Chhattisgarhiya Sable Badhiya!

Sable Badiya Chhattisgarhiya! – it means ‘Chhattisgarh is the best’ in Chhattisgarhi language. Those were the bold letters written on a giant gate at the entry to the capital city – Raipur. I still remember reading these words when I had taken my first steps towards the city. I still haven’t been to find the reason why locals there think so. However there are few things that make CG a bit unique in its own way.

Few enlightening things about my Karmabhoomi – Chhattisgarh:

1. Apart from Tigers it houses a human population of 25,540,196
2. No, not all people staying there are Naxals
3. No, not all people staying there are Adivasis
4. Yes there are a lot of people who buy cars there (for all those ignorant @$$es who kept asking me “Tu waha gaadi kisko bechega, forest officials ko??” )
5. During summers you cant differentiate between a girl and a guy, both are covered by super long scarf on top half.
6. Yes there are malls, 6 sprawling ones in a small city. Now you just have to find people to visit them.
7. Everything is as expensive as metro cities, surely they have at least tried to replicate one aspect of Metros
8. Summers are like a baking oven, can go upto 45 degrees
9. ‘Bhaiyya’ becomes ‘Bhiya’, ‘Haan’ becomes ‘haau’, ‘Paani Puri’ becomes ‘Gup Chup’
10. Rare to find localites, everyone is either a Marwari, Punjabi, Oriya, Bengali, Maharashtrian etc etc
11. Peace loving people, hardly witnessed petty crimes
12. Terrible food options, though I can vouch for the fact that ‘Rasoi’ in Bilaspur is the best vegetarian restaurant I have tried yet. No food available before 10 am and after 10 pm. 
13. It is not unusual to see a jerk stopping the vehicle on a flyover and talking on phone and waving other people to move ahead his car
14. Cattles on the road give you an exciting driving experience
15. Wine shops remind you of Mumbai Locals, round the year, as if the next day is a dry day.
16. Sunday is a holiday, even for shopkeepers. So if you make plans to do some Sunday shopping, you are sure to be disappointed.
17. Every Autorickshaw is a 10 seater, and even 15 seater if the traffic cop is on leave.
18. Remember those School Bags with buckles to close them? You get those as a free accessory with every bike. They are used as a side carrier!
19. Have seen a Bhelpuri waala sporting a huge LCD screen on his thhela powered by an Auto Battery. Call it a jugaad or innovation, means the same. He is a celeb.
20. Don’t be shocked if you feel your plane has landed on a railway station. Yes it is the airport.

Having said all these, I must say CG is developing rapidly thanks to its abundance of rich mines and minerals. It is one of the fastest progressing state in India. 10 years down the line I am sure any MBA passout getting posted will be happy to go there. I have absolutely cherished every day of CG, each one of them was a learning experience. I evolved. No matter what all reasons people have made to make that quote, but for me this was the reason why Chhattisgarh was truly sable badiya.

Why this viral di???

 ‘Why This Kolaveri Di (Why This Murderous Rage, Girl?) is an Indian song from the soundtrack of the upcoming Tamil film 3, which is due to be released in 2012… The song was officially released on 16 November 2011, and it instantly became viral on social networking sites for its quirky “Tanglish” (portmanteau word of Tamil and English) lyrics. Soon, the song became the most searched YouTube video in India. Within a few weeks, YouTube honored the track with a Gold Award for getting the most number of hits.’

 – This is an official Wiki Entry for the Kolaveri Song and pretty much sums up the introduction for a song for all those (if at all) unaware of the phenomenon. If there are actually people like that I guess we can successfully declare them Web-Illiterate.

When I first saw the song pretty much before most of us started sharing it, for me it was a catchy song sung by a southie star for promoting his new movie through social media. What followed was a mass sharing on facebook with endless likes and status messages about the song, crores of tweets and millions of hits on youtube. Many of them shared it just because others were sharing it.  It took me completely by surprise that my north Indian friends started humming the song and they thought Dhanush was a south Indian singer until I corrected them. Last heard the song has crossed borders and even Pakistanis are going gaga over it. And then we were thrown in some interesting and some really ridiculous versions of the song, all trying to cash in the fame. This included a female version (yaawwn!), Metal version (murderous rage to the core), Rnb version (wannabe), Sharad Pawar Slap Song (okayish) and even a jr sonu nigam version (cute, good way to make a son popular)

Many of us have wondered why this song has become so viral, I have tried to pen down some of which I have heard or read:

1.     The Musical Theory: First of all let’s not take the credit from the creators of the song. The young Music director, Anirudh Ravichander and the Actor cum Singer cum Lyricist, Dhanush is told to have composed and made the song in 25 minutes flat. The song has simple urban lyrics, very simple to be understood and one that you can relate to easily. This makes the song very hummable even by a non-tamilian. It has a very addictive rhythm that makes you listen repeatedly.

