Mani Order

I had met Mani Ratnam during his visit to our campus at IIMC a couple of years back, and have been in touch with his team ever since. Got a chance to see his newest release today. Helped by a special invite, you might want to know, to an exclusive premiere.

Raavan has to be the most quixotic film Mani sir has ever made. I am known to be biased against Amitabh Bachchan's son and daughter-in-law, neither of whom can act to save their lives, but who manage somehow.

Till now at least.

Abhishek Bachchan outdoes himself in the film. In overacting. If Mani sir hadn't been sitting beside me I would have probably walked out 1/3rd into the film. It's an insult seeing Abhishek Bachchan get another chance to come on the screen. He is just too bad.

The rest of the film, including the regularly idiotic Aishwarya Rai, is a lot more bearable. Now I know why she would want to act with her husband in films. It just hides her inadequate talents.

Sushmita Sen must burn so much (partly responsible for her tan) every time she sees Ash hamming through another role, and bagging all decent roles.

Friends

This must be the official pushing-away-friends week.

I very often feel that I am multiple people living within me. At least two different people. And the more stupid one, the one who is probably writing this, is the more dominant one.

I told a friend, whom I always want to meet and love immensely, that I was in Bangalore over the weekend. Even though I was whiling away time on a rare free weekend in Mumbai.

I haven't replied to this girl I knew in school, who was a close friend, and whose name I have been googling for ages to get a clue on where she was, and who finally mailed me this week. The last time I corresponded with her was in 2000. Because I am not sure I want to show her who I am now.

Have been avoiding talking to a close friend from engineering because I just don't know what to talk about.

And I have been trying to pick up fights deliberately with the friend I value the most.

And I can't control any of it. I really can't.

Maybe this is an apology.

But, we are like this wonly.

Beera!

It's kind of unfortunate that I so look forward to a movie despite it having the irritating Aishwarya Rai and the even-more-irritating Abhishek Bachchan.

Of course, if I knew Tamil I would have watched the Tam version, which I am sure is going to be better.


In the meantime, listen to Beera (http://rapidshare.com/files/379327415/Raavan__2010_.rar).

Consult Focused

Please do read the post below, where I appear to be a heartless capitalist bastard, but say, and more importantly, don't say, enough to show that I might not just be one.

I just found a few interesting articles that I really wished to share here, before I forgot, and hence this abrupt increase in frequency between consecutive posts.

Vibhor mailed me this link to a series of articles written by an MIT alumnus called Keith Yost, who worked for The Boston Consulting Group in Dubai for a few months and got back to Boston a lot wiser.

He writes extremely well, and even though I feel he is being a bit too harsh on Dubai, and way too harsh on BCG, thanks in no small measure to the immediate surge of antagonistic feelings one is bound to experience when leaving a job or a posting (refer my posts on Bangalore from last year), I enjoyed reading his articles on life in Dubai and life as a consultant.

Dubai's artificiality I can vouch for, and have written about more than once earlier. There can be few places I despise more.

BCG, on the other hand, is an interesting pack of people. Would reserve my comments on it. And other similar firms, who are the easiest targets for disillusioned grads from the top colleges across the world who think of themselves in more complimentary terms than they ought to.

Leaving Vidarbha

It might be evident that suicide is one of my favorite topics. I am intrigued by the various reasons why a person would want to end his/her life. In that spirit, I have been trying to understand the Vidarbha farmer suicides, including visiting some parts of the region because of some work-related assignment recently, and I have come across some startling facts. Startling for me, at least.

Most of the farmers who are committing suicide had a much better standard of living compared to farmers in backward states like Bihar, UP and Orissa. They owned significantly large pieces of land, their families owned cell phones, they had married off their daughters in grand style.

In fact, just taking loans to hold grand marriages so that neighbors would not consider them poor was the reason for so much misery. Relying purely on cash crops - like cotton and soybean, alcoholism, sending sons to private colleges they could not afford - these are just some of the reasons I had not realized were responsible for the much-publicized deaths.

Farmers were just living beyond the means they could afford to, and many took their lives, without thinking about the wives and daughters they were leaving behind, because they could not bear to not afford those means any more. Many were expecting that the compensation their families would get from the government after their deaths would help tide over the situation.

