My experiments with Sports.

Sports and I are poles apart. The only day in my school when my heart clangs like huge cymbals with fear is on the Sports Day.

I don’t remember what kind of events I used to participate when I was a kid. But the day when I played kho-kho when I was in fifth std. is still clear as a bright sunny day in my memory.

It is really funny when I think of it now.

People assume that I can run just because I’m tall. And the next moment I find myself amidst a group of girls and boys, full of team spirit, shouting and screaming and cheering their teams. Well, I didn’t know the rules of the game. And even when I enquired, I was told that if I run and give kho to a team member to catch the opponent team member, that would be good enough.
And I thought that, when I’m running, the sole responsibility of catching the opponent was on my shoulders and I had to do my best to catch her. I forgot the ‘kho-giving’ part. So, I ended up running between poles, as the girls from the other team kept hopping from one side to another and the girls from my team begging me to give them kho. And I would give in, giving kho to any girl who has been requesting for a long time.

Obviously, we didn’t win that match. But before you think I was a loser, let me tell you, we did win the junior level kho-kho match. Because, by then I understood that giving kho would help me prevent wasting my energy unnecessarily. The first prize certificate laminated with pride lies safely in my folder now.

In my later school years, I would escape somehow from participating in kho-kho. The screaming of girls and the sizzling heat of enthusiasm freaks me out and I just can’t stand there with my heart ticking like a time bomb, as if it is going to burst any moment if I don’t leave that place immediately.

Another sports day I remember is when I was in my 12th std. It was the 1500 mts. race.
I was in the Diamond house. When the race was about to begin, we found that there was no participant from our house. In order to save the grace of our house, my friend and I participated in it. We didn’t aim to win. Participation is all that matters. With that spirit, we entered the race. And the worst part is, I lost count of how many laps I had completed. I still wonder if I had run an extra lap and hence lost the race and my shoe( which tore at the end of the race).

The only thing that consoled me was that I ran 1500 mts. and did manage to complete the race. And that was the first time I was running in a race. Not bad, huh?

You’ve got mail-The End.

How would you react if you were reading your forward mails as usual and you get a warning message in bold letters saying,” You have been using your official mail for personal purpose. This has been noted by the company.” You click Ok. And it continues, “A copy of your inbox is being taken as a proof and will be reported to the HR.” You click OK again. The progress bar shows the status of copying the inbox. “The inbox has been copied.”

I first thought it was some kind of a prank. When I saw my machine name too in the message, I hit the panic button. Sirens were blowing in my head. I was scared that the HR would come in search of me or call me to ask why I was using my mailbox for sending personal mails. I could not think of any convincing answer to that question which was, by now, stabbing my “professional ethics” with a huge, sharp spear.

My brain was rattling with numerous questions …
What if my rating goes down because of it?
What if I was thrown out of the company for such a silly reason?
Are they really keeping a watch on everyone’s mail box?
Then would they be able to read my mails too?
Or is there some automatic setting in the mail client that this should be done when the no. of mails sent to n fro goes beyond some limit.
Am I the only one to receive this warning?
Why didn’t the others get the same warning?
Then am I the only one sending such huge no. of forwards?
No one ever told me about this rule before. .. was it mentioned in the company mail policy? Or I never read it properly?

I was even thinking of moving all my personal mails into some folder and keeping all the official mails in the inbox so that even if someone does come to check my inbox (something like what happens in my college.. the black n white “squads” check the students’, including girls’, bags to see if we have mobiles as we are not allowed to bring mobiles to the college.)

But then, the hard fact hit me that the proof was already taken and I couldn’t do anything about it now.

I was helplessly opening the forward mails I was getting and the very thought of forwarding them to others brought all those questions back in my already cluttered head.

I was wondering why I always fall in such trouble which nobody else has ever heard of or experienced and coming out of which seems very improbable.

I was so scared that I couldn’t even reply to one of my friend’s mail in which he had asked if I was on leave (considering the fact that he hadn’t received a single mail from me).I feared someone was monitoring my mailbox.

At last, only in the evening I gathered some left-over courage within my panic-stricken heart and asked about it to my team mate (we were in the same training batch when we joined work). I was relieved to hear that he too had got the same warning. At least I’m not alone in this weird problem. He felt that it was because of some mail we had received from a batch mate that morning. I got the warning when I was trying to open a mail (which I suspected of being the cause of it all) but still couldn’t believe that it was all a prank ‘coz that mail hadn’t opened by then.

On enquiring about it with my friends in office the next day, I found the culprit mail. The mail had an attachment, an exe file, which on running just showed up a message box which said “Hi”. The file was very small, around 8 or 10 kb. Usually, exe files are very large in size. I had wondered what kind of an attachment was that… it did nothing. Only later did I come to know that it had done everything to make someone stop forwarding mails altogether.

I thought of taking sweet revenge on all my other friends and forwarded it to all of them. One of them called me up to check if the warning was because of the mail. Another friend feared that the message was because of her overflowing inbox and deleted all the mails, including all her favourite forwards and mails, which she had saved over a long time.