2.     The ripple effect: You might have seen the video just to know why people are sharing it and many others have done it too. This has in turn made it even more popular.

3.     A highly critical but interesting theory:  Reasoning why the soup song has become so popular is also the reason why it is so popular. We can conclude two things from the fact that it has become so popular - First, it is establishing that we live anxious lives, always in the quest of answers for the Five Ws, the one H and their cousins. It is probably out of this curiosity and never ending journey to know the unknown that we are listening to it again and again. Second, by going viral we are also trying to heal our anxious selves. There is often so much things of meaning around, meaning being created out of nothing, meanings to explain the unexplained, meanings to define, to regularise, to legalise – that at times we feel it is good to transport ourselves to modes of zero-meaning; where there is no meaning of anything whatsoever. Kolaveri di is one such zero-meaning mode. Let us not unravel the meaning of why this kolaveri di, it supposed to have no meaning and let it be that way. It is just a moment of zero gravity for our mind.

4.    The Mathew effect: The Matthew Effect dates from the 1960s. It is the theory, first expressed by sociologist Robert K. Merton, that those who possess power and economic or social capital can leverage those resources to gain more power or capital. Put simply: the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Or as it is expressed in the Gospel of St Matthew, from which the effect takes its name - “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Thanks to the Matthew Effect, the already famous get more famous, the often quoted get more and more quoted…It is easy to see how this transfers into social media – the more something is spread the more it will be spread even further by word of mouth. So next time you see 15 friends from your list sharing a same link, there is high probability that you would be in that list too on your friend's walls.

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Can't believe you are actually searching for an explanation here!

What to expect from a Sales Job after MBA!

1. Your Targets – That’s the first word that pops into your mind when you hear ‘Sales’ and sure it is the first thing that you are fed with once you are ‘Sales – ready’. It all starts from this one most dreaded word. This is one number that constantly hovers around your mind most of the time. And after 20^th of every month, this number starts intruding your sleep and can give the ghosts in your nightmares a run for their money. Suddenly you will recite this holy number even when you are deep asleep. Suddenly you will realise you remember this number more than your best friends birthday.

2. Your Product – Before being sales ready, you are given a bible of sorts about the product you are going to sell. Trust me it is the best sleep inducer. You try to read the alien language and repeatedly fail after the 3^rd page and promise yourself – “Next time, I am gonna read it full No matter what”. And thus you give birth to a fine art which is overused ruthlessly & repeatedly – ‘Procrastination’. You master it as time passes. But thankfully this stops much later when you start answering the customer with “Sir, I will get back to you on this”. This is when you will go back to the biblical product book and will read all those words with so much enthusiasm like never before. You will suddenly see your product everywhere while previously you never knew this product even existed. The very sight of it make you go “hey I sell them!” with a glee. You get possessive about your product and donot like a single word against it. This is when you know about your product like never before. Its like an arranged marriage of sorts, you don’t have a choice but to love your product.

3. Your Boss – Usually a guy who had started like you. Do not presume he doesn’t know the ground realities. Don’t make false stories of why something didn’t happen. You will be caught and bowled. He will be behind you all the time like a thermo-sensing missile, like a Hutch Pug – ‘where ever you go our network follows’. He will ensure that your life is a pressure cooker. The more heat on your bum, the more you whistle. At times he will show you your real worth, will prove how a big mistake was it to recruit you, how useless you are and the list of insults goes on. At the beginning you take it to heart and his words keep banging your head all the time. Later you get accustomed to it. Moral of the story : Don’t take your bosses brickbats very seriously learn to shut off when he starts his blah, but take his praises more than seriously (you will get to hear it very rarely)

