Ripples on the brain

I never thought I’d back to the same place that I came to for the last time, to the same project, to work with the same folks. I went back in May and came back in July to complete some unfinished business.

The best part of the journey was the movie “Kalloori” I watched on the flight from Chennai. I enjoyed every bit of the movie. The initial story kept reminding one of April Madhathil and 5star in parts, but obviously this movie is at a different level (it is a reminder of a real incident that happened a few years ago in Tamil Nadu). The story and screenplay are very simple, but the settings and the actors infuse realism into the movie. Except for the leading girl (who looks gorgeous, but still suits her role), the movie makers have shunned glamour and opted for actors who will suit their parts. Excellent selection of actors I must say! The country-side settings, which are crucial to the story, have been captured very well. The acting is above par for most of the time, considering most of the actors are novices. Except for the heroine, it is difficult to even find the names of the other actors who played crucial roles in the movie. The music is also excellent without being pompous and suits the overall story very well. I liked the first song that takes place in the bus very much.

The movie kept reminding me of my own experiences in my engineering college. It was for the first time I had the company of students from the rural background. Many of my classmates came from Tamil medium schools and hence, some lecturers taught the initial classes in Tamil.

I just realized that Shankar produced the movie. What a guy? I mean Shankar as a director and Shankar as a producer cannot be more contrasting. Look at the list of movies Shankar has produced - Kaadhal, Imsai Arasan 23 am Pulikesi, Veyyil and now Kalloori. (Ofcourse, Shankar also seems to have produced Mudhalvan and Arai Enn … Kadavul which are outliers in the list). It is very difficult to choose these small budget movies that involve first time directors and, more often than not, novice actors. But Shankar seems to hitting the jackpot every single time.

I could see 4 people in my vicinity in the place who were also watching the same movie. Actually, the other Indian movie that was among the options was Race (Hindi). I couldn’t help thinking Kalloori’s budget should have been less than the salary of each of the leading actors of Race and still Race couldn’t have been crappier. A good study in contrast, again!

Revathi tags me and wants to know my quirks. My first reaction was I’m too lazy to take up to tags. Sathish had tagged me once and I attempted to take it up, but never actually did it. Then I thought I’ll take it up and see where it goes.

1. I get too embarrassed whenever I recall some embarrassing situations I have been in, so much so that I need to do something rash to get over it, like banging my fists on the floor or suddenly accelarating insanely if I happen to recall something when I’m driving.

2. That brings me to my second quirk. I generally get lost in thought whenever I’m driving all alone. I start thinking about some random things that I normally forget something important I would have been doing just before I started and wanted to continue after I reach my destination. Sometimes, even when the drive is just 20 minutes or so, it feels like I had been driving all day when I reach my destination because I would have been imagining too many things.

3. Even at this age it is very easy for me to migrate into a world of fantasy. I imagine myself to be the PM, to be a player in the Wimbledon finals, so on and so forth.

4. I don’t like taking photographs when we visit places because I feel that it once I take the camera out, it becomes the sole point of interest. One more reason I dislike taking photographs is probably because I dislike seeing myself in one.

5. Even after so many years of experience, I get uneasy before getting into any conference call irrespective of the duration of the call and the number of participants.

6. I can never watch any of those thrilling matches especially when the team / person I support is losing. I just switch off the television or turn to a different channel.

Okay, compiling this list was quite tough.

To somebody I know…I wish I could tell him directly…

This should have happened sometime last August. I was at my niece’s day care centre along with my mom. We had gone there to pick my niece up. My mom goes there daily, so the manager (an old man) knew her pretty well. I was actually there for the first time.

As we picked her up, the old man asked my niece pointing at me, “Ithu yaaru ma? unnoda mamava, chiththappava, athimbera? (Who’s this? Your maternal uncle or dad’s brother or dad’s sister’s husband?)”.

“Mama (Maternal uncle)”, I replied.

“Correcta sonnen pathiya! (See, I was spot on)”, he replied back, with a triumphant smile. I was dumbfounded!

This morning, as I was getting ready for office, my niece, who is a year and a half old, wished me on the phone. She’s just started speaking and nobody has even heard her speak these words. “Mama, Happy Birthday”, she said once. “Happy Birthday to you”, she said again. That made my day!