This was just another light hearted prank. But I realized the graveness of the situation when a friend told me about a person who was fired because he had violated the client’s mail policy by subscribing to his college groups and receiving so many forwards to his official mail id.

The result of it all… I don’t send forward mails anymore.

You’ve got mail!

Sometimes, when work gets so boring that you feel strangulated within the comforts of your very own cozy seat in your cubicle a.ka your ‘home-away-from-home’, the one thing that comes to your rescue is your mail inbox.

I am sure all ‘software engineers’ especially the ones who have joined this industry recently know what I mean.

The alert that pops up and the ‘ding’ announcing the royal arrival of a new mail into my inbox makes my heart leap with joy and I can’t resist myself from opening my inbox to see one of the many forward mails my friends send me.

While some mails bring you some cool or funny video clip, others bring some puzzles which are supposedly solvable only by highly intelligent people. Some are forwards appealing for help (most of them doing the umpteenth round around the cyber world) and there are others giving you some thought for the day. If one forward is one of those clichéd friendship messages, another one is really very sweet and makes you think of all the good friends you have. Few mails bring you the PJs of the year and few others are one of the best jokes you have ever heard or read.

Whenever I’m stuck with a buggy code, I just stroll around in my garden of these colorful mails and it gives me a fresh perspective and helps me resolve the problem. Actually, anything you do to distract yourself from the grinding work for a moment helps you a lot to get back to it with rejuvenated energy. And checking mails is the easiest way to do so.

There are days when I don’t get any forwards for a very long time and I begin to panic, wondering if there is some problem with my mail client. I keep refreshing my inbox again and again, with my eyes glued to the progress bar showing 20%...50%...70%...100%... and me anxiously waiting for a new mail to show up in the inbox.

And there are some days when I have just read a mail and moved it to some folder, when suddenly another mail waits eagerly for me to open it, read and then either save or forward it depending on how busy I am with my work.

It is sometimes true that a software engineer + joblessness = forward mails.
My presence in the office is known to my friends only when they get forwards from me. I even get mails like “What happened?” if there are no forward mails. A friend once asked me whether I came late to the office because he got my mail only in the afternoon.

Ding!

Sigh! Life of a software engineer…

Teenage life!

It is always a time for laughter and cheerfulness when I am at my aunt’s home. My 11-year-old cousin is the source of amusement and I keep giggling at everything she says or does.

The other day when I had been there, my aunt and mom had gone for shopping and we both were alone at home. We were getting bored, so I asked her to tell about her class.

She thought for sometime and exclaimed,” Yea! I will tell you this incident.” and continued,” There is this girl in my class. One day she asked a boy, who was absent for some days, ‘Why were you absent for so many days. Are you feeling fine?’ to which the boy replied sadly,’ No, I’m not feeling fine.’
The girl innocently asked,’ Why da? What happened?’
The boy said,’ Every night you come in my dream and tell I love you. That’s why.’”

I burst out laughing and wanted to know what happened after that.

It seems the girl gave one tight slap on the poor boy’s cheeks and the entire class started laughing at him. And the young Romeo started crying.

My cousin went on to narrate another incident that happened in her class on the Valentine’s Day. A boy had brought a red rose that day. During the lunch break, he called a girl to tell her something. Curious, she and her gang of friends went near him to know why he was calling her. The boy gave her the rose and said, ’I love you’.

I wanted to know how this girl reacted to it. It seems this girl burst into tears.

My cousin’s opinion: What the first girl did was right. That boy deserved the slap!

Her neighbour who is just one year older to her, seems to be learning to see the world through rose tinted glasses at this young age. She has begun to realize that ‘ Love is great!’. I really don’t understand what makes her say that, but it seems she has told my cousins that she feels like falling in love with every other guy she meets.

Such things did happen in my class too when I was their age. It started around the time we were in the 7th std. Once, a girl confessed her love to a boy only to get blasted by him. A few months later, she asked for another boy’s heart on his birthday. It was really amusing to see people falling for their classmates and some senior boys falling for the girls in my class. Teenage!

Those are the most memorable times of one’s life. Every emotion and experience seems so new.

This is the time when you start talking back to the very parents who taught you to speak.

You discover a new person inside yourself.

You fall for someone who is one among the ordinary people you meet in your life and one fine day, he/she becomes the special person for whom your heart flutters.And the whole world seems to be a happy place to live in. Now, why so many people seem special to you at this age is just beyond human comprehension. But then, if it keeps you in that rosy mood, who cares for the explanation?

And yea, this is the time when whatever the elders say seems like a lecture and we realize it much later in life that it all made sense, after all. That too, when you are imparting the same piece of advice to a younger sibling or cousin or your child. Everything that seemed reasonable at that age seems so crazy now.

Being at the other end of teenage, it is really enlightening to see that every teenager thinks and feels the same way irrespective of the generation they belong to.

