50 days

50 days to convo, 20 days to end terms, 35 days to placements.
9.68 bucks mobile balance.
0 in one bank account, 4k in another.
2 mess bills due.

How will I manage (.
God only knows.

That apart, life has been haunted by what I call evil hr practices in the corporate world. Wherein a company form looks like an autobiography, only if you are able to answer all the questions, bill Clinton would look like your secretary ( I mean all he did till college was have grass without inhaling, and possibly putting cigars to imaginative uses ).

Here is a sample of all that one needs to write. Mind you, all these are the 1st parts. Later you have to elaborate on how u felt and what u did and what would u do again in case the same thing happens.
An incident each in which :
You led a team on some path breaking stuff ( going to moon etc will do just fine )
You have taken some challenging task which stretched you, basically meaning that it made u move your ass a bit  ( this cannot be the same as 1st one )
You have changed the way in which your organization does something ( 90% of all CEO’s have never done this btw )
You have delivered something on a professional basis ( this is at least ok for people who worked)
Oh yeah and the favourite one – have you ever felt the pressure to compromise on your  values in a  work situation ( what the hell, I don’t have values which get compromised everytime I meet someone. Who are u looking for – raja harishchandra?? )

Yeah, then the pre placement talks. By now all companies sound the same to me, apart from the pay angle. Everyone is the fastest growing company in their sector, everyone is one of the best places to work by some survey or the other ( given enough surveys, u will find standard of living is higher in India than USA) , everyone has the best HR practices – the same ones which result in those questions btw. I almost forgot to mention the future leaders of the organization part ( we don’t hire employees, we hire future leaders, yeesh!)
The couple of ppt’s ( pre placement talks) I liked were those which dispensed with videos ( there is this new trend of videos in which employees are shown to be having fun, wtf are u hiring for – to take us to picnics?? ) and gave a point blank description of their jobs, and emphasized that they were not the company for a glamour job. I wish I get into one of them, calling a spade a spade has its own merits.

Little wonder, that almost all my desire to write has been killed due to the tons of introspection that I am having to do in order to fill these pieces of meaningless shit for most part.

~Somanxo

Cultural misunderstanding

found this today, max funny I must say

A disappointed salesman of Pepsi (cold drink) returns from his Middle
East assignment. A friend asked, “Why weren’t you successful with the
Arabs?” The salesman explained, “When I got posted in the Middle East,
I was very confident that I will make a good sales pitch as Pepsi is
virtually unknown there. But, I had a problem I didn’t know to speak
Arabic. So, I planned to convey the message through 3 posters… First
poster, a man crawling through the hot desert sand… totally exhausted
and panting. Second, the man is drinking our Pepsi and Third, our man
is now totally refreshed. Then these posters were pasted all over the
place” “That should have worked,” said the friend. The salesman
replied, “Well, not only did I not speak Arabic, I also didn’t realize
that Arabs read from right to left…”

~Somanxo

dollar dreams

There is a variety of Indians who for lack of better words I shall describe as afflicted with the “dollar” dreams.

What would describe most of these? For most part they would be bright ( and not so bright) individuals hailing from middle to upper middle class backgrounds, with aspirations mainly  to somehow or the other reach and settle in the USA, Canada or London. There is a small minority of these who go to the US to pursue higher studies in relatively decent schools, and get good jobs there ( this is the community which is among the highest earning ones the US, as a lot of Indian newspapers simply love to report ). There is a larger proportion who go to mediocre schools, don’t get a job and return back to India with “phoren” degrees and fake accents ( remember monica’s friend with the fake british accent ). This is the variety which irritates me no end.

Let me reiterate again, that for some things which one wants to do in life, India is definitely not the country where you might want to live or work. If I were born 10 years ago, I would most probably not even consider living in India because it did not have jobs interesting enough which paid good money. Even now that’s true for a lot of people. Interestingly, there are some symptoms which I shall talk about which are actually not exhibited by the people with cali, but almost always by the fakes.

