My whereabouts

Wish you a Happy and prosperous New Year 2009!!

It's been a month now since my last post- thanks to my computer conking out. And during whatever free time I got during the weekends, I kept putting off the OS reinstallation due to my laziness. Now that it is fully restored I am back to my old computer-addicted self. In the process of cleaning up my room, I happened to come across some old game CDs which were hot property in my high school days. 'Recoil'- a game where you guide an army battle tank across 6 huge missions, 'Need For Speed 5 - Porsche Unleashed' - my favourite among the NFS series, where you get to know about the Porsche company and get to race all of Porsche's cars released, starting from 1950 till today; 'Sim City 4' - where we get to build a city, provide for all basic infrastructure and watch it grow (yeah we could do it better than Bangalore Mahanagara Palike), you could even wage a nuclear war against the neighbouring nations or setup trade and transport links. So these past few weeks, I sat and played those games and many more just to revive old memories. I also caught up on a lot of good movies that I had missed during the past few months- Quantum of Solace, The Dark Knight, etc.

Last month I had been to the Vaahan Yatra auto expo in whitefield. This had become a sort of ritual that I used to follow since the past 5 years. I however regretted going there this time. There was absolutely nothing there, NOTHING! Usually there are a few import cars and superbikes on display which we poor, financially-starved auto enthusiasts get to ogle at- nothing of the sort this year. There would even be stalls of Auto accessories- K&N performance Air/Oil filters, after-market performance exhausts and Turbochargers, Tyres and Alloy wheels (I was looking forward to buying a good set of footwear for my car), Neons, Ear-splitting Sound systems (ICE! baby), Synthetic engine oils, imported car polishes, tyre polishes, dashboard polish sprays, etc. No german car manufacturers this time either, in 2007 I remember spending more than half an hour admiring the Volkswagen, Audi, BMW and the Mercedes Benz beauties. Hey, I even got to sit in the cockpits of the Audi A4 and the VW Passat, dreaming about the day when I could drive one of those. Every year, we would even have some cool, tuned and custom-modified cars on display with awesome looking females beside them ;-). Where the hell were the models and tuned cars this year I wonder! I guess global recession has affected them too! The only thing good in the show this time was a red-colored display model of the Fiat 500 sporty hatchback that looked cute and spunky.

The red Fiat 500 hatchback


I had a rather quiet New year's eve this year. A few of my cousins had organized a get-together at their place and we just watched TV, lit some leftover fireworks at midnight, had dinner at their place and got back during the wee hours of the morning amused at the sight of drunk new-year revellers on the roads, stopping every vehicle and shaking hands, wishing the driver and passengers a "Happy new Year, Sir" or "Happy new year, Madam"!.

A few of us friends from my old college "gang" met up in college the next day, spending an entire day on the pretext of collecting our final semester marks cards. A hearty Bhakri meal at Kamat Buglerock ensured we did nothing else but sit glued to the college katte (unable to move) and gossip like how we used to during our 4 years of engineering. We planned to go to Innovative Film City but the plan never materialised, with some person or other backing out every weekend. Hopefully we will be able to visit that place this month-end. It's supposed to be very good for a day's outing.

In December my team at work had been on a team outing to a place called Camp Srishti, located around 50km from Bangalore on Tumkur Road. It was a 80-acre forest area with some adventure activities such as rock climbing, rappelling (climbing down the rock from top to bottom), crossing over a lake walking on some rope and some other such "adventurous" stuff. It reminded me of a military bootcamp, only worse. It was the first time I slept in a tent that night- an awesome experience. Apart from the "bootcamp" activities, there were some stupid team building activities. After each activity, there was a discussion where everyone would have to talk about what they learnt from that activity and how they could have improved it- co-ordination, trust, strategy, planning, etc. This was what irked me the most about this activity. We do this kind of discussion everyday in office. Once in a while when we get to go out, instead of just enjoying the place and relaxing from the daily monotony of work, we had to again talk only of those "professional" things in the outing. I began to wonder why I even went there to suffer at their hands for each activity. Why couldn't we just be like friends in the outing, and just forget about all of that crap for a while and think like normal human beings for 2 days??!! However, the foodie in me enjoyed all that the camp guys dished out for us. I ate extremely sumptuous meals throughout those 2 days- no regrets at all. In fact, over-eating during lunch had me groaning with stomach cramps halfway through a trek on a nearby hillock!

During January we are supposed to have our performance appraisal meets with our respective managers. It will be my first one-on-one with my manager and hopefully the meet will go on well. I have been looking forward to this from a long time (for obvious reasons ;-) ). Nokia's takeover bid is now complete. In another 2 weeks, I will officially be a Nokia employee (from Feb 1st to be precise). They have already handed over the offer letters and from Feb 1st we would all be given new Nokia phones (hopefully a tube, N96 or N97 ;-) ), laptops (which gives the much needed work-from-home policy). Rumours are rife that our office would be shifted to a much closer location (at least for me) by June '09- it would be on the outer ring road next to the Intel campus. I long for the day when that happens- no more stupid jams under the marathahalli bridge, no more waiting for half an hour at the railway crossing for the 7.50am train to pass (shortcut to office used by my cab driver), no more cab- in fact I will take my own vehicle to office- I can leave at whatever time I want and at my convenience which means no more waking up at 5.30am, getting ready in a hurry rushing through the morning chores, no more eating breakfast at 6.30am, or missing the daily newspaper.

A few public holidays till Jan 26th and then we will be cursed with holiday-less months till this year's festival season begins in August:-(

KK