Living the Indian Dream..what it means

I am sure that most of you have at one point or another heard of the usage "yeah that guy, hes livin the American Dream". Well, even though the american dream is no concrete list of things we all have a basic idea of what it might involve. A good home, a good looking car, an even better looking wife, a son and daughter who are basically replicas of barbie and ken (not necessarily in that order) and so on. The Indian dream however, is a mysterious thing.

Upon close examination one finds that it resembles a nightmare more than it does a dream.

Before I embark upon this there is something else I need to do.

"To all of you Indian boys and girls out there who have taken up professions other than being an engineer or a doctor, my hat (if I were wearing one) is off to you. I salute your courage and determination".

Now, I shall embark upon this voyage exploring the Indian dream. (Think of a scene kinda like when the titanic was pulling out from the docks, only this time there are no onlookers, just a bunch of pissed off turkeys (Why were the turkeys pissed? All in due time shall be made clear) and there were no joyous and merry people standing on the deck of the ship waving to the crowd (turkeys) theres only a couple of drunk homeless guys who are eyeing the turkeys while frothing at the corners of their mouths. Finally, there is no ship, only me wading out into the water and then feeling extremely stupid coming back onto land narrowly avoiding the gang war that has by now erupted between the homeless guys and the turkeys.

When I asked my little brother the other day "Hey man, what do you wanna become when you grow up?" he took about 10 seconds before replying "I wanna play in a band, and if that doesn't happen then I wanna be a computer game designer". He has this plan to develop a MMORPG which is so massive in scope that it will in effect be an alternate life that people can lead. The idea has some mind boggling merits and some mind numbing stupidity but then again thats why it stays an idea for the moment I suppose. I am proud of my lil bro because he wants to work in something thats fun to him. I hope he gets the chance.

I am working on an internship in jacksonville, its only for four months out of which two are almost done, but still I quake in fear at the thought of returning tomorrow to work. The work is killing me from the inside.

(funny reference: Killing me softly with this code, you are killing me softly with this code, coding my whole life with c sharp, killing me softly, ....crash...bleep...bleep...BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH)

My friends back in India they tell me about what they do and even they are deeply unhappy and extremely dissatisfied with the way things are going.

When we call home however, we have to pretend that everythings going great because otherwise our parents are going to worry that we have lost our way and so on. Therefore, in order to make sure that we dont have a bunch of angry and worried relatives staging some kind of pseudo intervention every time we sigh, we put on a mask everytime we talk about our work.

"Hows the job?"

"Fantastic, I am getting so many nice projects"

"Thats good, and you are doing everything properly"

"No, I shit on my code before giving it in"

"what was that?"

"Yes, I said, I fit in my code into what the company is doing"

"ok.....so looking good huh? career prospects?"

"Yes, definitely"

"Good, good. Now, your future is secure"

"No, its pretty much blown to hell"

"what was that?"

"I said, its pretty much blown to hell...."

"Explain yourself young man"

you can kinda get the picture about where this is heading.

Now, I am not saying that all families have the same kinda attitude towards complaints about work. One common thing however is that we are dissatisfied.

You go through school, college, higher ed and get a job and then its like you're in that car which after managing to struggle up the slope just kinda gave up and leaped right off the cliff but instead of falling or rising or doing anything at all, you are just suspended there like the butt of some cruel cosmic joke. Its downright depressing.

So what is the great indian dream? simple.

We shall never chase our true dreams.

We shall become software engineers, the pawns of the system.

We shall live hoping for a better tomorrow but never doing anything to get there.

We shall watch bad hindi soaps and curse them , but still watch em again.

sounds more like a nightmare to me.

peace.

Magus.

stormy skies..

Just today i was returning from work and it was all overcast outside. Only one word leapt to my soothed mind...."Beautiful". A lot of people wake up, look outside, see the sun and hear the birds, and remark about how it is a beautiful day. If i venture outside on such a sunny day, I usually feel sick to the core. I dont really know why. When it is overcast outside somehow it is calm inside as well.