Hostel Days

We were watching ‘Minnalai pidithu’ song from the Tamil movie Shahjahan on the Sun Music channel… It brought me the memories of the times when I used to stay in hostel during my college days. Actually, any song from movies like ’12 B’, ‘Parthale Paravasam’, ‘Thulluvatho Ilamai’ and other popular songs of that period, take me back to those days.

We were eight girls, including me, who had joined the college that year. We were from different parts of TamilNadu and I had moved from Calicut to Chennai for pursuing my engineering course. We all became a close-knit group pretty soon.

Our hostel was outside the college campus (coz the college is in a remote area, far away from the human population). Since there wasn’t enough space for us eight in the main hostel, the college had taken an independent house in the next street for rent, where only we first years stayed (away from our seniors, apparently to keep us in the safe hands of innocence).

Now, staying separately did give us some freedom, which we couldn’t have enjoyed staying right under the warden’s nose. We were not supposed to listen to music loudly else our radios or tape recorders would be confiscated. Being in an independent house was a real boon we were blessed with.

The picture that comes to my mind whenever I listen to the songs I had mentioned above is this…

A bright, sunny Sunday afternoon… the room is filled with sunlight… me on my bed and under the fan, which is running at full speed… my long and wet hair dangling from the pillow where I was laying my head with my eyes closed, sounds of my friends chattering or washing buckets full of clothes … all this with the constant music from the audio cassettes which were already in a bad condition because of playing them umpteen number of times.

I remember, in our first year, once we had called a spirit to predict our future using a coin that moves on a board which has the English alphabet, numbers from 0-9 and a ‘yes’ and a ‘no’ on it. I’m sure most of you must have tried it. An important thing that should be taken care of when invoking a spirit, it seems, is that we should never call the spirit of some person who had died in an accident or had an untimely death in their youth. Else, it seems, it would never leave you. Spooky!

Among the several silly questions we asked, we wanted to know in which year each of us would get married. And guess what, the girl who vowed that she would never marry was told that she would wed in 2006 and those who wanted to marry early were told that their wish would be fulfilled in 2009(sounded like an eternity for them). He he he… now when I think about it, I feel so embarrassed that we called a wandering spirit only to ask such silly questions. But surprisingly, its one prediction did come true… that girl who was against getting married did indeed get married in March 2006. Coincidence?

It is not like I miss staying in hostel or I wish I could relive those days in college again, but then I’m happy that it was a part of my life.

Graduation Day

Yesterday was our Graduation Day.

The Union Cabinet Minister ,Science & Technology and Department of Ocean Development, Shri.Kapil Sibal was the chief guest.

His speech was really encouraging. One of the things that he mentioned ,which I felt that it was for me, was to have clear objectives and stand by your principles even if there is no one to support you. That made me realize that the reason why I failed sometimes was because I didn’t have a clear goal as to what I exactly wanted to do.

His speech was given to us all in the form of a booklet. That was one thoughtful gesture by the college.

Apart from being an important day in our lives it was also April Fool’s day yesterday. And I did get fooled… by my camera. Due to some problem, it refused to freeze the precious moments. I was disappointed that I couldn’t even take a snap of myself in the graduation robe, proudly holding the degree certificate in my hands with my camera. I had to use my friend’s digicam.

It was fun to be back in college and not to worry about the longlist of rules that we used to follow as students. The rules were now told to us in the form of “requests”.

We had lunch at the college canteen. It was after a long time, almost a year, that we were eating there. Usually, during such functions, the lunch would look as well as taste good. This time it wasn’t so. Reminded us of those days when we used to lose our apetite at the sight of those rock hard pooris and the taste of bisi bela bhath or fried rice.

At the end of it all, I was glad that those college days are over and am now enjoying a completely different life at work.

Misusing your tongue.

This happened when we were coming to Chennai by train.

We were six girls and were chattering aloud. There was a young couple on the side seat beside ours.

I thought I heard them speak a familiar lingo and later realized that they were speaking Sourashtra.

The train left at 10.45 p.m and soon it was time to sleep.

The lights were still on when I was going to bed by around 11.20 (I was the last one to go to bed). I heard the lady on the side seat murmuring in Sourashtra, “Looks like they are not going to turn off the light for now”.

I heard what she said (the lady didn’t know that I could understand what she was saying) and was about to turn off the light when my friend said that she would turn the lights off when everyone is settled in their beds.

By then, the lady impatiently said “Turn off the light… turn off the light…” in a language that only I could understand among everyone else there. The tone and the words she used were so rude that I, at one moment, thought of telling that we would turn off the lights soon (in her mother tongue).

That would have been embarrassing for her and so I didn’t dare to do it. I was chagrined at the thought of how my friends would feel if they know what she had just said.

The best she could have done was to ask us politely to turn off the lights if she wanted it to be done so at the earliest.

People often tend to use their mother tongue to pass comments or say something that others wouldn’t find it soft on their ears if they do understand it, especially in places where that language is not spoken by the native people there or when the population speaking that tongue is very small.

Even the so called ‘educated people’ do it even though it is far from civilized behavior. As long as they get away with it without staining their garb of decent demeanor or hurting their ego, we can see this happen all the time.