2S
Techie. Writer. Cricketcrazy. Filmi.
March 23, 2009 at 4:57 pm · Filed under cricket
Dear Mr. Modi,
Greetings. I hope you are enjoying yourself in South Africa, where you are holidaying with my tax money discussing the possibility of taking the IPL to the nation, which will anyway witness the Champions Trophy in the nearby future, hence denying Indian fans quality cricket. I am confident of the fact that you are well informed and aware of the pros and cons of moving the IPL to South Africa, yet, at this stage, I find it imperative to provide you my expert opinion at no extra cost in the interest of the league.
While you read the rest of this communication, I trust you will not consider me seriously and take this very lightly, as you have previously demonstrated when it comes to matters like fans wanting to see cricket live in Indian stadiums and the betterment of cricket by recognizing the ICL. In any case, the below are my observations in the light of the move:
1. The name is now irrelevant. The definition of “league” as per my accurate records is: “an association of sports teams that organizes matches for its members”, whereas in your case, the league in question is a business idea to rake in the moolah in the name of cricket, entertainment and fanfare. The word “party” is perhaps more accurate. Now, the word “premier” means: “be performed for the first time”, which is again not the case, as you might know that there has been atleast one domestic T20 tournament in India. Now that you have taken this outside India, I am afraid to inform you that the IPL is neither Indian, nor Premier, nor a League.
2. South Africa as you know is famous for the sizzling sun, and consequently, the sizzling women who dress for the sun. The name ‘Charlize Theron’ comes to mind automatically. I am all for women participating in cricket, especially as cheerleaders in cricket get more newspaper headlines than the women cricket teams than win World Cups. Yet, I urge you to exercise much caution as some women in that part of the world tend to go overboard with their summerwear, or perhaps, the lack of it. This could spell doomsday for cricket if the likes of Jayasuriya are batting and no one is looking at them. Not that it matters to you, or your coffers, but hey.
3. The disadvantage of South Africa are the number of streakers in that nation. On one occasion, Andrew Symonds, if I may, made a monkey of one such individual who decided to stroll butt-naked in the park. The IPL is not alien to violence either: speaking of primates, Harbhajan Singh has testified to slapping S. Sreesanth, when the latter was fully clothed. One could only wince in pain at the thought of what a hot-blooded punjabi like Harbhajan Singh (or a libidomaniac like a certain captain of the Rajasthan Royals) would do when presented face-to-face with an individual in his, or her, birthday suit.
Hence, Mr. Modi, please don’t say I didn’t Warne you. I wish you all the best in murdering cricket in my nation taking the sport ahead.
Regards,
S
March 13, 2009 at 2:53 am · Filed under personal
“Repeat my drink, please.”
I was open-mouthed, the kind of face you make when you see Cindy Crawford butt-naked or Ranatunga pinch a quick single. Absofuckinlutely amazed. I’m sure I heard the words “repeat my drink” leave Mr. V’s mouth, a hole in his face through which a couple of highballs had already raced through in the space of twenty minutes. Mr. V was two LIITs down as he ordered his third. It hence came as no surprise that he was pissed drunk.
“You know Mr. Srinivasan, I just love the taste of tea.”
I exchanged looks of immense surprise, the ‘WTF’ types, not the ‘oh’ types, with my associate, Mr. D, who reciprocated. To give a bit of background, D was a trusted colleague who perhaps hated Mr. V more than I did, except for one subtle difference: when Mr. V and I disagreed, Mr. V got my opinion, undiluted. When misters V and D disagreed, D would concede defeat as arguments usually ended with Mr. V smiling his ass away as D licked Mr. V’s aforementioned rear till it could be no further wet.
Anyhow, Mr. V had just talked about tea. I so intended on letting the US-return jackass know that there is no “tea” in the Long Island Iced Tea, as much as there isn’t an Island in it. Then again, Mr. V’s brains weren’t exactly too far from his testicles, so I let him live with his profound knowledge of cocktails, and instead sat back to enjoy the rock.
The third LIIT came, and if it weren’t for my reflexes it would’ve gone as soon as it arrived, because Mr. V, sober as ever, nearly tipped it over my blackberry. A quick word on the E71 then: like its proud owner, it does *not* know how to swim in water and liquor, so I automatically make every effort to keep myself and my cellphone dry. That my reflexes were still strong after three large Smirnoffs and coke, with D keeping company by ordering whatever I did, was commendable.
Mr. V asked if we wanted to go bottom’s up as I ordered my fourth and final peg o’ Vodka. Bottom’s up, he said, on his LIIT. He must be kidding, surely?
