Customer Service

While the week long "siesta" continues unabated, I have become used to having everything "eatable" from Hotel Saravana Bhavan. I don't claim that they are the best in customer service.

Like each organization has its own bad ass versions of "I-don't-cares", in the same vein they also have the omniscient waiters who know what the customer is going to ask of. Incidentally while I was en-route finishing one cup of sambar, wondering of the potential combinations of the three chutneys, in front me, that might be used to finish the remaining pongal.

There comes this waiter doing his rounds and sees my plate and quietly brings a refill of sambar. I did not even ask for it (eventually paid him a generous tip as well, he deserved it).

This is the same HSB where one has to wait indefinitely for his glass of water.

What's the difference ?

What is the difference between

Denial

Apathy / Indifference

Oblivious

Feign

I am really confused here reading about anosognosia (Errol Morris in NYT), a beautiful line comes by -

"Patients that are amnesic don’t know they are amnesic. " (From here)

Reproduction - Raavan

Don't be mislead by the title, its just words / quotes reproduced from around my gang with permission of course.

My respect for Original "Raavan" has increased after watching the movie.... at least he was straight to the point and he did his job well.... - A review of Raavan from a friend

Original Raavan that took me a couple of seconds to figure out :)

Misspell and coochie cooing

I guess there is a tremendous market out there for doing a spell check on images.

What an image this one (tsk tsk, oh the spell check fed generation)

Why not ?

I decided to die but then retracted on that because "there are just too many books left unexplored, just too many films not seen that would not be given a fair chance, if I decide to pack my bags". And so I remained.

Deliverance request

With due respect to my friend, reposting his thoughts that echo the current status now -

Super accurate (especially agree on the school point)

I can't keep cheating myself telling that the next company I join is going to be good...

I guess once you get married it'll serve as the perfect distraction for the shit we are going to do all day long.

Chinna vayasula veetla thara tharanu schoolukku kootitu povanga (till 1st std i think) (translated as remember the way little kids are dragged onto their school while they wail in the background)

Same feeling now except that no one can force us, because we have supposedly grown up (mba lan pannirukkom) (after all we have done MBA etc)...

I guess the force will come again after marriage - parents replaced by wife...

Geeky request

I thought you had a context switch and then some other thing kept your attention in a deadlock state and I was thinking when to send a hardware interrupt.

Office feel - 04 May

Obviously - do read the GameWorld trilogy by Samit Basu which was my only escape from the dreary, overloaded office work. Sad but it has to end.

For today - Zilch motivation to go to work / Dreading to return on 05 May

Aaaaaaaaaaarghh !!

Linguistic Overtures

Redundancy

Utter <> Mutter

Heard today

A birthday wish -
"Let your tribe increase"

Roomie -
"Shifting with a hindu batchmate. I mean the college and not the religion"

Love the way people use words.

Inside a high quality veg restaurant

Eating in a around-the-corner, trying-to-keep-the-cash-store-ringing; Here is a place where you, assuming that this place cannot burn a hole in your pocket, can sit and eat, mumbling silently about the "okay okay" quality of food. However here is also a place that "your two downs", monetarily, also come to eat. They come, they eat, their eyes breathe aspiration and also a sense of impending dip of green. While I ordered a mini meal for myself, at measly Rs. 25, which is not much for a post graduate who came out into the world when the latter was going down. Literally!
Next to me, came and sat a group of four. Two mothers, one instinctively elder in a protective way, one probably her junior-in-command and their two school going daughters. As the waiter sold them the mini meal, obviously casting a corner-eye to my plate, they decided to order 4 suchlikes. They did not ask for the price and looked at the price list which boasted of the same dishes in Tamizh and in English with an extra "h". In nanoseconds, the elder one calculated, that's a big note for lunch and her eyes sank and took a look at her purse carefully placed inside her blouse.
Then the waiter arrived with the four meals neatly compartmentalised into - a biriyani, sambar rice, curd rice, single roti, kurma, beans and a sweet.

Mall Recall

Trudging down an escalator, heard the following from a 4 year child -
"Mom the ad on the escalator has changed to this new one."

Such recall, I wonder. Actually the ad is an interstitial, coming down an escalator, visitors can see this ad over their head. We live in exciting times.

Linguistic Overtures - In Tamizh

Hell I've been in Chennai for the past 7 odd months, and now this fine thought blitzed past, in my root language (funny expression, I tell you) -

நரகம் - Meaning, well, hell
நகரம் - City

A geographical possibility, it means to me.

Seen today - 1

09 Dec 2009
A 20 seater mini bus passes me by and I happened to notice the company's name painted over in dark blue font -

Enterprising Enterprises

Sure the founders are very "punny"

Heard somewhere - 1

"Abe gyaan mat de" roared one of the guys, seemingly referring to a plausible conversation building up in the air. And soon after this happened -
"Sir you will have wait for an hour as I am busy on another call" and continued to blow up whiffs of cigarette smoke with this group of office buddies.
Such are the ways ...