For simplicity’s sake, lets just call them the McDee m coke lovers. I personally consider Mc to be a good place for cheap fast food, but it seems to have huge aspirational values among a big crowd. More distressingly there is a love for all things foreign, which is disturbing. Branding something Indian second class in India is sort of sad. But then, I guess they buy stuff just for the tag. A friend of mine who went to Paris told me most of the Eiffel tower replicas sold near Eiffel sport the “made in India” tag. How one passes that off as foren, it beats my imagination. The general attitude of some people that all things Indian are bad, and all things foreign are good, is slightly irksome. Thankfully I don’t need to cohort too much with such people.

What does befuddle me is that people don’t even seek to know what they are aspiring to. Personally I hate generalizations of any sort, this falls into one of them. I will end with an example of something which is extremely distressing. A friend of mine used to work for Oracle, Hyderabad. Given that he was the off-shore part, he had to interact with the on-site team in US. On one such interaction, the person at the other end realized that there was a time gap of 13 hours, so he offered to exchange late nights ( they do it alternately.).
No such offers were made by any Indians in US, who did know that there was a time differential. No one offshore expected them to make any such offer. After all they are the “superior” ones, the ones who got away from this hellhole.

~Somanxo

will make a post on why I wish to live in India, and the other acceptable countries sometime. When, I don’t know.

note – more for myself than nyone else.

things happened which were good, then things happened which were ugly.
a conversation has been left midway, and has to be resumed.
a post is still an idea, has to be completed. this will not be left as a draft coz it will get lost.

Lust,Love and Marriage

Got the idea for this when I was talking to sue, this being the first of the two posts I said I would write. These are my personal opinions and I don’t think a lot of people would be ready to accept these.

Given my hedonist stance on life, I shall start with lust – the simplest of all these. To lust, the verb literally means to crave for. Generally used for sex, I use it in the broader spectrum of physical needs. At one level, man ( woman) is an animal and lust is an expression of that beast inside him/her. That beast demands the satisfaction of its needs. It asks no questions about who or what is satisfying it. Obviously there are different levels of satisfaction. Its like the difference between having a nice lasagna for dinner and having dal chawal. Hunger is satisfied in any case, and given enough hunger, dal chawal is like lasagna. Should be similar for sex, need for money, possessions and any other so called material desire. Here what is important is that while lust itself knows no reason, as human beings there are definite consequences of wanton satisfaction, be it food (stomach upset) or sex(STDs, AIDS, divorce…the list goes on). But the beast demands satisfaction, and gets it. The price differs.

Love on the other hand, is much more human in nature. Some animals show life long mating ( wolves for instance), but most don’t. Animals for most part are still about lust, and fight for satisfaction of that lust. Humans also do similar things, but now civilization has to some extent prevented lust from having social costs. ( Helen of troy was a long long time ago, as was Cleopatra. Recent wars have been about economics ). One loves one’s parents ( btw my folks are about to celebrate their silver jubilee. Congrats mom n dad. Love ya. Yay!) , ones siblings ( depends on the kind of childhood you had. I love my bro), but that is not what I want to write about. If it is another person, who is not blood I am talking about, how exactly would I say I am in love with so and so… my heartbeat doesn’t actually go up around anyone, if my blood starts racing in my veins, its nowhere close to my brain, and is more again to do with lust. To me, love for a woman would be when I return home in the evening from work to find myself with her, then the world would seem like a great place. If not, I would feel as if I am missing something which has been woven into me, something which has become quite irreplaceable with anything else. It is like getting used to someone so much, that the loss becomes pretty painful. Difficult to quite put it into words, for some feelings are such that words don’t really describe them. Similar to good friends. Time might make you forget them, but their presence cant really be replaced. A weekend beer with X is not a weekend beer with Y, no matter how good a friend Y is. That is the best way I can put it.