4. Your Life – If you are someone who has never lived out of your home, things are going to be really different for you. Suddenly you will get to learn a lot of things which you thought were by default your Bai’s. You learn to wash your clothes by your own hand, you broom, clean your utensils. You get to know the prices of groceries & vegetables; even names of some you never knew. You will work on Saturdays; your Sundays will seem longer. You will find yourself watching every stupid movies releasing on friday. Your laptop is full of stuffs like ______ (Fill in the blanks as per your own interests). Facebook is where you meet your friends. You will start calling people whom you used to ignore just to hear someone talking. You will feel happy to see your home location in movies, in my case ‘Mumbai’ - which is seen in every second movie. You will stare people speaking your mother tongue as if you seen a UFO full of Martians. You suddenly start liking the “The customer is on another call” message, because you feel like home when you hear it in Marathi. Maggi is your saviour when the cook bunks work. You start learning how to use different weapons in kitchen. You will search for holidays to book tickets to your hometown. When you reach home, you tell mom to cook all those things you generally complained about for having every second day. Your 2 days in your home-city = 1 month in your job location.

Despite all odds, I believe the learning is immense. You are enlightened by the fact that not everything Philip Kotler said was true. All those presentations, projects, assignments, case-studies etc will seem fake and will fall flat on your face. You learn what really works and what not. This is truly the first step for all Marketing Aspirants. You get to evolve as a person. You become Independent and start becoming more responsible. You get to meet new people, see new places and learn new things. I was hesitant and apprehensive at the beginning to take up this assignment. Now when I look back I feel,I would have missed a great deal had I declined it. 

My Experiments with Kitchen

Off late I have been staying with a colleague of mine as a make-shift arrangement, as my company sponsored hotel accommodation had surpassed its day limits and I haven’t yet found a roof for myself yet. My colleague who is shortly planning to get settled has made this place a ‘proper home’ unlike the transit-camp like bachelors home. Every morning I used to wake up late shamelessly, and used to find him making some breakfast for both of us. Today was different, I woke up and the kitchen was waiting for some one to come and use it. My colleague had gone to his hometown for a ceremony. It was an early morning hunger and old habits die hard. Subconsciously my hand opened the refrigerator and found nothing but milk, water, jam nothing of which could be eaten as breakfast as it it. Ok I could get a pack of bread from the store down, if it was open. If you are planning to have bread in the morning, postpone your breakfast till atleast 11 am. That’s when the shops open here, take it or leave it – that’s Raipur for you! So bread-jam was out of choice, I raided the kitchen to find one packet of maggi, and I was unsuccessful. My tummy kept growling and I couldn’t think of something to keep it quite. I suddenly recalled, once as my colleague was making poha, I casually asked him, how is it made and he had told me the recipe like a quick tip. Being from Indore, poha came naturally to him. I had the entire kitchen with me and this was possibly the best time to experiment, there is no one to laugh! So I took the plunge and tried recalling and doing the steps –

1. Take some poha, salt, garam masala, haldi powder. Some? This is the most difficult aspect to start with, you don’t know exactly what is ‘some’. Is it a handful? 2 Cups, 1 teaspoon, pinch? You will just not know it unless it is made and eaten. The next time when you make it the ‘some’ changes and it keeps on changing after each attempt till you have mastered the art. Its like repeated iterations till you find the perfect unkown in an equation. (Ok if you dint get this, not your fault, we engineers have learnt a lot of useless stuff which we like to flaunt whenever we get an opportunity to relate it with real life. This was one of them!)

2. Wetten your poha and add ‘some’ garam masala, Haldi powder and Salt to it. Mix them well and you can already smell the masala which boosts your confidence.

3. Chop onions and green chilly, ignore the shape of onion pieces you have cut. It will never match your mom’s. So leave it like that, start liking it. Any ways its gonna go inside your tummy.

4. Take a tawa, heat it. Hell! Why isn’t the stove not burning? Tick, tick, tick! Failed! I bend down to see the cylinder knob. I look closely whether the position is really ‘close’ or ‘open’ and what is exactly close or open. This is what happens when you use the stove after a really long time. The last time you used it was when you had to make maggi when your mom had went out and you were hungry.

5. Back to the tawa. Carefully add drops of oil and let it heat till ‘some’ time. Now comes some audio part – Rai Fodni! This is something basic common denominator for most of the Indian food. I gave my mom credits for this as the mustard seeds fell from my hand into the oil. Add the chop onions and chilly to it.

