Valentines day

Saturday, February 14, 2009 7:32 AM
From: mahesh@******ams.com

To: dee***@yahoo.com
Cc: anlalk****as@yahoo.co.in

Dear Deep,

My Hearty condolences for yet another unsuccessful Valentine's Day.Hope your next Valentine's Day will be different.

Regards,

Mahesh

I was split into laughter reading the first mail in my inbox today morning!! Instantly i expressed my deep concern for him in the reply mail, as we both can be considered as prospering non valentines (dis valentines? unvalentines?...whatever)...

I was never influenced by valentines day during my adolescence or my entire life (to be modest). ha...just another of those bloated commercialized days - having nothing to do with romance or love for that matter. hmm...mmm.. such acute rejection of valentines day by me as an insensible idea does not help much - as usual during the past couple of days, all newspapers, magazines & TV had their coercion tactics, to instil guilt for the shortage of romance in our boring lives. I was so impressed to watch the new ATLAS jewellery commercial in which the guy who says "jana kodikalude viswastha sthapanam" was wearing a romantic purple dress and proposed his inspiring bidding. This ad can be considered the second reason for not buying more gold for my imaginary valentine...first reason being the current market price - AED 106 per gram (converts to Rs 1397)...truly romantic...i would opt for a rose and a heartfelt kiss instead ;)

During engineering college days few of us guys (who scorned valentines day for unknown reasons) developed a new day to counter valentines day - The Jilted Lovers day - or JLUentines day...The fun fact remains that the ratio of guys to girls in our batch was 1:3 and still almost 80% of the guys were active members of this union.

Umesh won 1st prize in the poem writing competition. My poetry attempt turned bit complicated and failed to qualify as a poem :(. Umesh, who had an inclination to literature, was too romantic those days, I even remember his analogy of intense spiritual romance, which he revealed to few of us animatedly during a tea session in sallap restaurant near EBC "eda..its like consuming hot green chillies with boiling tea"... and not to mention someones admiration for the romance of two teenage lizards back in his room, which was one of the funniest anecdotes those days - (That reminds me of one awful commercial i saw sometime back in youtube - pretty sad one).

apologies, if i offended any of you valentine enthusiasts...
Have a cheerful valentines day :)

update : http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article2233878.ece - valentine surprise!!! No comments as I`m at a loss for words.

KV Pattom 1985-1997

Kendriya Vidyalaya, Pattom, Trivandrum – I spent twelve long years (Ist through XII th standards 1985 - 1997) in this school and little did I know then, that termites of time will eat up most of the specific details… some faces, events, voices, and so on...etched in the mental canvas though faded, should help…Let me add some music for effect..

The music takes me back to the assembly ground, girls and boys clad in the white and navy blue uniform, aligned in separate lines - classified into 4 houses - Raman, Tagore, Bapu and Vivekananda. Little Deep hated the torture of standing in the scorching sun and counted impatiently whenever the ordeal got extended. Instantly the embarrassing events I can recollect related to assembly are ...


(1). Being detained in the assembly ground with 2 other fellow criminals in 4th standard for making paper air craft’s 

(2). Singing one extra verse of "hum honge kamyaab ek din" in all its glory, when rest of the assembly had finished and there was pin drop silence - (pallavi padi kazhinjaal anu pallavi padenam ennu enikku nirbandam aayirunnu...) being a music enthusiast was never easy.

Nevertheless, if I get few goose bumps & a drop of tear welling up in my eyes listening to the national anthem, I can proudly give credits to the upbringing we had in Kendriya Vidyalaya. The prayer song of "Asathoma sadgamaya....daya kar daan vidya ka" would be followed by pledge, news, announcements, patriotic song, a demo speech by late Kurup sir and then national anthem on a standard day... on Mondays the navy blue part of the uniform was replaced by whites and we had to attend mass PT sessions...forced drill.


The best period, without doubt, was games period (i was not a great sports guy then, but loved enjoying the fresh air and roaming around and discovering stuff– and towards high school, all sports I can remember is being a football defender having chit chats with goalie Mani and may be Harish and some failed volleyball shoots ...