I cannot feel any degree of support for these people. Yes, there might be genuine cases of destitution in Vidarbha, where excessive reliance on unsustainable crops or belief in the wrong kind of financial institutions might have caused farmers to hang themselves or eat pesticides, but it largely comes across as another crop of Indians stretching their feet beyond what the bed-sheet permits.

The problem is not so much from the Government's side, as many self-righteous NGOs and social reformers allege, but from within. Tackle alcoholism. Teach the farmers to live within their means. Let them know that marrying your daughter by taking unserviceable loans is not intelligent. That might help save some lives.

Only some though. The impression I also get is that the situation has reached a tipping point where men almost unanimously feel that killing themselves is a good way to handle relatively temporary difficult times. It is a scary situation when a large chunk of the population decides to give up and not fight instead.

Reading Hood

I read Sidin Vadukut's Dork recently. That and responses from some of the people who have read the books by Arnab Ray and Fake IPL Player have sort of convinced me that it might not be a great idea of asking every popular blogger to pen down a book. Writing a blog-post for laughs/comments and writing a book that, apart from other differences, people would have to pay for are two different things. One sure can be good at both, but being good at one does not certify being good at the other.

Dork was not unreadable, and really quite enjoyable in parts. But, at many points the antics seemed extremely forced and unnatural. As if the publisher had rushed Vadukut to make a submission by a deadline. All said and done, though, the book is among the better ones churned out by IIT and/or IIM grads in the last few years. Maintaining even this for a trilogy (why does every new writer have to come up with a trilogy!) might be too painful though. For the readers.

The whole premise of The GameChangers sounds like a bad idea. I have not read the book, but just rehashing stuff from the blog, very obviously to make a quick buck in the IPL season, does not a good book make.

As far as Arnab Ray's book is concerned, I have read bits of it, which bit me enough to not try reading the whole thing. I have not exactly been one of his fans, and feel that his writing is way too over-rated. He comes up with some funny stuff once in a while, the instances of which have gotten rarer over the years, maybe because of the constant pressure to amuse the many regular readers waiting thirsty for some drop of humor in their lives, no matter how dull and stretched the joke might be.

I do appreciate his ability to poke fun at all sorts of cows, holy or not, which is always a good thing in our times, when everyone has a reason or two to get offended.

So, what I have been reading instead are some very good books. Just finished Heart Shaped Box by Joe Hill. A plot that essentially revolves around a killer ghost being bought by a retired rock star, who then tries to find a way to save himself, his girl-friend and two dogs, driving across a stretch of America, pursued by the ghost in his own ghost truck sounds extremely corny. And I would not have tried this out if I hadn't just got done with Hill's 20th Century Ghosts - a collection of some brilliant short stories - some time back. But, if writing spooky stories can be genetically inherited, Joe Hill has the best genes possible. His dad's Stephen King.

I also recently read Handling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindquist, the Swedish writer who had written Let the Right One In. Just as the latter is a unique take on vampires, Handling the Undead is a curious tale of the dead coming back to life. With very little actual 'action', unlike what we would expect after having seen films like Dawn of the Dead, the book is a look at how normal people react in such a situation.

These days, I am alternating between Way to Go by Upamanyu Chatterjee and An Englishman's Cameo by Madhulika Liddle. I have liked Chatterjee's writing, even if not all his books, ever since I read the phenomenal English, August. Very often, the sum of the parts of his books ends up being less than the parts themselves. As in, there are parts that are just brilliant, and the manner in which he describes extremely mundane happenings - an FIR with the local police in the first scene of Way to Go, for instance - is something I have not seen any other Indian writer be able to do. He has this knack of observing things that we see but do not register consciously. And end up having a sense of deja vu when we read it in his books.

Way to Go has started off on an interesting note, but remains to be seen how long it can maintain that.

Madhulika Liddle's book is a murder mystery set in Shahjahan's kingdom. I am through the first 80 or so pages of the 270-odd, and the investigation by the young and handsome Muzaffar Jang is still in its early stages. He has just spent some quality time with the courtesan Mehtab Banu, and we can look forward to some good sleuthing. No idea who the Englishman is.

