Bong ha ha

I was reading this blog (www.thebangaloretorpedo.blogspot.com) today, thanks to my friend Sunayana, and thought it was rather hilarious. I think everyone should read it.
I came across this post on Bengalis, which I found to be the funniest I've read in a long time. And that brings to be the film The Bong Connection. Anjan Dutt tried real hard to get us bengalis to take a joke, to rise above our conceited selves and realise that we too, are as foolish as any other person from any other country or community.
There are at least few hundred million bengalis living in 'Bengal'uru.. They come here with the IT wave and settle down. They wear their Fabindia kurtas, drink scotch, talk sartre and tagore and eat 'machher jhol bhaat'. And they cuss like hell ( I won't say I haven't done it too). They talk about how Bangalore has no culture blah blah blah.
I don't like Bangalore as a city very much, but to be honest, it does surprise me every now and then in a rather pleasant way. I hate the auto rickshaws here, they cheat and they don't want to drive that goddamn thing most of the time. In Calcutta, we don't have an option, the auto guys ply like buses - fixed destination, fixed price.
I love that city, and that's because I was born there. I guess it would be true for any city I was born in. I love Mumbai too, I spent two of my best years in that place.
Why can I not fall in love with Bangalore? I have been here for four years and I still feel like a stranger at times. I sincerely wonder why!

Lies

I often don't know what to say to him. What do you tell someone you've known forever and yet cannot get used to?
What do you tell someone you've loved deeply and then walked out?
What do you say to erase the past in the hope of a fresh start? A start that will never be the way it used to be. A compromised restart.
What can you possibly say when you have so much to say that words fail you?
When is a good time?
When he is asleep? or busy with work? Would a letter do the trick?
What could you possibly do when he's a million miles away from you and time has managed to draw so many lines between the two of you that you have no way of knowing how to get over it.
Would you forget everything and let the memory serve its purpose? Would you allow a sliver of hope enter your mind? What would you look for? A lover? A friend?

Lies work. They are brilliant pieces of stories woven together to create this fantastic epic - of how it wouldn't have worked anyway; that he is totally not the kind of person you should be with. And I've lived that lie... everyday till it didn't make a difference.
And now, after so many years, I've allowed the truth to fade away. Now what I want is him, in some form or the other. It doesn't matter anymore. It cannot. But I would be dishonest if I said it is easy.

rather interesting... or not.

This is the latest comment on my blog and I think I will end this silly debate with this:

"Why am i still working here????Heard about bonded labour miss? Yep, corporate bonded labour in form of a bond signed at time of joining. Something which has a bottomline "leave us before 2 years and we take lacs; its a different story if u get fired though" And yeah miss Ed, u still need to know the ways of tech-corporate world. Would suggest u to do an "inside story" on exploitation by companies like mine which claim to work on lines of TATA code of conduct but flout it openly and use it to their convinience. This I'd say wold be a real journo work.And please do forward this to the HR. Thanks!! "

Yes, I do know of bonded labour.. when you have friends who go with the IT wave, you cant help but witness many fall into the trap of signed bonds. Put it to my ignorance (since I am not as educated or qualified as most and no company really ever wants to hire me, forget the bond!) but are most companies like that? I mean aren't bonds presented to the employee when the accept the offer. Why do people sighn the bonds then?

Dear writer, I am not really that unaware about what goes on in the tech-corporate world.. I do have a few friends and they aren't all journalists you know..
I was with a so-called corporate company for a while before I decided to come back to journalism and I know what went on there. and trust me, there was no blog to even vent out my frustrations...

anyway, I'd really like to put this at rest.. cos i figured one thing out.. We could be arguing on this forum or on the other, no one will do a damn thing about anything because people don't care. And people won't care till someone did something about it without expecting someone else to do it.. When I couldn't change things in my last two companies, I walked out... I was broke but I walked out because I didn't want to be in a set up that took advantage of me... thankfully, i found a job i like.. or else it would've been rather weird..
anyway, I wish you luck. I really hope you don't have to be a bonded labour for long and find your true calling ( i know it sounds a little fuddy duddy!)

And btw, I didnt form opinion on what the TEL guys told me.. It was a feature article and not a journalistic piece. I just wrote what they told me.. if you come and tell me that you have fun at work, I don't know why I should'nt believe you - then, I'd have to mistrust everyone.. What a life that would be!

