A Christmas Story

It was Christmas Eve. The mom was putting her kids to bed, not knowing if she should tell them that there is really no Santa, that it is just a fantasy - a made-up story with no real evidence. Her kids, aged 5 and 3, had heard about Santa at school, and, she feared, had hopes in their hearts of receiving surprise presents on Christmas morning - presents she had no money to buy. Ever since her husband had left her two years ago, all she could afford was to have a place to live and put three square meals on the table each day. While the houses in her neighborhood were decked up in charming Christmas ornaments and lights, she did not even have a Christmas tree. Worried and exhausted, she closed her eyes for the night.
She woke up at the crack of dawn, hearing what she thought was a thud outside the front door. "Who is it?" she called out nervously. Silence. Scared and cautious, she tiptoed to the door and opened it. There, lying at her feet, was a woven basket covered in bright red cloth, with the words "with love, from Santa". Hands trembling with surprise, she lifted the cloth. Inside, was a cute little stuffed puppy wearing a Santa hat. In its mouth was a small card with the words "I belong to Hazel". Hazel was her three-year old daughter. Beside the puppy, she saw two tiny stuffed monkeys, one with a bow on its neck saying "Mike will play with us". Mike was her five year old son. Her joy knew no bounds and she was almost in tears. She started to bring the gifts inside. But wait, the basket still felt heavy. There appeared to be one more item inside. Under a panel at the very bottom, carefully packed, was a bright red ladies' purse. The kind she had always admired, stared at in shop windows, but never had the courage to ask the price.
"These gifts are perfect", she thought, bewildered. "But who could it have been?" The kind priest at the church? The kids' kindergarten teacher? The jolly young man next door who often asked how she was doing? Or perhaps, just perhaps, as legend would say, Santa had noticed how good she and her children had been this year, how hard they had worked? Perhaps then, he had read from their hearts those desires they had never written down, and decided fulfil them? She was too afraid to ask anyone, she would never know. But somehow, she was glad she didn't tell her kids there was no Santa. For today, it was a time for them, and for her, to believe in fantasy.

The Order from Disorder

This is my first attempt at a "found"poem. Some of the words and phrases in this poem have been "found"from The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield.

The Order from Disorder

You look at me and smile
I pause for a full minute
We both say good night.
The lights go off, the covers on
But I am thoughtful for a while
Trying to understand
The movement of this energy.
What do we humans give and receive
When we care, compete, argue, love and hurt each other?
We calculate and control, but then let loose and lash out
In a rage, flinging the plate, spilling the water,
Exploding into total disorder
Until, the sky still a bright orange, we become aware
Of the twilight
The clouds in the distance, the plants in the foreground
A glowing sunset.
And slowly, but steadily, the shattered pieces
Start to fall into place
Though shaken and broken, the picture forms again
Not smooth and untarnished,
But uneven, cracked, beautiful.
Real and complete.
And we'll take it from here, bounding down life's path
Sometimes flustered and stumbling, sometimes lost
But always re-found, a scar added, with the gift of wisdom
And we carry on.

What does poetry mean to me?

About Poetry..

Poetry is sharing, exchange
A piece of you for a piece of me
Poetry is reflection
Of times that were, and times that could be

Poetry is expression
Of our joys and sorrows, comforts and wounds
Poetry is celebration
Of the colors of life, its sights and sounds

Poetry is read, thought, written and heard
Poetry flows like a stream, logical or absurd

Poetry is not only for a select few
Poetry is for me, poetry is for you

As you walk through life, eat, see, love and sing,
Poetry surrounds you, every moment, in every thing.

Come join my hand today, try your hand at poetry
Let's peel off layers from our hearts, let's leave no mystery.

Culture, Religion and God!

This is one topic I wanted to explore for a very long time! Majority of the people never seem to understand the difference between the three of these culture, religion and God.

So, I'm going to give a brief overview of these from my perspective! After all, no one can be sure of what reality is as we deal only with our perception of reality

Culture, the arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.

Religion, The belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, esp. a personal God or gods.

God, The creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority.

These are the definitions we get from Wikipedia.Though they are entirely different, people tends to treat everything as the same. So here are my views on the difference. Let me start with Culture and Religion. This is definitely the easiest one to explain. I realized I had to write about this after talking to my Venezuelan friend who claims to have an un-kickable ass. He thought that by Indian culture, I meant that I follow some weird Indian religion. So, my explanation is, culture is the system in which we are born and brought up in. It has nothing to do in which god we believe in. i.e., irrespective of the God, be it X or Y, my culture is always going to be Indian culture. But religion is something different! It is like a clan of people believing in one particular god/gods and fight to prove theirs is the best! It lays a sort-of-foundation for your culture but is not the major player in it! eg: Hindus not eating beef or Muslims not eating pork. it's just part of the subculture but we talking in Hindi or Malayalam is part of the Indian culture or the Mallu culture.

