Soulful Music

Soulful Music, originally uploaded by ubababu.

He was playing it for the love of music. Of course there were one dollar bills in his Tip Bucket, one of which was mine, but they were there merely to take care of this survival. So that, this man can live and bring the music alive. In the noise of the Kansas city Farmer’s market, The African American Man in a Cool shirt provided a beautiful ambience in a corner. It was simply beautiful. Can you see the music he is playing?

For more photos, Please checkout my Flickr Pool.

The Body Builder

Suresh was getting ready for his Mr. Madras body building competition. He was very fit, had nice bulging biceps and V-shaped body. He was honest in his body building and used no shortcuts like steroids to get where he is right now. He knows the evil effects of steroids and has avoided it ever since he started this.

With 7 days to go to the competition, Suresh was getting a little bit nervous. He usually wakes up by 6 AM and after a brief warm up session and a few raw eggs, he goes to the Gym and gets trained by his master. He evenly spreads out his exercises – curls, presses and weight lifting and keeps hydrated throughout the 2 hour long session. He follows it up with a nice healthy breakfast. He doesn’t eat 1 lunch but splits it into two and has one at 11AM and another at 2 PM. His dinner is also spread into 2 one at 5PM, and then at 8PM.

It was another day of routine for him as he woke up at 6 AM. He heads to the bathroom, spits and takes a leak in the commode as he wanders his mind around how he was going to go about the competition. The urine flowed out of his body making the noise of a stream of water hitting a pool at an intensity that showed how tall he was. He relaxed as he took a deep breath. As he came out of his thought train he noticed there was a chunk of blood floating in the commode. Blood! He panicked.

It is said that if you take Anabolic Steroids to build your body, the first few symptoms of its effects are bleeding when you pee. Suresh was scared now, he hasn’t taken any steroids. He has taken protein supplements and has a very uncommon diet. He wasted no time and he rushed himself to the doctor.

Suresh: I don’t take any steroids, but I saw blood this morning in my urine.

Doc: Don’t worry, we will take these blood tests and we can find out what has happened. You will get the results in a day, you can come back tomorrow at 8 AM.

Suresh was very worried. His entire body building and perhaps his life is now hanging in balance. That night he didn’t sleep properly. He had nightmares of seeing himself bald, sick and dying. He didn’t know what it would feel like with the testosterone level as low as a 12 year old girl, but he couldn’t sleep at the thought of that. But he didn’t have steroids and hence he was not worried as much as he would if he had had.

Suresh waited for the night to go by. It was the longest night he ever spent in his life. The next morning he rushed to the hospital without showering, eating. He saw blood in his urine even today.

Doc: The results have come Suresh. They all look normal. Your liver is functioning very well. You have nothing to be afraid of.

Suresh: But Doc, I saw blood even today. Please help me, I have a competition to go to in a week.

Suresh went close to the doctor and pleaded. The doctor moved away as his breath was stinking.

Doc: Let me see your teeth. Say eee and aaa!

Suresh was bewildered but did what he said.

Doc: Do you spit in the commode?

Suresh: I don’t remember, may be I do!

Doc: Your gums are inflammed and bleeding. You must be seeing that blood in the morning as you spit. You need to see a dentist!

Suresh laughed out loud. He couldn’t believe it. It was his teeth. His teeth was inflammed and he was glad it was just his teeth. He was relieved and happy. Compared to what it could have been, inflammed gums was nothing to him. He ran out of the hospital excited.

In a few days, a happy Suresh won the competition and became Mr. Madras and of course he went to the Dentist after a week.

So folks, Don’t spit in your commode while you pee!

PS: This is a humble attempt at Story Telling like Sakhi combined with Nikhil’s Whackiness and Rambodoc’s Body Building 101’s with an ending twist of my own style.

PPS: Virtual hits with Rotten eggs and Tomatoes from “Pissed” off readers welcome

Indian Companies, Raiders of the Lost Chair

Long Long ago there was a Chair in a busy IT office, brimming with people. There were just too many people in the building that there was limited room for breathing. They called it the boom, every single maintenance work was getting outsourced to India and the executives called it “Strategic Outsourcing”. No one even imagined the magnitude of growth and hence people were hired by putting fliers on the trees on the roads (Which were later cut by the corporation to build a Metro rail).

Coming back to the chair, this was one special kind of chair. It had a really soft cushion with adjustable height and nice tilting push back. The texture of the fabric was nice and smooth and one could really sink into it after lunch for a nice afternoon siesta, I mean a productive coding session. This chair was really unique, but the office was full of this unique chair. In fact there was one chair like this for every desk. But during boom time, people come in faster than buildings can rise and/or be leased. So people had to double up in cubes/desks/conference rooms/empty dining halls in cafeterias, lonely table by the restroom (which could seat atleast 3, with monitors positioned like the lions in our Indian Emblem on One Rupee coins and oh by the way the Emblem has 4 lions even though you can only see 3. You can’t see the 4th lion because it is a Tenderloin).