I put up the best Mr-V-your-bottom-will-be-up-and-your-up-will-be-bottom-if-you-go-bottoms-up-now face and mildly suggested that I’ve to drive back home. He went on it anyway. The bill came swooping in, Mr. V cleared it with his AMEX and we drove off, evading barricades and curious cops, as I dropped D first and Mr. V later. Mr. V was very “grateful for the ride” and suggested we “do it again”. I tried my best to think as straight as I could before wishing him a good night and driving home, wishing to myself that someday I could gulp down three LIITs in the space of thirty minutes and still walk straight without tripping or making love to a crack in the wall.
Tip: Red Bull gives you wings only *after* you are four pegs down.
March 2, 2009 at 2:21 pm · Filed under personal
… and it feels great. Fewer incidents in life bring more happiness than running back home after the day’s work into the arms of your soulmate. Waking up beside your wife every morning is a pleasure every man must experience, in my opinion. Marriage, and the one woman, have since introduced me to terms that never existed in my vocab: words unheard of, words like “chivalry”, “discipline” and “in-laws”. It’s been a joyride so far: while some might still argue that we’re in honeymoon phase, like I keep telling my wife, she’s my honey and I’m actually over the moon!
I just realized I never got around to thanking her: ergo, Somu, thanks for mustering the courage to marry me *and* put up with my antics for life. I promise you a life filled with entertainment, love and cricket. In reverse order.
The wedding was great: photos are available here, here and here. Many thanks to all my buddies and well-wishers who showed up, and also to those who didn’t ;-). A special word of thanks to my best man, Jerry, and my buddy behind the lens, Harsha. See our wedding through Harsha’s eyes and you see it like few have.
On that note, a quick personal update out of the way: effective 01/Mar/2009 I’ve decided to take an indefinite break from Mutiny.in and the priveleges and responsibilities that came along with it. The blog is in good hands and has made it into print, yet it calls for a lot more commitment and dedication that I can offer given my new phase of life. I wish Jacob all the best in scaling new heights with his magazine: he’s one of the few out there on the internet who has the orbs to pursue something passionately with/without support and I’m confident it’ll be big sometime soon.
Much love to all,
Sandy
January 31, 2009 at 12:13 pm · Filed under personal
Ladies and genitalmen,
This is in all certainty my last blog post as a bachelor. In forty-eight hours from now Ms. Soumya George would’ve entered my life, my house and my marriage as a soulmate, and while my blogging rights woud remain intact I wish I could say the same for my Counter-Striking ones.
So yesterday was the Haldi ritual at my place (and one at hers too). The ceremony is performed in both Hindu and Muslim cultures, so I ended up having two rituals. Anyhow, I rose with the sun, bathed and put on a crisp, new Kurta with old jeans that I didn’t mind turning yellow. Speaking of the colour, I hopped on to my iTunes library and tried to pick out songs for the Haldi ritual, but all I could find was — you guessed right — Yellow, by Coldplay. We were just into the second verse when my aunts and attes (Dad’s sisters, pronunced “uth-theys”) walked in, one of whom is uber-religious and was mumbling shlokas. I jumped and tumbled over flowers, candles, coconuts and whatnot before reaching iTunes just in time and switched the playlist.
Chris Martin had given way to MS Subbalaxmi. Vishnu Sahasranama was on.
The rest of the rituals went as per norm, interrupted by a Rahu Kala between 10.30am and 12noon, and a very prompt powercut that wove itself around the Rahu Kala. We resumed the rituals and it was a pretty mellowed down affair, more of tranquil and less of noise, followed by a scrumptious home-made lunch of pungent puliyodurai, voggarney-irodhu-mosoruanna (masala/nuts/coriander-mixed curd rice), obbattu (a cross between a chapati and a sweet dish) and my favourite sweet, kesaribhaath.
I had to step out to niptofy some wedding-related chores and when I returned, some guests were already lined up at home, preparing for war with turmeric as weapons of mass destruction. The Muslim-styled Haldi. The evening turned out to fun as well: more damaging though, as yellow paste and powder flew from hand to hand into face, mouth, ear, hair and visible parts alike. Ironically, for the groom, there was no respite. No mercy. For a moment all I could see, hear, feel, smell and taste was yellow. Okay, you can’t hear yellow, but you get the message. I was yellow-ed, so much that if I’d begun learning Jython my first program would’ve been “Yellow World”.
The evening ended with more food and a neat dance performance from my sisters who nevertheless mocked me and my gestures and habits all throughout. Yet, it was supersweet of them to do that, and if you’re reading this R/N, *thanks* so much! Loved it.