Next is the difference between god and religion. God, as I would put it, if exists, would be a higher dimensional being. So, like any being of a higher dimension, God would would have full control over our three dimensional world and the dimension of time i.e., he can move through time/space, so can be present at any any coordinate at any point of time (Just like we moving our finger through a two dimensional paper - for flatlanders, we are god) and would know everything about everything in our universe as when he "looks" as us, he can see our past, present and future. Basically, he would be an omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent being if he visits our dimension. Just like "Q" in Star trek! Also, he wouldn't care about what a person in our universe think or do just like we do about flatlanders (He might not know we exists, and even if he knew we would be the last medium to spend his energy until and unless we are his small science experiment). I would prefer to use the word Imaginary friend as according to The Grand Design, our universe cannot have more than three active dimensions or basically probability of existence of God is negligible, basically making him imaginary. Religion is more about putting all your faith in your imaginary friend and believing that he would make everything alright for you. Believing that you are really special and he would take care of just you leaving the rest six billion people behind. Believing that your imaginary friend is much much better than your friend's imaginary friend :D

Religion, more like politics, is a control or leash the powerful wants to have on you. Like a brainwash, to make you do what is good for them, to extract your hard earned money, for their better life, to survive the cold war between many other religions. To have supremacy or world domination as politics can just control a nation but religion can control the entire world as long as you are ignorant.

Why is Salad King the best place to go on a first date?

One night, long long ago, on my long journey from home to downtown in the subway, without an internet connection, I was submerged in a very important notion: Why can't I go to Salad King for my first date? That place definitely has style, super tasty food, can sit face to face, escape easily if the other person is a psychopath and starts giving you hints about her hidden agenda, cheap Chinese beer, affordable, zero candles or similar shitty nuisance to come in between. So why not?
 
Before I start explaining the advantages and disadvantages, let me disclose the assumptions on which my hypothesis is based:
1) Salad king consistently maintains the good quality of food 
2) No one is going above 5 spice (Trust me, those washrooms are not going to help)
3) Only half the stuff I say is stupid, offensive or rude
4) Everyone loves good food, even the grumpy cat
 
So here is the deal: Since I will be super busy eating the super tasty spicy Kari Chicken or Golden Curry (1 of them for sure), I won't be opening my mouth much. This reduces the probability of me saying stuffs like "Slow down, there is no competition" or "You do drink a lot, eh?" and by thus, increasing the probability of a second date.
 
Now coming to the other part of the first deal. Let’s assume I somehow manage to offend the person in front of me. There are 3 probable reactions I can get, of which 2 are good and 1 is OK. 
1) She is so busy eating that she conveniently ignores the golden words I spoke and also, I take her death stare as a hint and do not repeat myself. 
2) She notices what I hear and feels "something" for a second, but with all that tasty food in her mouth she decides to wait till she swallows it and then respond. By that time I "read" her face and come up with something "funny". Since "humans" cannot concentrate on 3 things at a time she forgets the first thing and will remember the funny stuff (refer assumption 3). 
3) And in the worst case scenario, if the stupid stuff I said was really insulting like "How are you able to fit those butts on that small chair?” or "Did you spend your entire salary on today's makeup?", her anger will override her human instincts to eat tasty food and might just storm out after giving me the finger. In that case, thanks to the affordability of Salad King (Assumption 4), I can easily manage the bill without having to do the dishes for them.
 
Let me add: My dear friend, who recently got frustrated with the crowd here and decided to move to Kingston instead, would also want to point out that girls love to go to crowded places. It makes them feel "on the top"; so, what better place than Salad King?
 
On top of that, 5 minutes’ walk and we have "Elephant and Castle" for the brown wine that cures all wounds. So, if I ever successfully convince someone to go on a date with me, Salad King is the place!

PS: If anyone tries this and fails, it's because the third assumption is not applicable to you. You are just plan stupid.

Functionals: People getting paid to generate work for the technicals!!

The most important thing I want to say before i start is that all characters in this blog are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people (Visible or Invisible) is purely coincidental. Also this is dedicated to Anil, Binay, Sushant and Sandeep, the four pillers of CG JD Edwards practice.

This is a small part of the eternal fight that's being taking place between the logical community (techies) and the Illogical community (Funcies) of the JD Edwards world. Am sure such conflicts happen as in other universes also but in JDE world we only need to maintain a maximum of 30% utilization unlike the minimum of 100% of others. So we get time to blog about the inequalities of our world.

We often have discussions on the importance of each group during our MANY private meeting, majority of them in the closely monitored cubicles surrounded by super-efficient techies. So to make you understand how it actually goes, I'll illustrate this with a good example. Let the Funci be IM (Invisible man) and the Techi be LM (Logical Man)

LM: Wazzup Guys? (Techies socialize a lot)

IM: Saala, abhi bhi zinda hai? (They don't want us to live, but want us to work)

LM: No work? As usual sitting idle doing nothing? As much expected from a Funci who gets paid to torture Techies.