6. Now add the wet poha to this tawa, stir it with some utensil, I don’t know what it is called. After doing this for a while, remove it from the stove and add some bhujia to it. (Atleast bhujia would be edible for sure, since I haven’t made it.)

 

Tadaaaaa! Hopefully I have made something reasonably edible. I prayed as I put one spoon of it in my mouth. I didn’t want to throw it in the garbage bin. And Voila! The poha tasted surprisingly good with a pinch of salt more than required, which can be forgiven. In case you actually read this recipe religiously just a warning: I was plain lucky!

Corporate Debut

This is a post which is a compilation of me and my friend’s experiences when you join an organisation. You need not go through each one of this, but some of them should make some sense to you. For all those who are already working, this might bring back memories of your initial days, for others this is something you may expect!

Day 1: Form-ality

Forms, Forms & More Forms. You realise, you have been using the PC much more than the mighty pen. Your fingers struggle to control the way the pen moves and you write in a handwriting you don’t recognize as yours. The Bank Guy opens a salary account for you on the spot which might have taken ages and repeated visits had you visited a bank yourself. You sign at atleast 100 places, each one differently. You check out your Debit Card and the Cheque Book in a way a Kid checks out his new toy. You try to break ice with other colleagues joined with you. The HR usually are often amused to see such bunch of confused souls joining together and pray that they don’t have to find replacement for them soon.

Day 2: Where’s my place?

This is one thing everyone is very excited about - Your cubicle! The Place where you would be chatting, whining, cursing, swearing, gossiping, bitching, sleeping, playing games, secretly logging to Gmail & FB and sometimes even do a bit of work! Once you get to know where your cubicle is, you do the recee of the area and try to find the ‘safest’ angle and position of your seat. Office privacy is ofcourse a topic of high importance. Allright what have we got here – A PC! Lets switch it on. Window --> IE -->”Windows cannot display your page”. Damn! Now what? OK lets try something else, Windows -->Games -->Solitaire, Yaay! Solitaire is something you will definitely find in any pc even if it doesn’t have a thing to keep you busy. So ensure you know how to play Solitaire.

Day 3: Know thy neighbours

You introduce yourself to your cubicle-ites. You are taken around and introduced to each and every person on the floor. After sometime, you start noticing the grin on your introducer’s and others face or is it just a figment of your imagination? You hear voices, ‘why on earth has he/she joined here”. Your jaws start aching after putting up a fake smile to each and every one. Smiling despite apprehension, confusion and nervousness does take efforts. People say the feeling is similar when you get married.

Day 4: Hello? IT helpdesk? Ohhh….Ok I will call again later

You have now become a champ of solitaire and there is nothing more to achieve. You realise you cannot live without the most and probably the only useful, important and interesting part of your PC viz the Internet. You call up probably one of the most busiest dept in any office – The IT helpdesk. Their hectic schedule is a shadow of goof-ups they have given birth to. So after umpteen calling back again and followups, the online ticket is raised whose status keeps yo-yo-ing between pending and resolved. They have a six-sigma for not solving the issue correctly the first time. Finally the matter is solved and your PC suddenly becomes much more interesting than ever before.

Day 5: Love thy neighbours

“Hey why don’t you join us for lunch?” – you hear this and are relieved that you would not be eating alone from now onwards. After many lunch and coffee/smoke/drink sessions, your colleagues turn into friends. They tell you the ‘who-is-what’s, how to deal with different kind of creatures in the office, the affairs, working proxies etc. This is the real induction.

Day 6...10..30...: Monday

You have been pretty much doing nothing for many days since you joined except for going through the same presentations repeatedly, surf the net, chat and keep checking the PC clock till 1.30 pm lunch and 6 pm to leave for the day. .Monday is synonymous to the day when your actual work begins. This can be day 6 for some, day 10 for some, even day 35, 50, 60 for the unlucky. Some noble soul realises someday that you have been sitting idle and being wasted for long enough. And you for once and for the first and last time become actually happy to get some work! You start taking baby steps, trying to stand, holding finger and walking and finally walking alone and after some time running, jumping too. You have done it all. You do this day in and day out. This gets xeroxed day after day. This is when your job starts becoming routine. You start waiting for Friday like a prisoner awaits end of his term and wish the next Monday never comes. Now you have truly arrived. Welcome to the corporate world!