They wanted more and more people, but they didn’t have enough chairs. As a result, chairs were stolen from conference rooms which began to look like a big pool table room with no chairs. But that wasn’t sufficient, so chairs were put on Time sharing mode until new chairs slowly arrived and unbundled. In any case, the number of new people coming in out numbered the pace at which they could buy the chair because of all the process involved in procurement and number of signatures needed to buy one chair was equal to the number of people working in one floor.

During conferences with the onsite team, the offshore team usually 10 to 20 in number (or in some case 20 to 40) gang up on that one speaker phone in the conference room with no chair. The American on the other side speaks in his stylish English and the team standing offshore stare at each other, while the Team lead says yes, without knowing that he was answering a question, “Can you participate in a Rodeo contest next week?”.

Chairs were stolen, because people couldn’t understand a thing that the customer sitting onsite said without grounding their asses on the chairs. It didn’t matter whose chair it was, it was vandalised. You could go to the restroom for a 2 minute break but you will be back to no chair to sit on. Heck, you could even get up to connect that PS2 mouse port to the back of the Pentium II desktop, suffering loose contact, and you may sit down and fall to the ground, because that was enough interval time for your chair to be whisked away. “No Mercy”, they shouted and continued “Give us chairs or we will steal it!”. For sometime, it became the motto of the company, I mean not the company just the employees of the company. The shareholders had nice chairs at their home, except those poor souls who bought employee stock with no chair to sit on at work and with no idea that the bubble would burst in 2 years.

Chairs were shuffled, you never sat on the same chair once. So, the chairs were always showered with variable aroma of farts by multiple unrelated employees, whose only connection was eating the food served in the cafeteria.

There was only one way out of this misery. Onsite. People wanted to go onsite because they didn’t have a chair to sit on, while the management keeps taking surveys over survey trying to find the real reason behind people wanting to go onsite (which actually yielded “Disneyland” as the answer), they never knew that it was the chairs. Sometimes, even the employees didn’t know why they were frustrated and unhappy over their career. They kept insisting it was their career, but no it was just their carrier, the chair! All they needed was a chair that can be raised and not a raise.

But then the bubble burst. Everything slowed down. New buildings were leased, unfortunately when people were laid off or when the CEO gets involved in a huge conspiracy, and now there is more space than people. There are more chairs now than people. It can be so unpredictable that between the time interval that the chair is adjusted the person would be sent home. The companies were cutting costs by cutting projects. They were laying off the Developers and restructuring the management during touch economical conditions. It was quite logical. With no work to do, they had to lay off Developers because they were the only ones who did the actual work. Management is quite essential to the company because they had to run the company and they were the only ones who had the power to lay off, so unless every single developer was laid off there was no way that the management could be laid off. Besides it is cheaper to lay off a Developer when you think about the severance package that needs to be given in millions for an executive and in thousands for the ordinary Developer. It all makes sense.

But the employees are now happy because they have more chairs. They can sit on one chair everyday and it will still be enough for the whole year. Heck, they can now fill every chair with the sweet aroma of the fart every single day and not having to sit on the same chair again.

The chairs got back at their theives. They finally got their justice, but they still get farted on.

A Foreign Language Irony

As I hold out a copy of the latest India Today (Ok, I was really reading Anantha Vikatan) and counting down the minutes for the arrival of Bangalore Express, My “then fiance, now Wife” (TFNW) reminds me I have to get Idlis from Murugan Idli shop for dinner. It was one of my several trips to Madurai a few years back to see my TFNW. The Railway department even went to the length of tracking me down and sending me a qualifying letter for getting a Season pass from Bangalore to Madurai (Ok, I made this up!). Those were the times when whoever bought shares of Bharti Airtel became millionares simply because of the talk time I spent with my TFNW.

Coming back to the story, I had about 45 minutes before the train arrived. I worked my way through the crowd at the Platform, accidentally hitting people like a snooker ball on rebound, reached the station side Murugan Idli shop and was ready to order, what else, Idlis. Along came a Woman from the other side to the shop. She was tall, fair and definitely didn’t look local, and didn’t look Tamil, and didn’t look Indian either. She was a Foreigner, was a tourist. Here is my chance to provide the utmost hospitality to a tourist who was kind enough to visit my hometown. I was brimming with a sense of helpfulness and I wanted to give the best explanation possible and help her order the dinner that she will love.

We both got close to the counter. I opened my mouth to start my train of Peter English, just when the shopkeeper tried to utter something in his own English, and the dear lady from a foreign country without pausing for a moment and without directly interrupting us, simply placed the order in Pure Tamil.

“Oru Dosa, Oru set Idli, Sambar Vendam, Chutney neraiya venum!”

Three Mosquitoes, Five flies and a Cockroach made its way in and out of my Mouth as I kept it wide open watching the foreign lady utter the purest form of Tamil. She wasn’t Foreign anymore. I exchanged a few more bewildered look with the foreign lady and the shopkeeper’s half petrified half clueless eyes and place my order for idlis and went back to reading the jokes in Anantha Vikatan.

Tamil Thai (Mother) was dancing disco in the tongues of an English Madam. I bowed to her sense of respect to the language I had lived in, picked up my order and walked away expecting no more surprises for the day.

Read one more interesting Irony here.