Next qualifier in leisure list can be Yoga (the slender Yoga sir coped our tantrums, probably by implementing his Yoga expertise - the funniest was when he would enquire "who is humming there??" as the boys in various asanas would abruptly stop their intentional high pitched group humming, without moving a brow...glancing innocently at each other in disbelief - who?? who??

I liked all Language subjects which took me to fantasy worlds (except Appukuttan sir`s Sanskrit - "Ekasmin vane ekaha crouncha mithunaha asthi??....".okies termite strikes...aham gachami....). Unlike most others I loved Art period, for that always seemed the long term career plan for little Deep...and so art sir Mr.Vasanthan was a role model then...No wonder I related well to some scenes in the movie "taare zameen par".


There were few teachers whom I remember with nostalgia - Shobha miss (Primary English), Shyamala madam (High school English), Gopalakrshnan sir (History), Cicy ma'm (Biology)...to name a few and then there were the ones who stirs mixed feelings (dominantly horror) - Rajamma teacher(Primary maths), Thankachi ma'm (High school math) who was soo sharp to pin point the restless lot esp. Roy Sebastians "viru viruppu" - & selected few of us got to sit adjacent to the teacher...honors for laughing at a pals joke :D…(incidentally all happen to be mathematics teachers, so do forgive my arrogance, ( I had an exclusive relationship with math - and this is beyond scope of this blog - I hated that subject, especially after primary – and see, my intuitions were right...I never found any use for integration, differentiation, complex numbers or series...etc in my entire career - thankfully we have calculators and excel for everything else)

As little kids, few of us used to make "sets" and I remember our set including Roy, Anand, Krishnakumar etc scurrying around the toilet block and the huge wild chiku tree near the primary Assembly ground after lunch break - some tom and jerry game. unit tests, half yearly exams, board exams all doesn’t create much feelings now, but it was not the case then...the relief of last day of exams and the ecstacy of embracing the anticipated holidays are beyond words - we used to play holi with the remaining ink in the fountain pens on the white shirts of buddies or have a game of cricket with the exam pad, a paper ball and 3 lines on some wall.


Hey so many events and faces are surfacing and this would get flooded - Namboodiri sirs tuitions (laughter club) & Apparao’s sirs IIT standard tuition's (guess Ayaskanth was the only guy who benefited), class bullies, sarcastic and instant jokes of Roy, Unnikrishnan, Prakash etc..ever enthusiastic sujith who used to cajole me to give touch ups to our raman house display stuff...the times with Roy, PP n Chethan in class - the guy sitting at the edge of the bench usually ended up as a projectile at unexpected moments...couple of unsaid crushes and the associated innocent romantic musings, Sports days, annual days, CCA meetings, the journey to and fro & times in Marian college, Kottayam for KV Youth festival, Fandango festivals at Kovalom, the journeys in crowded KSRTC buses or CISF buses, cartoon strips passed during class hours, The library ma’m and her books – tinkles, amar chitrakadhas, Enid blyton, Hardy boys.... Alice madams "say, whatever it is"...combined studies with Dennis, Vishak palan, Kiran, Hilarious times spent in making plaster of paris model of a volcano and some other thermocol model at Karthik's house. nausea inducing mice dissections in bio lab, unplanned experiments in Chemistry labs – burettes , pippetes, test tubes, H2SO4..the progress cards and the tensions of getting it signed...shared lunches..the nick names we called each others and teachers...The walks back to home with Rajesh & Vandana during primary days (will try to update from time to time to include all the missing characters...)


Dedicating this piece of blog to all the teachers who tried their best to help us understand the world better, tolerating our tantrums and struggles & to all the friendships made, mended, broken, forgotten during those innocuous days spent at KV Pattom....probably there were few painful and bitter events too, unjustified then - but smile inducing now...but then do I bother to spoil the euphoria of selective nostalgia :)...no ways...be it any mind numbing derivation, we always had dusters to clean up the black board!!!

Image Courtesy: Sanal Kumar - Facebook

Some class photographs :
http://picasaweb.google.com/domainDeep/GrowingUpInKendriyaVidyalaya#

Get this widget at roytanck.com

School Website :
http://www.kvpattom.nic.in/

Loss lies where it falls

When i first moved into Engineering consultancy firm Parsons, I was not quite sure of the nature of my assignment, and within a weeks time I saw myself pursuing a totally disfigured project in terms of planned vs actual. So naturally there were a dozen or more confusing claims that had to be figured out and disposed. To be frank it was not the job i was used to (okay, apart from idling), but having decided that this was my chosen career path, I wanted to master the trouble - come whatever may. With a sinking heart I soon understood that I was deep in ****. Administering contracts were not fun and had implications beyond my little world.