Now to the social face of lust and/or love – marriage. I personally don’t think marriage is a really necessary form of showing commitment. True love doesn’t need marriage for survival – it is but a social need. Now, marriage, love and lust can be a combination in these kind of orders :

• Love -> lust -> marriage
• Love -> marriage-> lust ( I believe a lot of people want this )
• Lust -> marriage-> love(hopefully) ( weddings with pregnant brides)
• Lust -> love-> marriage ( think concubines…)
• Marriage-> lust -> love ( arranged marriages? )

There would be some other disastrous orders, but I personally believe that the last stage in any relationship involving marriage should be either love or marriage. Guess that stems from my ( or maslow’s ) understanding that needs – physical, personal, and social are in that order, with physical needs the lowest level and hence highest priority for satisfaction. ( you don’t eat – you die). You don’t feel love for anyone ( you are lonely, pretty bad eh! ). You don’t marry ( frankly speaking do the neighbours and well meaning relatives opinions about you really matter all that much to you? ). But for the society I live currently in, marriage is pretty much a need. I would want that to be the last to be satisfied. The beast will get satisfied anyway, but the human in me demands higher priority than society, and he will get that.

So said Somanxo on “lust, love and marriage.”

Captivated

Absolutely love em saree’s with those threadbare blouses. The showcasing of curves is really amazing, more so when the view is partly obscured by long trailing and wild tresses. The only reason I like attending weddings (, apart from the food. Wanted to post on some other stuff but have been blown away for some time by one such view.
Could go on and on about the way a good saree really showcases the curves of the waist, hip and thigh… on lines of a certain description of draupadi I read in an adaptation, or on lines of Sita in Ashok banner’s Ramayana – which is an awesome reading by the way, both for Indians and non Indians.

(Sighs)
~Somanxo

New!

Made two new blogs, which I intend to keep updating regularly.
Will add links from this blog when I get time and enthu.
For now:

Ze quotes of  ze somanxo  - collection of quotes, poems, jokes which strike me, occasionally my own contributions, more likely to gifts of great people like GB Shaw.

Panoramas of the mind  - Collection of pics, of which I have a slightly non trivial collection. A look should give an idea of what it’s likely to progress as.

~Somanxo

Surprised

I never thought it was possible, in fact it was so far away from the realms of reality that I never even considered it a possibility. Then it hit me like a bolt from the blue, leaving me standing with my mouth gaping wide enough to let a chameleon pop in and eat all the flies that had entered.

What happened is this. A friend of mine who used to live in the next wing of mine, called LK messaged me on y! at about 5 o clock in the morning ( he’s in Wisconsin.. or some such place in the US, but he still knows it is 5 o clock for me) and desperately asks for some Lionel Ritchie song. I dint have the one he wanted, so sent him hello, and a couple more which seemed to be ok for him. He accepted only that some girl put him up to it, but nothing beyond it.

Just as a backdrop to why this should cause so much surprise, this is a bloke who is a born misogynist, close to a misanthrope, in his undergrad days, he used to talk about marriage being useless and kids being a menace to society. I am afraid this doesn’t quite say it, but it looks like LK’s chink dreams are gonna come true in the backdrop of recent news. Yet another asian uses the great land of opportunity ( see “Harold and Kumar went to whitecastle” to get the proper feel of the statement)

Now to the topics I said I would make a post on.

Why salwars suck?
edit : this is for the readers who dont know what a salwar is. It is an ehtnic indian form of clothing which looks like this most of the time.

The first line of defence most females take to that is that it depends on who is wearing it.
My answer to that is someone like sushmita sen or aishwarya rai would look awesome wearing rags, that doesn’t make the rags good clothes. Just as an example – look at the clothes Katrina kaif wore in boom. Frankly speaking they looked like a cost cutting exercise, but she still looked awesome ( one of the few redeeming features of that eminently forgettable movie). Coming back to the point I was making, does one actually see chicks with great figures showcasing it through salwars. In the 23 years of letching that I’ve been upto, its been extremely limited, and again those females were the kind who’d look good in pretty much anything. Most of the salwars I see seem to be designed to hide rather than reveal. I mean, you cant make out if it’s a 21C or a 36D ( maybe that’s exaggerating it a bit… but u get the idea). As to curves, you can forget it, its like a huge coverall, marginally behind a burqa in obscuring nything u can make out. How can anyone who likes a good letch like something which was designed with the purpose of hiding rather than revealing figures. Something which will put Shabana Azmi and sushmita sen in the same boat. What I like are skirts… or sarees…
~Wistfully remembers some teachers at school a la Sushmita Sen in Mai hoon Na
~ damn all the sarkari buggers who decide on salwars as dress codes nywhere
Why I hate the word cute.

