finally here

Heyyyy I am now residing in a studio with 2 other guys. Mann the rent is high here we pay 1100 dollars per month for this place :O :O

I am finding it difficult to blog as I don't have a laptop yet, I am using my roomies now.

In fact I actually managed to make contact with Madame Kalai but I had promised to call her up the next day and I didn't keep that promise. Damn me.

It is not easy moving to a new country and staying with 2 guys whom I have never seen before.
There is another downside neither of them can speak tamil ( :( :( :( ( waaahhhhhhhhh). One is from Orissa & the other from andhra.

Anyway the orissa guy is the master chef and if it is not for him we would be eating out only. I have started to make rice using the rice cooker ( while some of u think that it is not a big deal), it is an amazing thing for me.

& after a long time ( nearly 4-5 years) I am cooking scrambled eggs he he he he , the last time i did was when I had gone to kodai with my college buddies.

Anyway I think it will take a few more days to get used to this place and travel around.

wish me luck ;)

transit in Changi

I have been busy with a lot of packing for my trip to El Segundo ( LA) in California.
I change flights in S'pore andd I have spent 3 hours in this place.
I am stunned by the size of the sirport. & now I am in the lounge waiting to board a huge plane, it is the first double decker plane I am seeing (Boeing 747-400) I hope to fly in an A380 soon.

Ok I will reply to all your wishes soon.

Next blog will be from LA .
ciao.

chasing dreams

When I joined my company in 2003, I had a dream/wish that I would get to travel to different places on work assignments. In about 5 months i realized that since the work is divided based on clients I would only be able to work in USA ( well that was great too).
So I was building a nice little imaginary castle wrt my trip to the USA, but then my H1B visa application itself was initiated after a year and I got my visa only inNov 2004.

Even then I hadn't given up hope, i was still thinking i would travel soon. As i waited several of my dear friends left to the US for work. I kept thinking my turn would come and i had spent 2 years in my company. I was getting a little disillusioned (that maybe an under statement) because by this time my close friends working in other companies had jumped to Oracle and were getting real fat packages nearly double of what I was getting. I really felt bad and I felt that mebbe it was "ME" and that I was not good enough.

Well I did some thinking and that took me into June 2005 and I decided it was not "ME", it was my current position which had stagnated and the management didn't want to release me. I started my campaign for a release and it proved successfully after 6 more months ....

& then I was moved to another vertical and was requested to assist another Informatica project. Even at that time I was about to be pulled into a .NET project for offshore work but I managed to talk myself out of it :).

After about 3 months in that temporary project I am now scheduled to depart to LA ,California for a 6 month assignment.

I am the last of the gang of friends from my batch to travel to the USA, but hey i am finally going right ;). There were moments of extreme stress during this long wait but somehow I managed to overcome them all.

In a way I realized that a lot of young developers stay in such IT companies only for that eventual onsite work. I used to think that I wasn't one among them and that I would be doing my MBA in one of the IIM's by then, but time has proved me wrong.

well life sure has it's twists & turns huh. Let's see what happens next.

where are we going???

well today is Feb 14th ... a day which is known by most people as Valentine's day. A day which has been marketed so effectively that even people who can' t read or write , can actually say that today is Kadhalar dhinam.

In one way I feel sick of the way Valentine's day is promoted. The reason follows:

Jan 26th is India's Republic Day. I was listening to Radio mirchi that morning(Jan 26) and the Rj's were asking the people who had called " what was Republic Day & why we celebrate it".. I listened to it for about an hour and trust me NOT ONE person gave the reason, some people said because we got freedom .... ( ask the same set of people what was Valentine's day and they wud give an answer).
Even a few so called educated School children were asked the question on Jan 26th and they blabbered something. I mean why coudn't they say that Republic day was celebrated because we framed our constitution which gave us the bloody rights to speak & write freely ( for instance bloggin itself).
But they wud certainly know what valentines day is.

Another reason ( infact some guy made a similar statement on TV), if you are truly in love with someone then everyday is a celebration of love and togetherness. I agree with that guy ,Why shud we have one particular day to show our love ???

There are times when I think what will happen to the future generations in India. My history teacher from school was complaining to us recently that the current kids are smoking , driving cars, using mobiles 24 x 7 and just don't listen to the teachers.

When I go to malls and cinemas I see young kids paired up and having a more than "good" time. Several times I have had the thought of what will my future children be like ???.

Some people say that only a few are like that ...but we have been saying the same reason for a long time but the so called few are rising in large numbers.

Where is the great Indian cultural heritage , i feel we lost it in the 90's itself !!!

I am not against freedom but then again I don't like what I am seeing around me either :(

thats why I ask myself Where are we going ???
Are we going towards a better future or a sorry future ???

Bang bang bangalore trip

I think lady luck was sitting right beside me during this entire trip. Well the objective of this trip was to "attend" the IIM K interview in IIM B and later attend an international MBA fair in Taj Residency.
Some of the favorable things that happened to me :

1) While going to bang, I was in a brand new AC coach and that too in a window seat, so I got to do my most favorite thing while going in a train i.e. look at the world go by from the window. ( the reason why I say this was fortunate is because in the old AC coaches the windows will be so opaque that I wouldn't be able to see anything clearly)

2) I was only 3rd in the queue for the prepaid auto queue at the Bang city station ,which is generally very crowded.

3) I did something real stooopid , I was supposed to paste my recent photo in the Interview data form but I had completely forgotten it and I noticed this on Feb 7th 11 PM and the interview was at 9:15AM the next day. I tried my luck by going to the interview without my photo, there were a couple of assistants who collect the forms and they immediately said that they were sorry but I won't be allowed to attend the interview. I pleaded with them to ask a professor and boy oh boy a prof came out and checked my admit card etc and said I could attend the interview but I should return after the interview with a photo. ( So I managed to complete the GD and interview , then went to an instant photo shop and finally gave the photo to the assistants). phewwwwwwwwwwwww Well to make the situation lighter I thought to myself that I had given my most recent photo and no one else could have given a more recent photo, the form had said "please paste your recent photograph".... & man did I give a recent photo he he he he

4) The next day 9th feb I decided to visit my sister who lives in another end of the city, and I was real lucky during this trip too. I wen to the sivaji nagar bus stand at 9AM and asked for the bus, and they said it would come in 5 mins, and by the time they finished the sentence the bus was there :-) & while returning at around 9PM I came to the bus stop and the first bus that came was a bus to shivaji nagar :-) wooowww generally it is not easy to get buses in bangalore.
& the best part is coming up next : from shivaji nagar I had to go to Majestic to get to the station , so after I reached the shivaji nagar bus stand , i just walked past a few buses wondering which will go to Majestic ( you see in Bangalore all the bus name boards were only in Kannada & obviously i don't know kannada). I remember I passed atleast 5 buses and then stopped at one to ask the driver which bus would go to Majestic and Lo and Behold the guy said his bus was going and I got into it :-)

Apart from all this a number of other small things seemed to make my life easy, like the abundance of beautiful girls even on weekdays like Tuesday & Wednesday at Jayanagar and Forum mall respectively :-) :-)

coming back to reality... I think luck is just a way of looking at your life thats all. You can take the things happening to you in a positive way and go ahead in life. I mean me forgetting the photo was actually real bad luck but I still went ahead and had a decent interview (not that I expect a call).
So I say we make our own luck ..