there are meetings galore,
Add to this the traffic of terrible Bangalore

Days turn into nights, nights turn into days,
All this happens in such an a haze

So many hours I have to slog
When do I blog, when do I hog?

Deadlines get postponed so often they are as good as dead,
Im just waiting until its time to hit the bed..

God knows what the future may hold,
Im just watching the drama unfold …

And then came the smile

(first appeared in www.thousandwordpicture.blogspot.com)

“Keep steady man, be cool, be cool “I told myself. She was 200 meters away from me. Immediately I sucked in my burgeoning paunch, adjusted my Infineon badge so it was prominently displayed (why I do this every time, God only knows. Even the sweepers in ITPL, Bangalore have their own badges to show off).I walked towards her with an air of nonchalance. She was my junior from college, and a damm pretty one at that. I had never spoken to her in college though; this must have probably been due to the aura of nerdiness I used to radiate back then. Now the aura has turned into a small halo, but is still definitely there.

This is my big chance, I told myself. My plan was simple (too simple, some of you might argue). As I strutted past her with my stomach tucked in, she just had to notice me and say Hi, I reasoned (the smallness of my halo of nerdiness being prominent in my reasoning). I would then pretend to notice her and feign surprise. In my surprised state, I would blurt out how beautiful (and sexy, if I still had my guts around me till then ) she looked in her maroon outfit today. She would then have to blush, I reasoned again. And so on continued my reasoning. I’m actually very good at reasoning , be it logical reasoning, verbal reasinong, reasoning to evade blame, to gain time etc.

Alas! Today my reasoning made me lose time instead. Before I knew it, she was only 20 meters away from me. And to add salt to the injury, she walked with this huge swarthy bouncer like character next to her. What I had imagined to be a magnified shadow when I first saw her had suddenly turned corporeal. Complimenting her sexiness seemed akin to committing suicide now. Why can’t I be one of those pathetic losers who miraculously seem to have a hot babe stuck to one of their shoulders, I sighed at the world in general and at God in particular. I resigned myself to fate. I decided to go with the ‘strong hunk’ look. Puffing my chest and narrowly avoiding a coughing fit in the process, I walked majestically towards the ‘couple’, all ready to supremely ignore them.

And then came the smile. Bang; without warning, when I least expected it, when all my defences were low. This girl has one of the cutest smiles in ITPL, and that’s saying a lot. ITPL has at least fifteen thousand people, to hazard a guess (as with all my guesses the figure may be considerably off the actual value, so please take this with a cup of salt). We can safely assume that 40 % of them at least are females, which gives us a minimum of six thousand females. Of these at least four thousand would be in the age group of 18 and 27 years. Needless to say, every girl in this age group is trying her best to look gorgeous. Let’s say about one fourth of them are successful. That leaves us with thousand gorgeous females in ITPL. My girl (‘my’ sounds possessive and ridiculously untrue, but what the heck it’s my blog) would rank somewhere in the top twenty to thirty – close to 99.9 percentile.

Anyway, about the smile. She did notice me, and flashed her perfect teeth at my two day stubble. Her face was framed by two narrow strands of jet black hair and her right cheek showed the hint of a dimple. It was a warm smile to say the least and a super hot smile to say the most. And she waved at me in a silly girlish manner which I found very arresting. And even more embarrassing was the fact that I dropped my strong hunk attitude before one could say ‘strong hunk’ and stood engaged in a silly hand wave exchange program with her for a full 3 seconds. And even more embarrassing was the fact that the bouncer guy started waving back !! I smelled something fishy here, and I was not standing at the seafood counter of Civet.

She came forward and introduced me to the bouncer guy. Believe it or not, the bouncer guy was actually a co-worker of hers. I still looked quizzically at him, I had not taken well the act of being waved back sillily(dictionary check) by a hot babe and a monster man at the same time. She explained. Turns out during the time we were separated by a distance of 200m to 20 m, the effects of my mental reasoning were quite physically conspicuous. I had narrowly missed colliding with who dustbins, trod on the toes of a elderly man, walked mostly on the wrong side of the walkway leaving big brown footsteps glistening on the otherwise spotless recently cleaned surface.I had even walked headlong into a nervous gang of girls without noticing, scaring them away from Coffee Day Café. The bouncer guy had found this very funny (I hate his guts by the way) and had motioned my girl to observe me.

I grinned sheepishly at them with a men will be boys kind of look. And walked away huffed. However the after effects of her smile lingered with me, strong and everlasting like the smell of my socks (note to self: quota of one disgusting comparison over for this post). Everything in the mall began to look brighter, and my work for the day didn’t seem so hectic after all. I was even prepared to walk all the way upto the barber shop to get my unsightly stubble replaced by an irresistible clean shaven silkiness (if half of what the Gillete Mach 3 advertisement promises is true)

Ah, the simple pleasures of life! A smile is all it takes to make the world a better place. So I need to stop cribbing and start smiling more even if others take me for a dork, I reasoned.