I would have preferred the book to be darker, more in the zone of My Name is Red, but the tone here is not un-enjoyable either. I doubt if every custom, nuance of language, geographical and structural detail in the book is authentic, but the author has made a great effort and the sheen never fades off.

Next up is Agassi's Open.

In the recent series of interviews I conducted with B-school candidates, it was painful to see that even those who would mention reading as one of their interests had not gone beyond Dan Brown and Chetan Bhagat. It was just too dull talking to them about books in most cases.

I had once read an old mail from an alumnus who had been involved with the IIMC interview process about how he and the professors felt that the young just don't seem to have any interesting interests anymore. No one has any passion. No one goes beyond the common. The same books, the same sports, the same films, everything. I can't recall the exact theme of the mail, but it was roughly about the same dullness.

It made me feel quite old, but I had the same feeling during these interviews.

Life

I got to know a few days back that a girl I knew in my engineering college days died recently. She took her own life. I didn't know her too well. But, I knew her.

In my final final year in Delhi, I had too much time on my hands, and I had joined an NGO that worked towards creating awareness about suicide. My job there was to talk to people who contacted the NGO for help. These people were on the verge of killing themselves, but had enough will to hold on to something.

That girl I knew, and had spoken to a few times, lost that will sometime last week.

She was a very good student. Belonged to a not so well-to-do family. Parents wanted to marry her off. I felt she preferred being with women. Her marriage was fixed. I got to speak with her 4-5 times in February-March 2006. She had got married a few months after I left Delhi. She wanted badly to escape. She finally did.

I had contacted that NGO because I needed to get some sanity in my own life. After the craziness that my last couple of years in Delhi involved, I had given up a lot of hope. Just talking to people there helped a lot. I am a fair bit suicidal myself, but I have never gone to the limit of actually getting close to dying. A few cuts, a few rat-poison induced nose bleeds are mostly enough to give me enough of a scare. But, when I felt I was going beyond these relatively harmless limits, I sought help. I recovered, thanks in no small measure to some very important friends. It was suggested that, having been through those killer times, I should talk to others in similar situations. It was very cathartic, and probably helped some other people too, in that they found someone who was not judgmental.

During those painful years, what I realized was that the worst thing you can do to a person contemplating suicide is to tell him that suicide is for cowards. It really does not help. Very often, a person thinking of taking his own life is at the absolute bottom of self-worth. Telling him that the one resolution he can think of will only make him appear even worse cannot be of help. It might appear like an attempt at simplifying something that is really a lot more complex, but just listening is a lot more helpful.

A person inherently does not want to die. It is difficult to imagine how caged one must feel to take that step. Most people also do think of what effect it might have on their loved ones - their parents, friends, everyone who came to know them. To ignore all of this, to ignore all the pain, to just give up not being there tomorrow in the scheme of things - it's not an easy decision. It is taken only when multiple calls for help are not heeded. It is taken only when everything else seems pointless.

During my association with the NGO a school girl had jumped to death from her 5th floor flat because she thought she had not done well in her Boards. I had spoken to her two days before she died. It is not a great thing knowing that there might have been a chance I could have convinced her to live.

It is still not a great thing four years down. I am sorry Sakshi.

Food, Quizzing, My Life

I'm slightly worried right now because a recent visitor to my blog from Denver, CO, came here after searching on Google for "I let my young son play with my cock". I hope he was referring to the poultry at his farmhouse.

Anyway, to each his own daddy.

As someone implied on Twitter, the hiatus has indeed been partly because of a marriage. But not mine. Was away for a cousin's marriage. That was only for 3-4 days though. Some work-related submissions, some personal work and some work-life issues were responsible too. Plus, we did a couple of quizzes for NIT Durgapur at their Tech Fest, Aarohan. But, I am back now and that should make you very happy, no?

A good amount of my time lately has gone into mock interviewing candidates for various B-schools. It's more fun than anything else that I have done lately. And I get paid for it too. Met some amazing people, both as interviewees or co-panelists.

I like it that way - meet people for a brief while, get to know about them, have a bit of good time, and then move on. No pain of being in touch, maintaining relationships, with all and sundry. If someone's really great, you can stay in contact and get together for drinks/dinner once in a while. If really great. Everyone gets painful after some time though. The time it takes to get painful varies, that's all.

