Ehh....

With the usual spirited grunt, I dismissed my apprehensions again. So what if a friend of mine did not get a job despite being an alumni of Harvard... I am different...

Recently, a brave comrade, spurted out... How? How Shiva...? I thought briefly before "spurting" out.....

Cos I think I'm different....

The elusive club....

Tired of studying and clearly lacking motivation, I ambled all the way back from college, deciding not to take the bus. I needed some fresh air...

Half way through my struggle to cover the 3 kilometre journey back home, I received a call from a friend... "Hey Sheeevaa... There is tees very nice Ruusian club; Infinity. I have free visitors pass.... You want to kome?"....

My jaded soul, sprang back to life, my instincts took over and I blabbered... "Did u say its free? I'm in...."

0130 hrs... Rejuvenated by the excitement of experiencing something new, and shrugging off sleep again, I sprint to this "Ruussian" club with an Armenian friend of mine. We cross streets, pubs and a lot of excited faces on our way to this elusive club...

0200 hrs... "Sorry Sir... Your friend's shoe has a mark on it..." said the Ruussian bouncer... "Huh!!? "Where...?".. "Sir, do you want me to get a microscope or would you like to try some other club... ".. That is when my friend took over, and tried pursuading the bouncer who clearly needed a few more expressions on his face to pass as human... After sometime, we were let in...

The women were dressed as if it was their last day on planet Earth and they had to finish all the "decorative stuff" they had before the world ended.. and the men were not leaving any stone unturned in enchanting the Venusians...

Ignoring a few glances from few women, we made our way to the bar, got drunk, and.... ehh.... and got drunk...

Incorrigible...

Class performance is graded... The Indians grab the opportunity and torpedo the professor with questions that he would not have prepared and if required put questions to him that do not even pertain to his subject...

One guy, an Indian, during the Operational Business class, argued with the professor for 30 minutes straight, why it is absolutely unimportant to reason with your kids and how a nice sound bashing will mould them into great people... "Future leaders"....

If there are limits to popularity, we had just crossed them and Indians and their bashed up kids had become the talk of the class... Yeah!! I always wanted to be in-FAMOUS....

I realized a marked difference between us and the west... The Indians though get the best grades and are unparallelled at handling numbers, were incapable of attaching theories to real life practical situations; something that the others seemed to do with ease... We were just too rigid... We struggled to break free of the infinite social constraints that were embedded deep into us... Our complex social structure was limiting our capability to think freely...

Though we all know what lateral thinking is, do we all understand it or even if we do understand it, do we practice it? We need to break free of the society, look at it from the outside and only then can we assume an impartial view and look to improve the society...

MBA

The degree which helps us take better decisions using complex calculations and a systematic approach...

The same decisions which we could once take intuitively....

Life just gets tougher...

I thought college life was back, and I had successfully turned back time... It was going to become easier now... I was a free man...

It took me only two weeks to realize, life never gets easier... We cannot turn time.... We cannot run from the escallating pressures... We need to keep getting better... We need to get fitter every single day to survive....

Two weeks back, I needed just 3 beers to sleep like a content man... Today I can gulp 6 bottles and still work on my assignments... I have to beat the Russians to survive... :)

The Unscrewable Americans...

I recently had the privilege of witnessing an American couple's bargaining skills...

The crash courses in Hindi that they had taken before coming to Bharat were being put to good use....

They managed to bargain a whooping three hundred rupees with an auto-rickshaw driver who clearly seemed disappointed.... The happy American couple paid only 500....

Neat.... After all... Chanakyapuri to CP is just 31 kms... the driver must have taken the shortest route via Rohini...

The 300 Rs would have probably been spent on other important things.... probably on a rickshaw to The Meridian hotel.....

Awakening….

My first few days in college, I was a scared man…. In fact a scared boy, who had ventured out, alone, for the first time. The mess food for the first time, a whole lot of money that I had to manage for the first time, the first smoke, the first hang over, the first night-out, the first love…. life was full of firsts….

It was during these years that I was taught by life… before that, I learnt from what my parents taught me… it was only during these years that I learnt to be a scoundrel… A Pakka Maddu ROWDY… not by actions but by intent…

Maddu rowdy was a positive transformation in me… My views turned from being idealistic to pragmatic… If I someday tell you that I received an engineering degree during these years, we might probably be sitting in an interview room. The engineering degree was just a cover…

A blunder...

I had recently convinced myself that I'll not bargain with the economically challenged, to be specific the Rickshaw-walas....

Only a month later, when our hapless FM at a press conference declared that inflation had crossed the 10 percent mark, did i realize the repercussions of my decision...

The secret of being single...

For a long time I wondered why all women were just my friends....

A perennially single friend of mine cleared all my doubts.... and asked me to make my intentions clear in the first meet...

Why do I feel he does not like me much....