A sudden night in Zephyr's life

Dear diary,
There is no greater experience in this world, not even love, but the feeling of that good old catharsis. However ineffable it might be, there is a certain elation associated while being liberated in the catharsis zone that is unmatched. Somehow that is why I think, fighting vehemently, staying away and then making up is this world's most underrated yet most significant bunch of emotions. Being a witness to such an event at close quarters is the only thing that probably can take you ever so closer to experiencing catharsis. As a person equally involved with the fighting parties, as a person who both of them feel one of them like a close confidante, as a person being able to say things that otherwise might be rejected as being "none of your business". This is what is catharsis, and I experienced it today. The elation and the smile that fills you up and suddenly revs up certain dead parts inside your existence is what it is. The thing with feeling so is that it also wells up inside feelings of being privileged, that inner smile that so often seems so rare in this world. That is what I experienced today. Seeing people handle themselves in a manner befitting much older, wiser and being able to say things to the same people and who take it with the real gusto of a well deserving human being is what is privilege, is what is catharsis.
I am feeling unusually happy and it seems that my elated heart is up there showing its entire countenance in my teeth and my brain, is something I have never seen, done before. So they say distance makes us appreciate those close to us, so does going away and coming back also achieves the same effect but the emotion build up is all the more stronger and all the more inhuman to witness if handled by such people.
Privilege! Catharsis! Amen!

Which comes first - conflict or cooperation ?

Image by Delphien Experiences via Flickr

Today has marked a day of twin importance - me crossing 100 posts and the other one, the more important one, having a long discussion with semi-drunks on Richard Dawkins, Selfish Gene, History, Into the wild and much more.
Of course its more of a given that the selfish gene operates at every level of human activity known till now. Its cause is more complicated by the most fundamental arguments of biology (and evolution) that the human end result (not death, though) is attributable to nature or nurture. So our discussion went on when we actually stumbled upon the problem of conflict versus cooperation. I am extremely aware of the fact that such topics of discussion laden with the nature versus nurture conflict raises a lot of pertinent points but the question that really stuck was that of primality.

Which comes first conflict or cooperation?

As I often experience, history and culture are the victims of causality. All sorts of improper causal relations have been sought to explain human character. So I thought whether such a causal relation exists between conflict and cooperation.
At the level of basic thought process, cooperation is fundamentally a more involving mental thought than conflict which is more of a natural process. Therefore, as plotted against the chart of evolution, the idea (here I mean even the basic notion of these two ideas) of conflict and cooperation require different kind of mental acumen. Cooperation, by its nature, requires two or more parties in a state of agreement that requires a mental and verbal (often) interchange of the tenets of working together. Cooperation bases itself on the recognition of the power imbalance and an effort to ameliorate that imbalance while conflict is only an exposure to this imbalance. As a primeval organism, cooperation must have evolved much after the first experience of conflict.
Furthermore its only after experiencing a conflict that the idea of cooperation must occur to any living and mental (not the exclusionary one) organism. Its just goes on to prove (again the influence of causality) that cooperation as a thought is not natural and a post facto concept. A real question to be asked here is that the existence of conflict (or even the visualisation of conflict) is necessary for the formulation of cooperation among such thinking animals. Prima facie a causal link exists on the basis of -

1. Complexity of thought of the idea of cooperation as against conflict which is readily experience-able
   
2. Experiential (imaginary) coexistence of conflict
3. Requirement of a developed mental faculty

What do I think? Conflict comes first and then comes cooperation, a weak link exists. Am I right?

Linguistic overtures

Image by margolove via Flickr

D.H.Lawrence once said "trust the tale - not the teller". Well what can be more perfect because anyways all the great fiction writers in essence are magnanimous LIARS. Anyways coming back to the theme of this post of linguistic overtures, I ask you to look at the following very closely

WORDS

Now why these are so powerful so much so that people say "words once spoken can't be taken back" because in them they contain the proverbial

SWORD

On that note consider these words about writing which so mirror the feeling one gets while writing -
"Sitting alone in a room for hours while essentially talking in your head about people you made up earlier and then writing it down for no one you know does have many aspects which are not inherently fulfilling." - A.L.Kennedy
"Another reason is the professionalisation of the vocation so that the novelist is supposed to produce novels as naturally, automatically, and regularly as a cow gives milk." - Amit Chaudhuri
"Writing a novel is largely an exercise in psychological discipline – trying to balance your project on your chin while negotiating a minefield of depression and freak-out. Beginning is daunting; being in the middle makes you feel like Sisyphus; ending sometimes comes with the disappointment that this finite collection of words is all that remains of your infinitely rich idea." - Hari Kunzru
Finally
"Civilisation's greatest single invention is the sentence. In it, we can say anything." - John Banville

Do read this entirely for at least the writing pleasure
PS - 100th post calls for a celebration. I have evolved so would I like to claim, but no I still remain the same and raring to reach 200. This blog still remains largely a self-documentation project which I hope to continue. With that I wish "18 till I die" sine die.

Thoughts

A dominant sign of human achievement -
Only in today's world could memories could mean two things

Linguistic Overtures

Image by Μя.Ćăv㣣ǐ ™ via Flickr

The burden of

CREATION

is the fear and anxiety of

REACTION