Basket Case

"One night @ call center" is the kind of book that deserves a review by Akshaya . However I see little hope of ever being able to make him read it, so I will have to do the honor. It is easily the most pedestrian and useless piece of work that I have put my hands on. Let's not even try to get into the literary merits of book, since it has none and since, author accepts that in the first few pages itself, but the sheer nonsense of the plot is itself unbearable. So you have this call center and the call traffic is low and jobs are being cut and you have to save it. So what do you do? Just call up Americans saying they have been attacked by a virus and ask to call back and voila! The traffic is up and jobs are saved. And supposedly the author, Chetan Bhagat, went to two of India's most premiere institutions, IIT Delhi and IIM Ahmedabad! At least I expected something better from him, something that was not so downright nonsense. But even before all this drama begins to un...

This post is in response to the comment by Ankur on the last post. I am not at all saying that the people asking those question are superficial. But all this redundant communication doesn't even ring a bell anymore and the instances on which it leads to further things, are going down sharply. After throwing that trendy question and getting the trendy reply, half of the time none of the persons involved have any idea what to say next. I believe that many times it is not the lack of things to talk but our decreasing powers of engaging in a meaningful interaction. And partial blame for this goes to the language. Why do people learn English? For money, for wealth. The biggest "economic" power of modern India is its army of English speaking graduates. English is valuable to people not because they find it very apt for their expressions, but because it represents status, it represents whatever is modern, whatever is chic and because it brings in money. And before we realize, we...

All those who read the last post and thought "What the hell?", please count me in. I would have removed that post but I am keeping it as reminder of how bad and incoherent can writing get when moods dwindle. And the lovely poem at the end that bore the burnt, I wish I could give it better context. However, I am back, to Bangalore, on the track. The journey home was journey home. I don't want to tag it with adjectives like good, excellent, wonderful or the more desi, fandoo. In fact, if I could, I would not have anybody ask me this question, "How was the trip home?". Everytime I am asked that question, I feel like a loser. One who cannot think of one word in which to pour in all his heart and memories and show the other person how exactly was it and I just dish out a "good" or a little more trendy "mast". Soemhow, it occurs to nobody how ironic our questions and answers have become. "trip to home" ?? "mast"?? Some more enli...

Thoughts come and thoughts go and everytime I think of all the lost thoughts that never made it to this blog, a sense of meloncholy comes over me. For quite sometime now, I have a feeling of existing in a vaccume, a vaccume that sucks up all the thoughts, all the deleberations. And as a result I find myself a man without conviction. In fact everytime I am making a strong pitch for or against something, I can read in my voice the voice of others and I feel like cheating. Somedays ago a school friend left a scrap for me on orkut - "Hi Abhaya, belated happy new year. I just went thru your blog (read it whole from 2004 onwards). quite interesting thoughts (since it is not coherent there is no other comment i can make) ". And I thought, may be he is right. One reason might be that there is a lot in my life that is not reflected here but then I don't want that too anyway. Isn't it even worse? To not like how it is and yet don't know how to change it or what is wrong any...

Finally after a year and 2 moths, I managed to finish Made in Japan by Akio Morita. There are 2 ways of interpreting that long duration. One is that the book is so uninteresting/difficult/ that it took me so long. The other is that there has to be something really exciting/engaging/ that I held on to it all this time. The answer, as usual is something in between. The book is not and is not meant to be a weekend reading, those spurts of reading energy that let people pick up books like LOTR and actually finish them. It won't mesmerize you so much that you can't even put it down and once you put it down, it won't keep haunting you either. But there is plenty to be taken if you do come back, those small nuggets of wisdom, those small insights into things that turn dreams into reality. For someone like me who doesn't understand the technicalities of world business, it is an interesting glimpse in to that complex and often daunting world. The important point that comes thr...