Many people have told me that England has mostly overcast weather, if this is the case I would love to live there for good. It really is difficult to explain exactly how good I feel inside when there are dark clouds overhead. I shall now recount an instance from my college life which is in a similar tone. I've probably already mentioned this incident before in this blog, but I dont really care since im sure that no one reads this neway. More than anything else, this blog is a journal, for the older me to read about the younger me and laugh my old ass off (i hope i dont do that, cause i hear that hip related problems are real bitchy.)

We had this one course called mechanical workshop in our first year of engineering. This course should have been named something like "Making yourself feel like a caveman again 101" or something because that was essentially what it did. We had to do stuff like cut perfectly useful metal sheets, file em and make them into completely useless shapes. We were made to do this why? Because snot shaped pieces of sheet metal were coming into vogue as new age paper weights? Because the ninjas in Japan realized that there was a more efficient design for the shuriken? I don't think anyone really knows..

I sucked at this course, partially because I didnt get the point, but mainly because I've never been a brutish kinda guy. Let me put it this way, if I was in middle earth I would be an elf and not a human. As of a result of the aforementioned sucking at the course I came home after the class mostly with a collection of bruises, cuts and other such battle scars on my arms. Once I even managed to cut myself with the handle, note HANDLE, of a wood file.

So things went along this way and we were taking our final exam. I was given some kinda sheet metal thing to do and as always i was clueless on how to actually do it.

Thankfully, my mates standing around me helped me out and got me through the actual making part of it. When it came to the viva voce I used my speechcraft to such an extent that the sir was firmly convinced that I was descended from a long line of noble blacksmiths (nothing could be further from the truth).

After I was done with the exam I walked outside thinkin bout catching a private bus back home since I didnt wanna wait for the college bus which was a half hour away. I saw my friend sreeraj walking out of the wood workshop and I was like "Oi..!! How was it?" to which he replied with a single finger gesture. After the inevitable exchange of obscenities which though not strong enough to surprise a sailor would definitely make a sailor stop in his tracks and go "ahem..well...carry on then.." or something to that effect (for those of you who find that sentence too complicated, turn off ur laptop and take up some easier task like say.....being a lumberjack...or sandalwood smuggler....see, you always have options.)

We were talking and walking towards this one shop where we drank lemonade usually. Thats when a cool breeze ran right through me. I looked up at the sky and it was dark. It was so peaceful and serene. There was an anticipation in the air as if the very earth was waiting for the rain to touch down. This affected both me and my buddy and we were both talking about this for years to come. We talked for a while and then got on the college bus and went home by which time it had started raining heavily.

After getting down from the bus I decided to walk home in the rain, got completely drenched and was henceforth referred to by tripunithura-ites as "he who walks in the rain" and by a few as "he who is not too well in the head" and by a small tribe in africa as "wakalooloo the rain god reborn".

However, it was a beautiful day.

mage lord.

To be here, or not to be here....

No, this one is not about philosophy or anything. The title is exactly what this one is goin to be about. I had an experience today which made me think about a lot of stuff related to being in the United States of America.

I came back from the office today and as is my habit raided the fridge only to find that we had run out of bread. As all bachelors know an apartment without bread is something inconceivable and so I decided to go to walmart and get the aforementioned bread (yes, I love using the word 'aforementioned' so sue me!!..............on second thought please don't.. :-) )

My walk to walmart was uneventful except for when i was crossing the main intersection and even though the walk sign was on I heard a vehicle from my left coming in fast. I looked to the left and saw this truck coming towards me, slowing down in the process.

Seeing this somehow made me smile in a weird way and I was looking at the truck. I guess the driver thought I was staring him down or something, its not like he said anything or did anything, but something in the way he looked back at me suggested that he had taken offense at something I had done (unless it was my mere presence that bothered him....more on that later).

I got to walmart without any further incident.

After picking up the bread and some chicken to keep it company in the cold confines of our fridge I was on my way back. While crossing the same darn intersection I had reached the other side when I heard a horn honking. In the states you hardly ever hear vehicles using their horns and they only do this if someone else on the road is committing or has already committed some wrong action. Considering this you can understand that I was suddenly on the alert.