Fun extended

Wow. First of all I must appreciate your writing/d... Wow. First of all I must appreciate your writing/debating skills to extend a matter to the extent of banning anything and everything. But then isn't that what you've been trained for?? :)

And it is understandable that a newpaper with a small subscriber base is bound to go with the highest bidder(read good money from Elxsi)

Something like in an auction; the novelty goes to the highest bidder.Rather than a journalistic work; it seems to be a marketing campaign with the bottomline of making money.Its seems more like "we pay u; u market us" still better "Pay us; we make you famous"Had it been a project with a journalistic approach; a passage about Elxsi could well be titled as "NO FUN ONLY WORK ???" This article clearly shows that u guys havent done ur home work well to take real inputs from employees; but rather from corporate communications guy(gal - gurmeet in the case) OR you people are all sold out to Elxsi(which seems to be the case)...But surely u ppl could have done up the fotoz better; they looked so staged.Best Regards,"Current" employee of TATA ElxsiName withheld as it could lead to I being fired tomorrow.

WOW! Double WOW! I never thought someone would take the trouble to read my blog... It's such a waste of time.. Anyway someone did.. And I am assuming it's someone who is kind of really mad that his newspaper doesn't come on time. Why don't people stop reading the papers if they are so annoyed with the print media? This I don't get. I can suggest at least one paper that's really good and that's the Hindu. Maybe this gentleman here should read that instead.

He also suggests that Elxsi paid Midday to get that feature done..I think he's a little confused between medianet and Midday. I know both start with 'M' but the similarity ends there.

I think I will forward this 'current employee's' mail to the lovely HR lady of Elxsi who told me that all the employees have a great time at work...

And no, I would hate it if you ever got fired... wouldn't want you to dabble with journalism, I say!

But my question is... why are you still working there if you're not having any fun at all?

Fun identified

I often search for blogs to read and this is what I came across today - http://the100rabh.blogspot.com/2007/08/what-would-you-do-if-traditional.html.
It is, in a way, rather interesting because it discusses an article that I'd written for midday a week or so back. Well, it's more of a feature for our fun@work segment. This gentleman seems to be quite upset about what I'd written, claiming that all the FUN Tata Elxsi claims to be having is absolutely untrue. Of course, he didn't bother to take in to consideration that the information I got, could've just, by chance, have come from them. But that's alright, I am right now just amused that someone can feel so defeated by the fact that some people from his ex company had fun while he didn't! Maybe what Elxsi told me was made up too, but then again, isn't he out of the company already, why should he really care?
Yes, ladies, gentlemen and friends, don't read any news paper. Midday, TOI, Deccan, Hindu, HT, Telegraph, Business Standard or any other kind of paper for any kind of news. What's the point anyway? It's just a bunch of silly people trying to take you all for a ride isn't it. And it doesn't make you richer. It doesn't pay your rent. It doesn't put food on your table or make you look cooler in front of all the men and women you want to impress.
We're just out there to get you - to take you for a ride, because after much consideration we realised that we weren't pretty enough to be on screen, corrupt enough to be a politician or smart enough for any other profession...
How about submitting a petition to ban the media altogether? television lies, print lies, the internet lies, companies lie... I think the only people who don't lie to us are our friends - oh hang on a minute, they lie too.. cos sometimes, and only sometimes, we get on their nerves as well and they don't want to see our faces and the truth doesn't help then.
So technically, everyone and everything should be banned. That would be the ideal life, wouldn't it?
I think I wll go and fill ink now.

El laberinto del fauno (Pan's Labyrinth)

What do I look for in a fantasy? Something so removed from reality that it just becomes real. An extension of my life, my brains. Barring one film, I've never really seen anything that qualifies for that kind of fantasy. Guillermo del Torro's Pan's Labyrinth or El labertino del fauno is a film that can put many fantasy films to sleep.
Forget Harry Potter or any other bizarre unrealistic fantasy stories that's been woven - this film captures the very essence of real meeting unreal.
Set during the post civil war in Spain in 1944, when the rebels were still fighting the fascist troops, Ofelia travels with her pregnant and sick mother Carmen to the country to meet her step father Captain Vidal for the first time.
If you remember Amon Goethe (played by Ralph Fiennes) in Schindler's List, you'd find a terrible similarity between the two characters.
Incapable of any human feelings, Captain Vidal's whole agenda is to clear his area of any rebels and establish the fascist government.
Unable to tolerate the misgivings of this cruel man, Ofelia disappears, into a world of her won, far away from her current life.
She meets a fairy who leads her to a fawn, who tells her that Ofelia was a princess reborn and she must perform three tests to prove her royalty and only then, she can come back to her kingdom where her real father and mother are waiting for her. Ofelia accepts these tasks, and in the midst of war, torture from her step father, death of her mother, she sets out to find her port key from a world that she can't deal with.
Flowing mellifluously between the two scenarios, the beauty of the whole film is that we never know whether it was Ofelia's dream or reality.
Pan's labyrinth is not for children - but for those adults who need to find their world, that is far away from the unbelievable traffic and chase for wealth.