Been doing the usual stuff, watching films, reading. And cooking. My cooking skills have improved considerably over the last few weeks. But, I can't bear to cook the usual aloo-baingan and aloo-matar. Not that cooking them is any easier than cooking Thai red curry mix vegetable, but it's just too boring to do all the pre-cooking cutting and post-cooking cleaning for something that my bai can make with her eyes shut. So, only (slightly) exotic stuff for me. I am still not confident enough to make others eat what I have cooked though.

Auto Know Better

A question that I get asked almost as often as "When are you getting married?" is "So what car are you buying?". I find both questions as unnecessary as people asking "Wassup?" or "How are you doing?". And hence merit no reply.

But, maybe a blog post.

At least the car question.

Buying a car is like having a baby. Far too many people do it just because they can.

I think most people will do this world a whole lot good if they didn't buy a car, just as many others would if they did not have a baby. They don't know how to care for one, how to treat one or how to ride one. Car, not baby.

A car is hardly aspirational anymore. Every goddamned person can afford one. And then one more. It's just another machine like a microwave or a TV meant to provide some help.

And practically speaking, especially if you are single, but even otherwise, having a car probably ends up being more a hassle than a help. In a city like Mumbai particularly, where the public modes of transportation are fairly decent, it makes a lot of sense to not add to the traffic even if you can afford to buy a car. Of course, I realize that I might be overlooking some issues like overburdened buses and trains or possible difficulty in getting a cab or rick if a lot more people decided to use them instead of personal cars.

So, I'll just talk at a personal level about my reasons. I can't imagine liking to drive in any city in India. I haven't been to all cities, but have enough experience to make that claim. Heavy traffic, road encroachments, potholed roads, no lane discipline - this is the stuff that a taxi driver's dreams might be made of, but I would rather stick to horror stories that I see on the screen than on the road.

I don't think I have the patience to engage everyday with all the frustrated drivers, pedestrians, stray dogs and other assorted creatures that inhabit our roads on my way to work or back, and still be able to work properly. I enjoy sitting back in a rickshaw or cab and looking at the hoardings or reading on my phone or watching something on my laptop.

Apart from the in-use hassles that driving on most city roads in India entails, the maintenance and servicing of a car is just too much extra work. Getting hit by someone, hitting someone yourself, arguments, insurance, being fleeced by the auto-mechanic, periodic servicing - that's so much precious time lost when I can sit in my living room drinking beer and lazying away. Just parking and then taking it out from the parking is such a headache half the times!

Plus, you are always worried of the car or some part being stolen. Or losing your keys inside. Or the tyre getting punctured at some random place where you have to change the tyre yourself.

One solution to many of these issues could be hiring a driver while you sit back comfortably in your car. Leave the dirty work to lesser mortals. Now that is one option worth exploring.

But, I am not sure I am willing to bear the costs of car loan, petrol AND driver's salary for something I don't need in the first place. If not a rick or a cab, my thumb works just fine.

MnA Activity

So much to write about, so much lethargy that keeps me from doing it.

But one thing that always gets me excited and makes me want to write is when any of our quizzes get appreciated. Which, thankfully, happens every time we do a quiz.

Menon did a General Quiz at Instruo, the tech-fest at Bengal Engineering and Science University in Howrah on Saturday (6th). Like past MnA quizzes, this one seems to have been a success too. If accounts of Mr Menon's flamboyance are anything to go by.

MnA also came up with (part of) the questions for an internal quiz for The Boston Consulting Group last week. Adds another respectable name to our roster.

We have also done two quizzes so far for o3 Capital, an investment bank. A cricket quiz at their head-quarters in Bangalore, and a general quiz at their off-site in Bangkok. Both were appreciated a lot, and we have had invitations to do more.

And then, I am doing two quizzes for NIT Durgapur in the first week of March. There are some issues related to scheduling that need to be sorted out, but that should not be a major hiccup.

I have gloated about this far too many times earlier, but that won't keep me from doing it more. I (and we) love making and conducting quizzes, and it's great to realize every time that we do it well.