I also realized that having your wife’s birthday the next day after yours is not so good after all (I know I didn’t have a control over it). You can never spring a surprise or act as if you’ve forgotten hers.

Yet another one comes… This is the second time I’m in the US on my birthday…

I don’t know why i have not been affected by the news of the shutdown of Woodlands Drive-in. I had been a regular to its premises during my earlier employment. My office was bang opposite to the restaurant and my colleagues and I visited it a few times in the evening when we had just enough time to hop across the median before that evening call with a client or an onsite co-ordinator.

I think one can never be loyalist of Drive-in’s food. I remember it was always pretty mediocre. Even the famed Chola Batura wasn’t very good. Though the restaurant was close by, it was never a place for family or team get-togethers. We usually had chat items when we went as a group in the evening. Mostly, there was too much pori in the Bhel puri and dosais sometimes had that raw smell. One of my friends who was sometimes teased for being very particular about food never liked the sambhar vadais they served in the evenings. It was always the case of getting a recently made vadai into the sambhar.

There were many other options for an evening bite in Cathedral Road. There was one shop that made very good sandwiches. That was a better hang out place for us. Bread Omlette was my favourite there. (I liked the mint paste he applied on the bread). There was also a roadside kaiyendhi chat corner where we used to get Bhel and pani puris. Then there was Gangotree, though all the stuff was pretty spicy there. I remember there was a north Indian restaurant, just beside Stella Maris that sold Aloo paranthas. I don’t know if that exists even now, but that was actually a reason we went to work on Saturdays. One of those paranthas served with curd and pickle would fill you for the rest of the evening.

The ambience of Drive-in, however, was amazing. Lots of green space in the heart of the city for parking or for just taking a stroll. Many a times, a stressful meeting was always followed by a coffee in the Drive-in to cool the tempers. I think it was a usual pit stop for all those people who had an appointment in the US Consulate across the road. I have seen singer P.B.Srinivas a lot of times there. I was told he came in the same auto and was served by the same person for a long time.

Hopefully, the Government uses it for the purpose it has promised.

I clearly have my doubts.

Around 2004-05, I too caught this craze for orkut and social networking in general. I joined communities of “like-minded” people, chatted with them for hours together, met them over a coffee and so on. While I did make some new friends and establish contact with some long-lost friends, mostly, it was just another user id and password for me to remember and while away my time if I had nothing else to do.

I guess things started turning for the worse after Google took over orkut. Google then mandated having a unified id and password for gmail and orkut. Social neworking was suddenly over-hyped and all these orkut clones started appearing. People unsuspectingly gave their email ids and passwords to these phony sites and they then had a field day flooding inboxes. Around this time, some bloggers started criticizing these sites and users of orkut who send these funny “franship” requests.

Over the last 6 months or so, I had restricted my orkut usage for birthday reminders and greetings. All these bulk scrap messages started increasingly appearing in my scrapbook. Some contained greetings from friends but there were others that had some magic scripts to increase friends, send bulk messages, identify others who had crush on you and so on. If this was not discomforting enough, today I discovered that I had automatically become member of more than a couple of communities. I checked these communities and found that all these had started only on the last week of February 2008 or so and many had more than 5000 members. One community, started after Feb 15th. had 68000 members and aptly, promised its members that it will teach them orkut tricks!

Clearly, Google’s attempt at increasing security (through locking features built recently for profiles, scrapbooks, photos and so on) hasn’t helped. It is increasingly becoming more and more vulnerable with the increased usage. Over the next week, I will seriously consider deleting my orkut account. The friends list has swelled so much that I don’t think I can use orkut for any meaningful networking any longer (oh, not that I did so much earlier )

Please read Part I here.

Flight
It was also one of the first times, I had used the escalator. I stepped right on the yellow line and almost fell backwards with my stroller while moving up. All through my wait at the arrival lounge, I was hoping to have a glimpse of the aircraft that was going to fly me, to see such a thing for the first time in close quarters.

After a wait for sometime, our boarding passes were checked and we were led through what appeared to me to be a passage into what appeared to me to be a big waiting area with columns of seats. For the first 10 minutes or so, I didn’t understanding why we were put up in this second waiting area when it was already time for take-off. Only after sometime did I realize that we were inside the aircraft already . My knowledge of people boarding aircrafts came from watching MGR movies, where MGR would climb the staircase to the aircraft in the final scene and bid good bye to everyone before “Subham” appeared on the screen indicating the end of the movie. I assumed that this was the only way to board aircraft . Moreover, the aircraft itself was so huge and its capacity was way beyond my imagination and hence it was difficult to realize I was actually inside one.

