My Thoughts and et al

Incoherant Musings ......!#!@#!@##^%$%@$%@$!#!@##~

Saturday, July 16, 2005

Memoirs of Pune diary 1.0

I guess when I joined Wi*** Tech if some one would have asked “which is the last place on earth where u would like to work?”, my answer most definitely would have been “Pune”. I guess its natural decision as if u ask the same question to anyone other than a tamil and Andra fellow, they wouldn’t want to be seen around Chennai either. Lets just agree that we just cant mingle naturally. Well that’s what I thought when I went to pune. Considering that my hindi is at its best slightly better than a 2nd grade kid’s hindi , I had very little to look forward to when I reached there.

But I guess life has its own twists and tales and now if somebody asks me a question on “Your most preferred location to work?”…”Pune”. I guess how a year and a half can change ones perception of the world.

I was deported from Chennai to pune on feb 14th 2004 (What a day to waste!!!). As we reached pune at around 2.00am in the night, we directly shifted to the company provided accommodation, “Hotel Rathnalok“ which was miles away from my work place. I and my batchmates found that we had very little money and we knew no one, barring manoj. As we were not earning at that time, we came up with a brilliant plan of 5 people staying in a 2 bed room with 3 people sleeping on couch and 2 on the floor. It turned out to be pretty economical at that time. Though the company is reimbursing we were damn poor tat we didn’t have money to pay up front, so 5 of us shared a room. We liked the arrangement so much tat all 5 of us took an apartment when our time at the guesthouse ended. There was a pretty interesting thing tat happened, the vibration from the floor below us caught all of us by surprise and still vividly remember how we took turns trying to force one another to sleep on floor and how we fought with the management guys to get this thing resolvedJ

So off we went to work and found ourselves promptly put in bench. I understand that in all software companies the biggest hoaxes are ‘the trainings’. When we were recruited, we were trained on Java and the moment I reported at pune, they put me in .NET. I just wonder how on earth all these software behemoths reap such obscene profits year on year, quarter on quarter when they don’t show any signs of people management? May b this might be a little paradox of the industry.

Of course as I knew neither java nor .Net, I was happy that I didn’t have to choose among the two. Though I liked web development and was reasonably good at it, I really didn’t want to do tat for a living. Still remember my mentors at those times abhijeet and richa who helped me out tremendously. I was sitting in the same cube and used to bug the life out of them for 3 months. Well they really helped me out a lot on whatever I was doing at tat point. Forgot to mention that I had a whale of time with two trainees who were there namely abhijeet and ashish. Well one thing abt pune, every other person is either abhijeet or ashish met a whole bunch of them there…

Hence it started my life at pune, all interesting occurrences of the first 1 week in a nut-shell. Though my life had changed drastically after the first week, it was the starting point of everything...!!!!

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

Adieu to pune - I

I don’t know why but I hardly stay at one place for long. I have been hopping between places/friends for more than ten years now. I meet new people, make close friends, forget some bad old experiences and the moment I think I am kind of settled at one place, life kicks me on my back and says “move on”. Well what can one do but “Keep Walking!!!” Such a call had finally happened to me after a staying quiet for about one and three quarter years.

My stay at pune had come to an end on July 8, 2005, when I resigned from my job at Wi*** Tech and had reverted back to the state of a student. I am extremely content tat I had a great opportunity to work on the best technology and a great project on networking. But the best part was the kind of bonding I had with my team and the support I got from them when I was during my learning phase of my career. Still am in the same phase for that matter.

A moment of recollection of the times I spent with my roomies / batch mates: sourabh, amit, manoj and vijay. The time we used to sit outside the balcony and watch a gal on our opposite flat moving around, the countless arguments we had, the early morning shouts of “F*CK U” towards amit to budge him from bath room, the DARE-DEVIL like sensitive ears of Mrs.inamdar (who stayed below our flats) who raised hell everytime we stayed late, the idiosyncrasies/ idiocies of Vijay (especially his Spiderman like Sweater), the absolute fun about manoj wanting to buy everything he saw (Santro and Flat especially).

The experiences of our room would be incomplete without stating a terrible phase where 3 of us had a break up of sorts with our gals(or atleast that’s wat we thoughtJ) simultaneously and where bhagwad gita was sought as a route to stay away from gals J and election of vijay as the leader of the room(though it didn’t last long).The time where vijay was stuck on “Hotel california” and kept on singing/murdering the same song for months and also the time when sourab was at his busiest best came home at around 1 on his birthday and all of us just having enough life to wishing him a happy birthday and promptly dropped dead immediately, if he had expected a bash well this was the best we could afford :) .

After sourabh it was the time of amit to become super slogger and even now he cant sleep before 1am. Slogging for a year or so beats the Cr*p out of everyone and amit has become like a zombie processJ. I am not sure about the ingredients of Bangalore air, but it sure must have contained some magical stuff coz it had transformed manoj from his simple retro style into wanna-be cool dude. After that nothing he would speak contains anything without some java lingo or some higher level managerial members’ decision. He became the single object of leg pulling replacing vijay at our till-midnight discussions.

Then came my movement to Bangalore where I was staying in luxurious comfort of my company’s guest house and my turn for slogging for six months. I was replaced by two other guys, friends of sourabh. And when I returned the fun tripled with the gang of me, amit, sourabh and KK started taking turns at pulling the legs of each other. I remember spending one entire weekend where all of us just spent talking, talking and more talking.

Well the time flew very fast, but some things can never be wiped out from my hard drive. Sourabh remains a true friend (except for a brief period whenever he is seen admist gals J) , amit a truly remarkable phenomenon, remains the hardest man to contain when he is in form, vijay a great guy to be with especially when he is having his inner philosophical searches, manoj (when his mind not oscillating between ten different things/people) a great guy to be with, especially during the his Haywards 5000 (STRONG, EXTRA STRONG) binges and finally KK during the exciting talks towards the end of my stay. The funny part was all of us were so different but somehow managed to stick together for a such a long time, accepting each other as friends. Here is a toast to that spirit, Comrades !!!

Guys this is not a farewell coz we will surely meet sometime again. Cant promise that we will have the same scenario again, but hope is everything in life