some days are routine

First of all, I've almost not controlled anything that has happened in the past 3-4 months in my life. I have just cruised with the wind, doing things that are very routine.. Loads of Work, Frnz, and managing personal boring responsibilities... Its not surprising that responsibilities and Boring go hand in hand. So much so that, I can use 'boring' as an adjective with every word 'responsibility', I use in my life.

For a few days now, Iam bored of routine and want a change from usual and I have decided that I shall do it by writing something that I had not done for long now. Then there are many plans in Queue, A goa Trip with dear pal Shashi. May be a full day or a weekend trip with another friend. Ofcourse ensuring that I finish 3 month old - piled up, chaotic, directionless RT work pending at Cisco.. yes, I plan to complete it in a week's time. Long time since I have put my heart and soul into work and seen the fruits of it.

And then there is Stocks/Furtures .. Its as important as anything else.. I have already incurred good amount of losses in stocks/futures.. If I dont regain my hard earned money, My subconsciousness will haunt me calling "jackass" everytime I see CNBCTV18 or UTVi or Moneycontrol.com.
Its time to Re-gather whats not been lost...

My dad is a hero

Since the time my dad is retired from his official job, he has been looking for various activities to keep himself occupied and interested. There are days when he is very busy with activities varying from "visiting our hometown and spending good times with his old mates" to "engaging himself in spiritiuality and prayers" to "pulling my Moms leg the entire day followed by the three fourth of the night". And then there are days when he sleeps for 14 hours a day and finds it difficult to find new ways of spending time and keeping himself busy.
During one such phase, he decided to engage himself in learning car driving and joined motor driving school. Everyone at home were very excited about my Dads decision to learn driving at 65. He started learning. He was scheduled to take classses for 25 days and then, the driving school would get him his Driver's License.
Subsequent 25 days, All of us spent our dinner time mostly engaged in talks about the driving and My dads experience with it... After about 25 days, My dad was done with all his classes and for my dismay, I sensed that he was not very keen in giving his tests for getting his driving license. I started wondering if it was, for, he was not confident in passing the driving tests. I pursued him a couple of times to go ahead and get his driving license. My dad was unusually reluctant. Then I decided, it was time to see him drive our car. When My Dad tried, we realised that the trainer had not taught my dad how to drive completely and he was not comfortable driving a car on his own.
Finally me and my younger brother decided that we will train him on driving a car and for next few weeks my younger brother who is very good at cars and driving managed to teach my dad the basics of driving a car. Finally Dad fixed up an appointment at 10AM on a thursday morning, with Motor driving class and Road transport Officers to give his driving test.
In comes thursday morning, I and both my brothers started preaching dad, the basics of driving. We told him to be confident, not to worry about the car indicators etc and only to concentrate on driving slow and steady. Also we told him to adjust the seat to his comforts and wear a seat belt, before starting ignition. We also told him to drive barefoot instead of wearing sandals for we felt that, it would enable him with better grip and control over clutches and brakes.
As my younger brother went to drop my dad to Road transport office, My mom said to me and my elder brother 'While you were kids, this is how your dad used to send you guys to your exams, asking you to double check if you had carried the hall tickets, extra pencils, eraser etc, and reminding you to go through all the answers once, before returning the answer sheets and so on". I felt very touched and thats when I realised why my Dad keeps becoming more and more adorable everyday and why "My dad is the biggest hero of all times" for me.

Kicks of being in a nutshell

There was a time when I was upset and sad about everything that was happening in my life. I had ceased to bask all those things, that I had enjoyed the most in the past. The only thing that I felt like doing was, to be on my own, alone, doing nothing.
My close pals Santhosh and Shashidhar had known me for many years and had seen the better times in my life and were not happy with how I was leading my life. It probably wasn't easy for them to condemn my being in nutshell and make me realize that my approach wasn't helping me, for they felt uneasy to bring up the topic directly and hurt me momentarily. For many days, they did try and do their best to spend time with me and cheer me up.

And then there was an evening, when they talked about how a person gets some kind of 'Kicks' in being lone and sad, How a 'drowning feel' could deep down give you an Unconscious thrill and how an ignorant mind can keep striving for this thrill of being sad, thus making it, so much more difficult to come out of the Kicks and start being more merrier in their routines. I did understand what they were conveying and deep inside readily agreed with the simple and beautiful theory, though it took some time for me to stop striving for the Kick of Sadness. There were times when I have felt the kicks of being in nutshell, being sad, are equally dangerous to the kicks of narcotics and the likes and this realization has helped me in being more merrier and lively of late.

My mom happens to be a person who has many concerns and gets paranoid about the simplest of problems I come across in my daily routine. One of the Saturday late nights, I started talking to my Dad and Mom about one of the simple problems. As we conversed, my mom started expressing her worries. After looking at her sad pale face, I decided to preach her the 'Kicks of being sad' theory and transform my image from 'Been a responsible kid' to 'Knows to deal with problems' status. I was simply trying to boast myself in a comic manner. We conversed on a very lighter note on the theory for about 75 mins and I had managed to convey the theory. Major part of this conversation was filled with great humor, thanks to My dad who is effortless and extremely good at humor. All the tensions and problems that we had started with, had vanished.
And then, Suddenly, My Mom went back to her habitual ways of dealing with things and started expressing her worries over the tension, problem that we had started the conversation with. As I said to myself "no god damn 'kicks of being sad' theories could ever change my Mom from being so concerned and paranoid about my simplest of problems, My Dad says to my mom "U r striving for too much of a Kick on a Saturday night, which isn't good. Guess its time to goto bed" and all the three of us burst out laughing. I felt a tremendous joy, for having spent some meaningful and fun filled time, with my parents, as I turned off the lights in their room and walked towards my bedroom to grab some sleep.

Flair for troubleshooting

It was a time when I was picking up softwares, learn how they are built and tested. I was in a small team of testing softwares and qualifying if they were ready to get into market.
To be able to test the intricacies, the hidden logic in bits and pieces, it was key to have an end to end functional deployment.
There were days, should I mention rare, when setting up a functional deployment was rather surprisingly effortless. Then there were, usual days when we were always 'getting stuck' in setting up a fully functional deployment. That's when were relevant 'the day saving troubleshooting skills' possessed by, my then Manager Arun Krishnan and Tech lead Aravind Rao.

Arun was calm and systematic in his approach, natural at full circle analysis of the problem and getting to the root cause of it. On the other hand Aravind was cheeky in his approach, good at narrowing down to the cause of the problem and tweaking the system to work for him. It was either an irritation or an eye-popping treat to watch him moving his fingers on keyboard while troubleshooting. He was fast on keyboard and it demanded attention of some magnitude to follow what he was trying to achieve.


On a daily basis, I was learning, analyzing the mal-functioning of a deployment, narrowing down closer to proximity of the problem, tweaking various related components and figuring out workarounds.
Even now, whenever I have managed to troubleshoot and resolve a customers or a team members 'getting stuck kind of problems' with our software, I see a bit of an Arun or an Aravind in my approach. I believe, at work, you are mostly what your role model is, that in most cases, your supervisor or your boss. I consider myself fortunate for having worked with many intellectual people and learnt a thing or two from them.