After overcoming that initial shock, passengers were bombarded with an array of announcements and instructions and a little later, the aircraft actually started moving, albeit backwards. The aircraft was in motion for sometime and then everything came to standstill. It was pitch dark outside, save for some violet lights, and the view didn’t change for quite sometime. I assumed that the aircraft had already taken off and that the violet lights were how the ground looked from above . To my dismay, for the second time in half an hour, the flight actually took off only a short time later and only then I realized that the violet lights were the runway lights.

Transit
At Frankfurt, I didn’t read or follow any of the instructions. I just followed my colleague who took me to the terminal where we were board a different flight to Philadelphia. Again, I didn’t understand “through checkin” and all through the transit at Frankfurt, expected to collect the baggage that I checked in. The Frankfurt to Philadelphia leg of the journey was uneventful, except that the food was more alien than the one in the first flight.

In the US of A for the first time
If I had assumed that all my mini-adventures were to end when I landed in Philadelphia, I couldn’t have been more wrong. We were to proceed to a different state from Philadelphia by cab. The cab driver took sometime to get the route for what should have been an hour long journey. Only when we reached our supposed destination did we realize that the address that was given to us was that of an apartment leasing office and it had long been closed for the day. I’ll ever be grateful to my wonderful manager who provided that address to first time travellers. My colleague informed the cab driver that we had another friend that we could call and crash at his place for the night. At this point, I asked the cab driver to stop in an “STD booth” so we could make a call. He gave me a reaction that I still cannot forget . Understanding out plight, the cab driver arranged for a conference call, so we could talk to our friend and get his address. Again, as the cab driver drove and searched for the new address, I amazed him by asking him to stop the car and ask a passer-by , that too in an interstate. “WHAT?”, he asked me and I never opened my mouth again .

The whole of my first stay in the US had a lot of these adventurous moments that keep coming back to me whenever I think of an overseas travel. I never tire of repeating this story to anyone and everyone and hence wanted to register this in my blog too. I must confess though that it was not even half as fun penning down the story as it is usually talking about it. Though recalling these incidents always brings a smile to my face, I cannot forget how nervous I was during my entire first flight

…I think was my first ever flight in an aeroplane and first ever travel outside India. It was on Nov 2nd / 3rd 2002 that the flight happened.

Preparation
The run up to that journey was very exciting for me and my family. As it always happens, the date of travel got confirmed only a couple of days before the actual travel. Since my work didn’t free me up for travel-related activities, my mom and sister did all the shopping for me. There was a torrential downpour on Nov 1st and again in the morning of Nov 2nd - that kind of rain was rarely witnessed in Chennai. On Nov 1st, we heard stories of cars taking 4 hours to cover the stretch between Guindy and airport. In fact many Maruti 800’s ran out of petrol in the traffic jam and had to be abandoned on the roads and that added to the chaos.

I had to collect my forex and tickets from my office on Nov 2nd. Against my parents’ advice, I rode my motor bike in the rain. The water-logged roads were too much for my faithful Hero Honda Splendor to handle; it broke down in Adyar. I left it at a friend’s place and paid an inflated fare to a lucky autowala to reach office. As I was dripping wet when I entered office, I tried using the hand dryer to dry my dress a little.

Airport
The better news on the whole day was that the rain relented towards the evening and Chennai traffic eased a bit. I was more nervous than happy with my trip. It was late evening when the cab dropped us at the airport. I hadn’t yet got used to the “cabin baggage, check-in luggage” terminology yet . My only solace was that there was a colleague who was going to accompany me.

The only earlier experience I had had with the Chennai airport (and that was the domestic terminal) was when my grand father and I received our uncle who came down from Bombay. I recall we paid Rs. 10 for entering the airport and a coffee at Rs. 5 in the arrival lounge seemed to be ridiculously expensive to me.

All those scanning luggages, collecting boarding pass etc. was absolutely new to me and I just kept following the crowd at each step. After emigration and security, we waited, for what appeared to be eternity, to board the aircraft.