I was lucky to have a peer who was also in a similar dizzying awareness and the chap was more concerned as he was keen on obtaining the membership of RICS - and was supposed to master three modules, one of which was hehehe "Construction Law" - idi vettiyavane pambu kadicha avastha . Let me introduce Sajul Mansoor - hailing from Malappuram - religious, ambitious and a nice buddy.

So when I got this invite for Dr. Sam's lectures sometime back in winter of 2007, both of us immediately secured seats. The course was an eye opener and our candle lit world of contracts were now lit up by 1000 Watt halogen floodlights... FIDIC was no more the old FIDIC, she was beautiful n glowing in her built in consistency, Like the rest of the class we developed great reverence for Dr. Samarathunga, who is refered to as "champion" in the subject, in middle east. A man of great knowledge and as one expects, knowledge makes these men so humble that they leave foot prints in your heart.

Few of Dr Sam's cliche dialogues ( "in this part of the world" , "loss lies were it falls" ...to name a few), became part of mine and Sajul Mansoor's day to day light hearted conversations, and since both of us were kinda study buddies now, we had discussion sessions almost daily. The discussions by default slipped to current affairs esp. funny n controversial ones as our studies somehow attracted other colleagues, who would readily join and spice up the scene.

"Fate it seems, not without a sense of irony" (another favorite cliche of mine) , Loss lies were it falls. With almost 50% of real estate developments in Dubai frozen by the recession and hordes of qualified people rendered jobless, we have accepted the fact that, though brief, we probably had our time in Dubai and if we happen to be in the lucky few who would endure the recession, that would purely be out of luck & Most of us are planning for a sabbatical (dedicated to further studies??) with any savings we have, & to spend some quality time with our beloved ones back in India for a while, and then return if our 2nd home recovers anytime soon - rest is up to destiny. Despite the traffic, the sand storms...Dubai sure has a certain charm of her own...she transform lives...she rocks!

Sajul n me at Dr Sam's final class

Our Project - Aerial Photograph

Tere bina zindagi se koi...

Prakash (Age : controversial, say 25 - 35 :D ), single, is an accountant by profession and is a Manglorean gaav vala whose family is currently settled in Mumbai. A simple guy, ....well, too simple n straightforward to be true. Hey prakash dont kill me - when i saw "punjab power - Sharukh" in "Rab ne bana di jodi - the first face that flashed in my mind was yours...) -bhaiyya, dance pe chance mar lo... :D

Par mera dosth mere se bahuth gussa mein tha, till today afternoon - pucho kyu?,

The story began sometime back in middle of 2007, I was looking out for a room to stay in Dubai and had almost dropped the plan when one friend who had agreed to move in with me quit for family reasons. By that time we had finalized a good flat in Qusais for sharing, owned by a 'gentleman' named Rahees. Qusais is a place prone to less traffic and easily accessible from any place in Dubai or Sharjah. So after 2-3 days I got a call from Mr. Rahees, that the room was still vacant and one Manglorean guy was interested if he could share the rent with another. I agreed and made a call to Prakash's phone..., and so with a little chit chat we agreed to move in together. We settled quickly and to be frank, he had to endure my antics for almost an year.

An emotional guy with deep regrets that he had to leave his parents and relatives for a living in this faraway desert...not very happy about his job, but fiercely loyal to his commitments.