Rarely do the rituals of these two cultures cross at one point, and Haldi is one such marital ritual. As the evening came to a close I now shut the doors on my penultiate day of bachelorhood, as my marriage-induced contemplation inside is now efficiently masked by a coat of yellow.
Homework for tomorrow: Buy soap. Scrub. Receive guests. Grab sleep for the big day.
December 14, 2008 at 6:35 am · Filed under tributes
Sunrise. The big day had arrived.
He’d never proposed before, ever. In fact, the closest he came to a ‘proposal’ was back in 2007 when he pored over a whole wave of RFPs in the pre-sales team, and responded to each individually. To suggest that he was unprepared for the moment was to suggest that Satch could strum a guitar. Yet, it was something that he’d always wanted to do, all his life.
As the sun uncovered itself from under the dark, our late-riser SOA specialist was up, running and active as hell, like a Wall Street trade server on a Monday morning, YouTubing all kinds of proposal videos. Yes, you read right, YouTubing. He was the kind of guy who believed that Wikipedia was the Gospel Truth. He was known to wiki everything from Nuclear Weaponry in Pakistan to the biological internals of the male reproductory system in the event of a possible sexual arousal by the opposite gender. And here he was, browsing through a number of proposal videos. After a few dry runs in front of the mirror, he finally figured out the entire go-down-on-one-knee affair, and though it did seem silly in front of the mirror, the reaction on the face of the women in the aforementioned videos was motivation enough to persist with the idea of going down and proposing.
The reaction. Hmm. It didn’t take too long to figure that out. But of course, it was the ring.
Opening up a new tab, he googled all over again for diamond rings on the websites of Gili and Nakshatra. Not that he liked any: they all seemed to be, in words immortalized by the woman he was proposing too, gubbe, which when translated to English roughly suggests that the rings were owl-like, although owls and rings - or owls and anything else, with this woman - never have and hopefully will never be literally compared. Owls, and dogs at times, were her much sought-after context comparison operators.
The ring. As he checked into work, he momentarily drowned in a sea of use-case diagrams, MBeans and a rogue Null Pointer Exception on a bitch of a String member (he went on to suggest, in native Urdu, that the getter method in question made love to String’s female sibling). Yet, swimming through them and aided with timely log4j calls that he always abused (his log statements read: “Jack Sparrow was here” as many System Admins at the giant investment bank he worked for often wondered in amazement at the mysterious appearance of the Caribbean Pirate. Virus, those dumbfucks guessed), all he could think of now was the ring.
Furiously alt-tabbing between two putty terminals, a cricket scorecard and a Google image search for the rings, he kept staring at one he fell in love with, prompting a colleague, Pis, to walk past mouthing ‘Frodo’. He immediately alt-tabbed away and looked towards the voice that followed it up with a ‘obsessed with holes now, are you? Here, grab a polo. You’d fit through it, I think’, sending his compiler into overdrive.
The Ring. Declining a nasty meeting request that came up at the last moment (Domestic situation at home, Mr. Manager. Need to rush. Will discuss with team tomorrow) he rushed out to the Oasis Center in Koramangala, and the Carbon showroom, checking out a few rings that his best buddy, Jay, had seen the previous day. Not many that he liked, until he chanced upon one that he was attracted to so strongly that he half-looked around for a Gollum. All clear. The only Gollum that ever followed him was on Twitter. This ring, my precious, he liked. It looked like an S too. Meanwhile, the friend had arrived, and ack-ed his choice of the ring. Perfect.
But that wasn’t the end of his evening for the woman. Flowers were always on the cards, flowers his buddy had already arranged and deployed at the location where the evening was set. Yet, there was something about the whole thing missing. He racked his creative thought process and realized a common mistake every distributor makes before it sells its product: branding. Where was the personalization?
So, summoning all his documentation skills, he sat outside the mall, shooting nervous glances towards the incoming traffic at the Sony World signal, and penned a little letter that talked about the ring. A letter he was proud of, because he’d poured into it a kettleful of vision, hope and affection. Words he didn’t have to conjure up because the woman he was about to meet, and in an hour or two propose to, was so special. Yes, special as in, extraordinary, and not as in Special Olympics.
Ring safely secured in the left-corner of his jacket, he rushed to meet the girl who was waiting at the Forum mall. An embrace where for a moment he wondered if she’d find out that he had a ring, before he put that thought to rest. Naw, she was super-smart and brainy and all that, but she wasn’t Nostradamus. She couldn’t possibly have known. As they cuddled up together in the rick, going towards that same old restaurant on 100ft road where it was all planned, he was lost in thought, much to the dismay of the girl in his arms then.