Remember any Johnson and Johnson baby’s ad. Imagine a baby like that in front of ya. Most females I know go “ cho chweet!” and promptly kill the poor baby’s joy by pinching his cheeks and try to smother the kid. Similar is the case with the so called “cute” guy. In any normal blokes understanding, if you have been called cute by a female, that’s the “the end” of any hopes you might have of a non platonic relationship. You might as well be gay. In fact, if you are indeed gay, then it might be better, you can have the feminine bonding conversations and bitch about your boyfriend or crushes. Also act as a shoulder to cry on etc. basically nothing productive, or reproductive is ever gonna happen. The “just friends” tag is slightly better, at least there is a good exit option. But cute is like a snowball in hell, with no scope of a dignified exit. Got one of the worst statements of that type a couple of days back. Comment was that if I were to wear school clothes I would look like a school kid. I was so extremely flabbergasted, I almost choked on my coffee! Being a beast with sideburns and arbit moustaches is so much better, let some bimbo’s go yuck! But at least no one can say hey cutie! ( this sounds so girlie, I am sure will would have loved it!)

FYI – from the Webster dictionary
Main Entry: cute Pronunciation: ‘kyütFunction: adjectiveInflected Form(s): cut·er; cut·estEtymology: short for acute1 a : clever or shrewd often in an underhanded manner b : IMPERTINENT, SMART-ALECKY <don’t get cute with me>2 : attractive or pretty especially in a dainty or delicate way3 : obviously straining for effect- cute·ly adverb- cute·ness noun
Therefore, to any self respecting male, the word cute is acceptable only as an adjective, even there, the word “fresh” or “nice try” are much better.

As a final word, if a guys described as cute, it basically means one doesn’t have good things like smart, sexy etc to say about him. Generally hollow, more applicable in case the girl doesn’t know the guy. Ex – ooh I think Ed Norton is so cute!! That ways..

Pervert, dirty mind could count as better adjectives ( MCP is about the only adjective I think of which is worse than cute.)

Cute girls have a hope coz of skewed sex ratios in the country. Cute guys ( non gays of course) god save ya!

~Somanxo

Hitz

Nothing can quite match the elation I felt at this, but it does feel happy in a way to have crossed 5000 hits since having installed the counter. When I first started blogging, I never felt like keeping a counter, coz frankly speaking I never did write for stats. In fact I’d put a counter only after I saw this post on bahadur’s blog (now dead, the blog I mean). Though in terms of tracking softwares, I like statcounter the most. It gives you nice detailed stats about visit length, geographies, paths used etc which often provide interesting info. For instance there is this person in meerut who regularly searches for my blogname on search.blogger. Most visits to my blog come via bookmarks or directly typed addresses. The biggest referrer is Mythreyee, with some 30 referrals in the month of January (.

When my blog started, its header was called “ The life and times of a certain Abhilash Somanchi at IIM Cal ”. That would be I guess the life of the blog, at the end of which I would be writing something like this , with the title – “ So long, and thanks for all the hitz”. Will be difficult, to give this blog up, might start a new one in my corporate avatar, the more acceptable one to the world as a whole, maybe.

It still surprises me that people actually read what I churn out on a regular and uninterrupted basis. Looking forward to churning out sum more, while I am here in the green jungle by the lakeside. What will happen after that? God only knows, or maybe even he/she/it doesn’t?

~Somanxo

Hmm

Two things happened yesterday.
One – I am not going to watch any more Indian cricket matches, at least test matches if not the one dayers. Never did I feel so betrayed as today. I will not comment any more for I have but caustic words for them. All the best in their future endeavors, but I shall not be supporting them live.

Two – I went to the city after a long time and met a friend after about four months. A lot did happen in this time.

Coming up with a post on why salwars suck and why I don’t like the word cute

~Somanxo