Movies are his weakness (head over heels about Vidya Balan) and being an avid music lover, he enjoyed all my playlists, be it old malayalam songs, MLTR or even Akon...but had one condition - he would listen to a song of his choice after all my preferred songs - luckily for him i used to stay in the room only briefly - and without doubt the song he chooses every single time after browsing the computer exhaustively would be " tere bina zindagi se koyeeee shikwaaaa...tho naheeee, shikwaaa naheee...............................

i hoped and hoped....but he was obsessive compulsive about this particular song...how many times, i cant remember, but seeing him peacefully enjoying it, i had no other choice than listening to it for the 637th time before we finally parted...

he hated me for abandoning him...but i had given him ample warning that i would be leaving - by that time we had moved to another place and we stumbled upon a strange house owner - one of the strangest guys i ever came upon in all my life - Mr. shereef, (The name has nothing to do with his character) i think we need to build a strategically placed memorial on his name in some public restroom - this guy was so unbearable that no sane person could stay with him a single day...Prakash, in spite of being 17 times humbler than me could never stand him and his crookedness....i had tried each and every trick learned at the art of living sessions...to understand his shereefness and to be compassionate....but miserably failed - and was forced to say it straight on shereef's face one fine day, that he find someone else to share, & i moved to my sisters place and never worried about traffic since then :)...i LOVVVEE traffic...

Prakash moved to another room, but soon stopped all communications...it was only today afternoon that we really made up...and thanks to anlal for confusing him 360 degrees in chats by pretending that he was me - forwarded excerpt of today's loong chat:
...............
Prakash: ha....a.....a.....a....a
me: howz ur busines
10:56 AM Prakash: slow & PARSONS ??? good or bad
me: i m not in parsons
Prakash: u r
me: deep is in parsons
Prakash: y bcoz u r deep not anlal
me: hehe
10:57 AM i told 100 times..bhayyaa i m anlal
Prakash: no uncle u r deep
me: nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Prakash: anlal hardly use to talk to me
10:58 AM me: no
Prakash: u know he is bit reserved type
me: i m always talking to u i m not
Prakash: no still i say u r deep
10:59 AM me: no my dear i m anlal deep is reserved
Prakash: ok dear i agree
me: i m very friendly
Prakash: no anlal is reserved and he is very rude
11:00 AM me: deep and mahesh r reserved anlal is very open lovable friendly good smart stylish brave
Prakash: darpok
........................................LOL the whole chat is raunchy - having cooked up fatal allegations and so can't be published : for my kids(?) reputation sake!!
so after getting confused prakash calls me up and we are back friends again :)
and so next week we have planned to meet up.

so now you know, whenever i hear this eternal love song...i frantically reach for the skip buttons dedicating the next song to big bro prakash bhaiyya... :D

Some coordination memories

Statutory warning : all characters in this blog are fictional ;)

Lolan is calling me every other day to confirm my attendance in the CETA annual meet scheduled for February 6th in Abu dhabi...He is continuing his legacy of coordinating head count, which was his proven skill even during our CET days. He played key role in organizing most of our college tours, civil nights, and one national level seminar contest - INSIGHT, ...memories of which, still brings smiles to civil guys. hats off there.

With all due respect, Tenni was never an individual - he embodies what we usually refer to as "prasthanam" :) and he thoroughly enjoys it that way, he bought a costly laptop when his salary barely could afford a usb disk , he braved many emotional allegations during the college and later, while we were working together for Simplex in a remote rural Andhra village called ulavapadu, .....

(This space intentionally left blank... ;)...

To our awe, he purchased a new accord once he was in UAE and in less than a month some lucky thief drove it off (he left the keys inside and walked towards an ATM...vere pratyegichu oru thettum cheythilla)...the thief even got a complimentary cell phone, ....etc etc....oh and he remembers all the equations learned during XII standard, including their derivation from scratch...just ask him what Bernoulli's equation of continuity is, and you are done....!!! (Betwee he has an identical twin brother as well, who has stunned me for the resemblance quotient)

so as you see, he has no regrets in life, except for getting married earlier than expected (His parents and esp. his elder brother Kuncheria sir, "coordinated" this marriage, as they probably guessed that at a later date it would become a "program"!!! Kuncheria sir, was guide for my elective subject in college - transportation engineering : i still remember how he cold heartedly made me redo my seminar submission almost 3 times...

well cant blame him cuz, my knowledge in internet resources was in its infancy stage those days and all that i managed to copy paste regarding global positioning systems and surveying , that too after procrastinating confidently till last day, had little to do with transportation engineering...enthinere parayunnu...it seldom had any relationship with civil engineering in the first place.....but then skeptically, by the time he was guiding us in the final year project, he became very friendly ....umm...(some text truncated....)...He is now principal in some remote engineering college...oru pavam manushyan..just like Tenni.