I turned to the direction from where the honks were coming and this truck passed me by (not the same one as before, this was more like a truck SUV hybrid..). The guy sitting near the window put his head out and laughed loud, real loud. The laugh was not supposed to be a funny one. In fact, this laugh had not confusion about its identity, it had a card in its bag which clearly stated that it was a laugh created for only one purpose, to mock.

The guy was mocking me.

At the moment I shook my head at this and walked on not really indicating any other emotion. As I walked on however I started thinking about what had happened. Why did the guy do what he did? He doesnt know me, I dont look particularly threatening, and I was not doing anything particularly offensive to anyone except for the chicken in my possession which I admit is a gray area. The only reason why he could have done what he did was because I am not white. There are other streams of thoughts into which this can be sub divided but not without further information so I shall leave it at that.

This made me wonder again, what if he had not simply laughed, what if he had thrown something at me, run me over, pulled over a little ahead and then beat me up or robbed me when I got close, or something even worse. What if?

The question ultimately comes down to this

"How much are you willing to risk for earning lots of money?" (which is not even true in my case, but never mind that)

I miss India..I miss Kerala....I miss my home..

magus.

Vindicated..

There is a feature which I try to put into most of my posts, I do not know if I have been successful in it. I try to start off each post by mentioning the song I am listening to while writing it. At the moment I am listening to the song vindicated by the band dashboard confessional. For an alternate rock/Sissy wimpy rock band....they have done a pretty amazing job with this song. The lyrical quality is outstanding and can actually be likened to poetry which is much more than what can be said about music in general these days (hip hop anyone?).

In my opinion the song talks about life and its related insecurities in general though it does this from a slightly romantic perspective. The first line of the song goes "Like hope dangles on a string like slow spinning redemption, winding in, winding out, the shine of it has caught my eye"...pure poetry and nothing else.
The chorus goes as follows,
"Vindicated,
I am selfish I am wrong
I am right I swear I am right
I swear I knew it all along
and I am flawed
but I am cleaning up so well
I am seeing in me now
the things you swore you saw yourself..."

beautiful aint it?

Right now I am working on an internship in Jacksonville, Florida. Yeah, I finally managed to get one and I am so damn happy. Except for the last part of the previous sentence everything in this post has been completely true. I am not so damn happy, in fact I am not even any kind of happy.
The work is commonplace and extremely boring and most of the time my employers dont seem to know what to do with me which in itself is quite worrying. There was a career fair in our university recently and I went for it thinking about somehow getting a better and more interesting job.
Every single company I went to had the same frikkin reply "Hey, yeah, give us your resume, but also apply online ok? We are not saying that this was a completely pointless waste of your time but if you cant figure that one out yourself then we were not gonna hire you anyway....so, have a nice day...and here take some free goodies which are actually various somethings which were lying around in our homes and which we could not get rid of in any other way"
long sentence?
you should've seen the length of the queues...
The only redeeming part about the day was....oh wait there was none...
So many people dressed up in their finest, waiting in queue holding on to a piece of paper in which they have tried to sum up their knowledge in as few a number of lines as possible (in many cases coming up with interesting and wildly inappropriate abbreviations). The air was crackling with the energy of their hopes and dreams and the dry responses from the employers shooting down the aforementioned hopes and dreams.
My abbreviations were cool too, I had lines in my resume which read,
Proficient with CRAP (Commercial regression advance planning)
Well versed in NOTHING (New order of theoretic hyper imaging neo genesis)
and also
Certified master of bullshit-jutsu!! (now that one I just made up now...)

For those "critics" among you who point out that I did not include the second 'o' in the abbreviation NOTHING, guys, seriously????

The day was extremely disappointing...and so were the two days after that when I had to return to work, get shunted off from a project since I had done something completely different from what they had asked me to do, get explanations from both the supervisor and the CEO about how "your work was good, great vision and excellent quality, we're just gonna go a different direction on this one...ok?". Doesn't that last line sound weirdly similar to "Its not you, its me..." probably the most cliched break up line ever...
and guess what....after tomorrow I get to go back to another week of that amazing life...yea...wow..cant hardly wait..

more cynical than ever,

magus.