IM: Hum log nahi hothe tho dekh lete, thum log ke paas karne ko kuch nahi hote (Very true.. without funcies, it would have been a heavily paid job for doing nothing)

LM: We know. If you guys don't do any blunder, what rework will we do? The major part of the income of the software industry is because (not by) of the Functional guys. They understand everything wrong, and make the techies do it wrong even when the techies know its wrong (refer discussion 2, also since Funcies consider themselves to be the most sophisticated and intelligent creatures, they rather make the techies do the rework rather than listen to them when they are right). And for what purpose? So that more rework will come and more revinue is generated.

IM: Hum log nahi hote tho clients ka requirement kaise samajthe? (As if we don't know English)

LM: Hum log samajne jaathe, to sirf work hota, rework nahi

....

...

..

And as expected from any discussion involving logic at one end, this is never converted to an argument and also truth (logic) always wins!

There are few other discussions that illustrates the basic crux and those will be published from time to time as comments as it happens. I thank Mr. Patel for providing valuable inputs on which these are based.

Discussion 2:

LM2: Yes I will do it, it's logical

IM1: No No don't do this, client will be happy, do this I should be happy even if it’s illogical

Discussion 3:

Case 1: (When there is pending work)

IM1: We have to do it

LM2: Yes

LM work like donkey and completes the work.

Case 2: (Work Completed)

LM1: I have done it

IM2: [blank face] There is a slight change in the requirement

Happy Married Life: A theoretical blunder

Cautionary Warning: If you lack commonsense or sense of humor, don’t bother reading this. I wrote this not for the morons but for witty guys.

I was actually trying to write on "How marriage sucks the happiness out of every person" but realized in a team meeting involving majority of them (by them, I mean the unhappy people) that it was not a good idea to hurt their emotions and also that this might end up harming (physically) me instead. By hurting the emotions, I meant that they are already getting accustomed to their life and even a slight ray of false hope or real enlightenment might turn everything upside down. Not that I didn't mean to do it, but they are my friends after all.

From what I observed till now, in life, happiness and sadness are both two faces of the same coin, without one the other is meaningless. If you are a bachelor and really think that you are screwed beyond anything possible, just look at the married man sitting near you and you'll understand how easy and free your life is. This reminds me of a friend of mine, whose name I dare not speak. He, though not married yet, still understands the meaning of "lack of freedom". Poor chap recently got engaged and now has to take permission from his fiancé before taking any action (by that I mean even before washing his hands before food). Now a day he just thinks and talks about just one topic: “if so now, what later (after marriage)?”

Another best part of marriage is, there is no "other side of the river is always green”, it’s just “this side of the river is always dry". Everyone tends to understand how much dry the other side of the river might be. And also when they give condolences, it’s always comes from deep within the heart. They are able to sympathize as they have also travelled in the same boat before, and are still travelling in fact.

Few months after marriage these people tend to justify everything, even when unasked for. After being asked explanation for each and everything they do at home, it becomes a habit and they can't let go off that even when they are having a lunch with friends or having a discussion with clients. In some worse cases, they start asking too much questions. Questions that have the obvious answers, still they have no other option but to ask.

The main topics of discussion for the unhappy people vary from the food they made to the clothes they washed. As free-will, free-thinking and free-speech is a blasphemy after marriage, these people are never able to discuss on any worthy topic like Black-holes or curvature of space-time continuum or even politics. All they can think about are ways to channelize the pressurized frustration they have accumulated in their long run.

Bad thing about them is they never tend to disclose the depth of their pain in front of bachelors. They always tend to say that live a very happy life, but many a times I have seen their eyes all watering up while talking, may be because they realized how peaceful their life was before marriage. I seriously think that, after being unable to share their innermost sorrows and fright for so long, they become trained disciplined zombies (Just eat and move) who just work and behave socially.

Once we asked an unhappy guy what he thinks is the biggest advantage of marriage is? And his answer was Discipline. He said you lose your free will and ends up doing only approved things at the approved time that you turn out to be a disciplined (pupil). Also, according to him we don't need to provide military training till the concept of marriage lasts in our society. In the beginning he was joking, later on we realized that he was dead serious after seeing pearls of tears on his cheek. Another example he gave about enjoyments in marriage is a story as follows:

There was a man who never listened to music. He always loved movies and drama and all the colors of light. Then one day an accident happened and he lost his vision. He was bored to hell and had nothing to do. Then as this continued, he had no choice but to listen to music as it was the only available mode of entertainment left for him. In the long run he started enjoying music. Now in case of every unhappy man, the accident is his or her marriage. By the time they realize that it was an accident, they are too late and miles away from recovery.

Some cases we have even observed that, people after suffering for long, tend to lose the difference between Real and Imaginary. I assume that this is caused because of the asynchronism between their Dreams and Realities they face after marriage. Such cases they usually start laughing when they are sad or being punished (We haven’t observed the other way round as for them it’s an imaginary concept)

So the final conclusion is –

Marriage is just like Coma, except that you feel pain in the initial stages.

As suggested by a close friend of mine, who seems to share similar thoughts, to make the views clear, I've embedded a video of Pearl Jam. And noobs, please don't worry lyrics are included.