yea... this time when Tenni calls and tries his colorful persuasion tactics, none of my batch mates have responded positively yet, akru has promised to be there, but has told me he will ditch, Jiju has not even agreed to my proposal of an alternate road trip on the same day, and so on...Basically all the guys including Tenni knows that such a programme is going to be a cold affair as the current climate in UAE market is bleak. But then, we have other reasons as well ;)

Tenni nee paranja pole ellam edit cheythu...ini pedikan onnumilla..... :)

Ashwamedham

So for friends huddle, we chose to meet up in LULU food court yesterday - had food along with our usual random talks which spanned - imminent lay off concerns - selling assets etc.. hansum mahi is planning to sell off his optra - a car which took us many places only to be ridiculed for its model and owners incompetency (word meaning : Lack of physical or intellectual ability or qualifications..). betwee he has sensible driving skills - he threatens us by releasing the central lock asking us to get out, while cruising at near death speeds, me n lal has a secret pact that we would take him on a looong trip and then dispose him off in some remote desert someday, where he will have no way out, other than walking...we are seriously working on it.

after food we drove to the huge deserted parking lot behind Crescent school in Qusais - few suspicious guys were jogging around - last time we were the suspicious ones when a police patrol came specifically to see what we were up to - being brave and innocent, none of us panicked... i even wanted to volunteer and ask the police guys - if something was wrong...

So we dint have anything in mind other than spending some "quality time" together over some ice cream in cold outdoors - normally quality time for us means venting ideas, gossiping, pulling each others legs and so on (its a vast domain depending on circumstances)...at some point we decided to play aswamedham (TDH) - where one of us would think of a personality and the others must crack who the guess is, within 20 'yes or no' questions. This game was the sole entertainment in our besix days with no internet connection in office - we could sent messages via server and we found this game handy to pretend busy and avoid sleeping ...., this was only till we figured how the IT guys accessed internet from any PC.

The only reason for this blog is cuz, I thought its high time the world knew the truth....... Tamil Nadu is no more a state - its a country !!! And more importantly a girl born of keralite parents is not necessarily keralite!!!

Chandni chowk to china

One of the worst movies i ever watched.

so this negated the guilt of recommending beowulf (starring angelina jolie) as a great movie sometime in the past to my unsuspecting friends anlal and mahesh.

reading all the reviews, i was quite convinced that beowulf is a legendary movie!!!
guess what...Angelina Jolie herself said that she wont allow her kids to watch that movie...sounds tempting - doesn't it?

okay i wont go to the details of how both of my buddies started to validate me halfway through the movie with glaring looks - and "nee purathirengeda - ninakku vecchittund" sort of gestures.
To my surprise ( as well as of my poor friends) the whole movie turned out to be animated - no Jolie, no jolly.

So when ever we went to theatres after this, we used to reminisce this strange word - beowulf. you may be settling down with conclusions that this was the first time - Movies were never kind to me - if i rewind a little further - me and anlal had a sordid experience of watching a horror movie named Thamara - we dint have any movie in mind that day and the inspiration to watch that movie was the poster which said "from the creators of final destination" - which obviously is an impressive movie - esp part II. frankly i don't want to comment more - the ugly girl turned seductress goes on a killing spree and... both me and my friend were speechless 10 of 10 by the time the movie finished. We never talk about that now.

coming back to the subject - chandni chowk to china - it was the release day of the movie - Grand cine in Sahara mall - the best part was that the movie hall had only four of us to start with- and to our freedom concerns, a Pakistani lady with a swarm of kids too joined after a while. We even walked down the ramp during the interval for a lil demo only to be warned by the guy sitting in the slot above.

Movie started with a Warner bros logo and a cool rendering of ancient china warriors - later on i was really watching familiar things - a bowl of Indiana Jones, a teaspoon of matrix, ....i donno the list is long - and there is a scene where a Chinese passenger in the flight asks akshay kumar, "are you stupid?" - i dint have to think twice in texting the same dialogue to anlals cell, who was sitting with his wife in another corner of the theatre (remember, we were free to sit anywhere given the audience count). He was the one who booked this movie. We dint talk anything after the movie for a long while...