twisted

twisted
rubber bands
with no shame
snapping when alls well!

days down the drain

it begins well. the day i mean... at 6 am i wake up, alert to the sound of the car being washed in the parking bay on the ground floor. me being on the first floor does not help. my feet feel sore and the muscles ache from inactivity. i have withered away over the years. The muscles from the legs and arms have slowly turned into blubber and a stretch of it has been resident around the tummy for years. 6 abs are meant for actors who at 40 live life they want to. I have emis to pay instead.

by 7 30 i am out of the gates of the complex, i have not felt the breeze or realised the mumbai is getting pleasant. its a rush to get ahead of the rush.

it still feels good. the day is still promising. By 8 15 am in the pokey office of 'the startup' i am a part of. 8 30 is breakfast of the same thing that i have eaten for the last 4 months, one idli, one wada, one bowl of oily upma. i try to be innovative with it, eat half the upma first, the an idli with chutney and then a wada. maybe i will try the wada with the chutney tomorrow. Maybe the day after I will eat the upma last and soaked in sambar. with 5 items the combinations are many and it can keep me mused for somedays.

The the chai, chai is good. its sweetened with some sugar free - some have said that i will die of sugar free poisoning - my take is that in Mumbai the average life cycle is anyways depending on your surname. and if u ever happen to have a life threatening situation you will die for sure at the same spot stuck in traffic. it does not need to be sugar free.

after that is chaos!

Days go down the drain when one expects things to happen. For calls to come and smses to your frantic messages. It is wrong to hope for impossible things. Wrong to hope that today the day will be better than yesterday. That the universe will collaborate instead of the usual demolition job it does.

Days are human I suppose.

loser me?

I am not an ICSE / CBSE school product - i passed out of SSC state board
I am not a stanford / yale / leeds / oxford / MIT / Sing U grad. I passed out of Pune Univ with barely enough marks to make grade for a post graduation in management
Am not from IIM or IIT or BITS - my post grad batch had all those guys who did not make grade to even the most prestigious mba program in Pune.

To make matters worse I never worked for Tatas, Infy, Wipro, Google, Microsoft or even Reliance. My career has been with startups and small sweat shops that never made it any place.

I have failed several times - sometimes because I was raw, sometimes because my dad did not inherit anything. Some of the most frustrating times has been working for people who tried to clip wings to suit their purposes. The best boss I ever had is a gentleman called Neeraj Roy, the worst is your guess. I never have managed a decent ref check ever from anyone significant

What I can do best is think innovation. I can put disparate things together and come up with ideas that work. I understand technology, marketing, funding and some bit of human intelligence.

I work hard.

Maybe thats why I try so hard. Why I do not relax. Why I am hyper sensitive to barbs.

Loser me is not true because I have not lost, I have abdicated and have come back stronger.

Am human.

think different

social networking hogwash

First there was ryze in India, then came myspace, then linkedin, then the latest kid on the block - orkut. now there is facebook. Ergo one now jumps between these networks trying to keep in touch with friends who also happen to be on all the networks at the same time. It seems like every new kid gets people to jump onto the bandwagon and loses the same people to someone else. I guess retention would be in the levels of about 4% - 4% of all people who come in at the initial surge will remain while the others will move away.

This was seen earlier in email systems. Everyone who was anybody had an hotmail account, then lycos, them aol and so on. Now people have a gmail account. The difference is that this gmail login and password is the universal kep to everything that google provides.

Facebook is interesting since it is a platform that allows others to plug in their applications. Inane applications that help you 'poke' people. There is an economy that is being suggested around facebook, we have to wait for sometime for anyone to see what that means.

In the meanwhile does anyone know what bigadda and gang are doing?

uh oh!

should it be this, should it that? in the past month my head has had so many things going on that it is impossible for me to remember to write about everything.

hence uh oh!

How about that piece about a classmate coming across my name in a mag and googling me to find that I am his neighbour? One wondered if it was wise to leave so many digital trails for people to find me.

Or the thought about the way things never change back home in Pune? About the comfort of familiarity and therefore the slumber of sameness. Of death of thought and the impossibilities of growth. Of times of childhood and of growing up and marriage and then leaving it all. Of rebirth. Of winning, of falling in love again with the same people. Of missing the world who make me me and of not missing them in the expanse of fast furious six lane traffic of the western expressway?

And reading relentlessly about Google and Microsoft and Linus and Ford and IBM and starbucks - trying to make sense of what to do with this 8 month venture that has grown so fast. And realising that it does not have any rules, That we will have to invent and invest in the new.

Sometimes of even the joy of reading out to my 15 month old girl. Of her wide eyed wonder and the Aeroplane ( annna ) that flies over her head in the evening. Of the crows and the pigeons and cats and missy doggies that inhabit her world. Of my ambition of writing a book of stories for her and her age friends.

Time - there is never time to do anything. When was the last time that we sat down and talked about nothing, about eloping from the hustle and bustle.

Time is not the only thing we do not have?

ponderous ways of the empty world

Some 8 months ago, three friends started out on a journey. One fell by the way side and the other two somehow managed to stay above the waters. The above graph says it all aloud. We are somehow as big or thereabouts with so many of the media companies that we fight with. They are well funded and are stable while we smile and work our way around prima donnas, clients who care less, skeptics and such.

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