Welcome to my life

Are you a software engineer?

Are you tired of sitting and working in a cubicle?


Do you find that the management guys have nothing better to do except use complex jargon and create silly acronyms?

Are you stuck in an organization whose every decision seems stupid and sometimes downright absurd?

Do you cringe at thought of understanding the dialect of managers?


And well, your boss is a loon?

Well, you are not alone.

Dilbert is exactly like you. You can find him on the web at this location: www.dilbert.com

A masterpiece of cartoonist Scott Adams, Dilbert provides you with insight that is necessary for a nerd/geek to survive and grow in the highly competitive world of software.

Why am I praising it? Because I love the cartoon strip and want to share it with you.

Of course, if you are bored with software projects and now want to move on to management, help is on the way. Read “The Dilbert Principle” by by management guru Scott Adams. Its the only management book you’ll ever need. There’s even an Indian flavour in one of Dilbert’s co-workers called Asok.

So, enjoy the humour in our miserable cubiclized lives!

India in Slow Motion

Sometimes fiction is nothing as compared to real life. Sometimes, a writer’s words do not capture the true essence of his thoughts. Its during times like these that I switch to reading non-fiction. Mark Tully‘s book; India in slow motion; turned out to be the newest entrant to my book-shelf.

The book is dedicated to all those who are striving for the good of India. It sure mentions a few of them. Mark Tully himself has a great deal of love for this country. Sure, he may look and speak like any another foreigner, his sympathy for this country matches that of any contemporary patriot. Born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) and educated in England, Mark Tully was a correspondent for the BBC in South Asia for 25 years. In 2002, he was working as a journalist in New Delhi.

Tully mentions Gillian Wright; his partner in many of his escapades; as co-author. However, the book is written from his own perspective. A book about India! I felt a deep sense of pride as I first read the cover. However, the contents of the book did shake that pride a little.

In the book, India is presented through the eyes of an outsider. A stranger in a strange land. He dwells on the glory of India’s heritage and swiftly moves on to the deplorable condition the country is in today. No, he does not focus on the poverty and the down-trodden like another famous foreigner (Danny Boyle, anyone!). He focuses on other serious issues, highlighting how this country hasn’t been able to out of its colonial mindset. How red tape and bureaucracy (babudom) are still holding back the potential of the largest democracy in the world.

The purpose of “India in Slow Motion” was not to highlight the problems faced by this country. India is often depicted as a victim of forces too wild to be controlled – of post-colonial malaise, of religious strife, of the caste system, of a corrupt bureaucratic machine. The book argues that change is possible and solutions do exist. It looks at the people who are trying to bring about this change.

The book is in the form of short stories written in the first person. Mark Tully has personally interviewed quite a few soldiers of truth. There is Mathew Samuel – the journalist from Tehelka.com who exposed the corruption in arms procurement in the Defense services. Also, there is Aruna Roy – one of the major proponents of the Right to Information Act. She was the one who got Right to Information implemented in Rajasthan even when the RTI was just a bill in the Parliament.

“India in Slow Motion” securely grasps the essence of the enigma that is India. A Third World country that has all the ingredients to become a Superpower but is hindered by the enemy within. Even if you are not an Indian, this book provides very deep insight and may even force you to re-think any preconceived notions you may have about this country.

In everything he writes, Tully’s sympathy for and knowledge of India shines through…He is, indeed, incomparable among foreign observers of that bewildering, maddening, utterly enchanting medley of peoples.
- Geoffrey Moorhouse, The Guardian

PS. Mark Tully did not pay me to write this review. But I do feel that any person who thinks of himself as an Indian should read the book.

The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has-or rather had-a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

So began the legendary Douglas Adams in his epoch-making, path-breaking, gut-wrenching, brain-twisting Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy.
The story begins with a house. A house that was to be demolished to make way for a bypass.

Bypasses are devices which allow some people to drive from point A to point B very fast whilst other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what’s so great about point A that so many people of point B are so keen to get there, and what’s so great about point B that so many people of point A are so keen to get there.

Arthur Dent, our slow-witted protagonist sees his house get demolished and then his planet. The Earth is obliterated by a Vogon spacefleet to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route ( An Intergalactic Bypass). Arthur’s friend, Ford Prefect from Betelgeuse, saves him by hitching a ride on one of the Vogon ships.

What follows is a nightmare, for any reader of science-fiction that is. There’s Zaphod Beeblebrox, the President of the Universe, travelling in a stolen spaceship (Heart of Gold) powered by Infinite Improbability Drive in search for the Ultimate Question. Helping him in his ludicrous quest are Trillian, the only other survivor from sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha (Earth) and Marvin, the paranoid android. At the centre lies the Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The book is what its name suggests: Marvels of the Universe for less than thirty Altairan dollars a day.

What is the Ultimate Question? It is something without which the Ultimate answer is incomplete. At this point however, in the mind of the reader the ultimate question is: What is the Ultimate Answer? Well, its the ULTIMATE answer. The answer to Life, Universe and Everything.

The book, if you haven’t noticed yet, is full of insightful sentences. Of course, most of the insight is lost to the utter absurdity of the book. I’m including a few quotes from the book here. There is something called copyright infringement, but then imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Here is glimpse of what the book has in store for you:

• Arthur felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it.

• I love deadlines. I especially like the whooshing sound they make as they go flying by.

• In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move.

• The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t.

• Space…is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.

• Vogons are one of the most unpleasant races in the Galaxy-not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn’t even lift a finger to save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without orders signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat and recycled as firelighters. The best way to get a drink out of a Vogon is to stick your finger down his throat, and the best way to irritate him is to feed his grandmother to the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

The Hitch-hiker’s Guide is a really wonderful book. Un-put-down-able, a word coined by the slang-happy Americans, actually is quite fitting.

PS. The Hitch-hiker’s Guide was meant to be a trilogy. The first and most popular book was The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Mostly Harmless was the fifth book in the trilogy of four books. Don’t scratch your heads. You’ll do that in plenty when you read the book.