Scared? No, of course not. Nervous? A little. Excited? Yes. It reminded him of those few minutes before a critical production deployment where the JBoss server was deployed and running, the production ticket had been approved, the database tables in production had been created and populated and all he had to do was deploy the EAR before tailing the logs and ensuring the system came up. Yup. That kind of feeling.
It didn’t help that it was a harsh, cold evening and the girl had wrapped herself up in a shawl in such Mujahideen-like fashion that he managed a faint smile. To distract herself, she started singing, and when she broke into the tune of ‘chulli chulli’, a (forgettable) Kannada song picturised on the legendary Dr. Rajkumar, he, for a fleeting instant, revisited the thought of marrying this girl. Yet it was these moments of random excitedness that he loved, much liked he loved the sporadic peaks on a CPU/Memory graph of his local de-centralized message monitoring dameon. And so, they made their way into Take-5, as he was quickly distracted by the cricket match in progress. Dhoni had just slammed a boundary, went back, used the full length of the crease and punched the ball through cover and extra-cover as sweeper was left with no chance, before the girl did a soft-reset and brought him back to his previous stable state where willow took a backseat.
Before he knew it, the moment had arrived. T-minus-2 minutes and his mind went blank. Jay had to almost point him to the girl he was going to propose to, otherwise he’d end up proposing to a doorknob, and doorknobs, for all the pushing and squeezing and twisting opportunities they offer, do not say ‘yes’ in confirmation when diamond rings are shown to them. T-minus-1 minute and Jay had broken into his homosexual act, suggesting that he and Jay were in love with each other. A pseudo-gay-prologue to the proposal. It was a decoy, though. His buddy had set it up perfectly for the rest of the crowd at Take-5. T-minus-20 seconds. At that moment, Jay was a placeholder that sacrificed his heterosexuality, risking his public reputation at the joint.
Finally, the moment arrived. The ring-bearer plucked it out of his shirt pocket, went down on one knee, and popped the question, mumbled it really, while in his heart he spawned two vocal threads that implemented Runnable, Loveable and even WhatTheFuckable, one that said ’say yes, please’ and the other that said ‘thank you YouTube and God bless you Google’.
Two seconds. Three. She didn’t respond, and in perfect SOA architecture, the message publisher, down on one knee, was anonymous to the consumer in this instance. Decoupled. Four seconds, five. No ack. He timed out, so he published the message again. “Will you marry me?”
Her MessageListener’s onMessage event triggered gracefully again, and mercifully, she was able to parse it and respond. A positive acknowlegement. “Yes.”
But being the rogue publisher he was, he wouldn’t stop at that. He re-published, silently cursing himself for the overall latency he now introduced. She, however, was well equipped with duplicate message handling and responded with an ack again. He took the ring out, placed it on her finger and then sat back next to her, moment over, message deleted from the queue as the crowd looked on. A drop of sweat had accumulated. Whew. That instance really hogged all the CPU for five minutes. Finally, it sunk in.
She’d said yes long ago, yet he understood the importance of this vocal confirmation, much as a sales engineer understands the difference between an okay from the CIO, and a work order. They were getting married. It was going to happen. The Capri’s pragmatism had been conquered. Her doubt-ridden security policies had been compromised. The Libran, smitten by her centralized architecture of individuality, had sneaked into the heart of her core, coupling himself with her as SOA and loose coupling died a horrific death. They were bonded, merged, now one entity, as Adobe and Macromedia are, and as Microsoft and Google will never (hopefully).
It was time for a regretful goodbye that evening. Now at the lane where she lived, he pecked her cheek and gave her one last good-night kiss, an undocumented EOD SoP. As she checked into her home, he made his way back, his life forever tagged with the version of this release. And he was missing her already. Sure, he’d meet her the next day, or the day after that. But she wasn’t around then, and he missed her like hell. Yet he could feel her presence around him as he made his way into bed amidst a flurry of SMSes, knowing well that he loved her a lot more than she knew.
In hindsight, mistakes happened. Doubt pricked, and still does at times. Yet, there is this instance running on one of his clusters dedicated for her, that she perhaps might never know about. An instance whose uptime is unearthly. An instance that, strangely, cannot be killed even with a root. An instance that has no PID, that isn’t visible on a ps -ef to the naked grep.
An instance that is madly in love with her. One that he hopes, someday, somehow, she’ll find, appreciate, and cherish for a lifetime.
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