Chennai!!!

Finally! After countless days of waiting!

No, its not the Second Coming, but its close, I've finally landed a project. It's in Chennai. For people familiar with Satyam, my circle is HCU-CES, sub circle SCM and the client I'm working for is a major chocolate and confectionary company. Sounds great doesn't it? But then, I'm doing shift timings, I'm on the night shift right now, and Chennai is more humid than a bluewhale's armpit. And no, we don't get free chocolates, so don't ask. And even if we did, what makes you think I'd give them to you? :)

I've been in Chennai for around 3 weeks now I think (Yes! I think!). The first two weeks were the most comfortable. The company pays for accomodation for two weeks, so I stayed at a hotel. A/C room, cable TV, a nice bed, fluffy pillows, enough to satisfy a simple soul like me. But then, after two weeks, I was brutally kicked out onto the street with all 5 pieces of my absolutely uncarriable luggage. That's when I realized that maybe, instead of having spent the weekends snuggling under the blankets with the A/C on high, I should have been looking for a place to stay. Anyway, as luck would have it, I found out that a couple of my college mates stay at Velacheri, which is rather close to my office at Perungudi. And so I barged into their home, and have taken over the best spot to sleep in, right under the fan. But all wounds take time to heal, and it'll be some time before I forget the comfort of that A/C room. In fact, there are nights when I silently weep when I remember how happy I was there, and how there were times when I felt too cold and turned the A/C off. Right now I sleep on the floor, with as minimal clothing as possible and right under the slow and loudly complaining fan. And I still wake up from nightmares where I wander lonely as a wisp of water vapour through the polluted skies of Chennai, having completely evaporated as I slept. No, there are no daffodils here to chance upon, just open stinking sewage canals which are the arteries of any big city, and the polluted dusty air, which is the fragrance of civilization.

Chennai is a huge city. And following some unwritten law of nature, which says "Kick him when he's down", most of the distances you'll have to travel will be too short for an auto and too big to walk. And then of course, there's the blistering heat, and the persistent humidity that follows you around like a fly following a piece of dead meat, if dead meat could walk around, which we all know doesnt happen, right? Wrong! There is dead meat that walks around. What else explains the phenomenon called Adnan Sami? Hehehe, just kidding, I actually love his songs. Well, he's not in Chennai, so there won't be any flies harassing him anyway, so the question does not arise.

I think my brain is completely wired after a sleepless night which I spent drinking some strange brown liquid that comes out of the coffee machine when I press the button labelled "Coffee", but which doesnt taste like any coffee I've drunk before. Today was my first day on the night shift. Yes, an oxymoron, get it? first DAY on the NIGHT shift? Har har...Well, thats better than any other kind I always say...atleast its an OXY-moron. If it was a Carbon MonOxy-moron, then it would have contributed to global warming and the melting of the ice caps and we would have had to ban it.

Man, I really need to get some sleep. I think I'll be blogging a lot more constantly from now on. I mean, here I am, sitting jobless and not able to sleep because my company has knowingly provided semi-intelligent chairs that give you a crick in the back as soon as you doze off, what else is a guy supposed to do? So blog it is.

Hopefully, the next post, which I shall write tomorrow, will make slightly more sense, but I wouldn't count on it. No, I havn't smoked anything illegal, its the coffee here, I tell you.

What's Going On?!

"Hey, where did all your old posts go?"

I've been trying to reinvent myself for some time now, and that somehow meant that all my old posts had to go. I've got them all in my Gmail account for those days in the future when I want to see what life was like back in the beginning of the 21st century. But they won't be coming up here again. I just realized that to break the funk I've sunk so deeply into, I needed to do something drastic. And this is part of it. All those old posts were just weighing me down and holding me back in a manner I just can't explain. Besides, my blogging had slowly turned from something I did purely for my pleasure into something where every post began with an apology for not posting more regularly. Its funny actually. You start blogging for yourself, because you like writing. Then people start coming to your blog, start commenting, and slowly the reason you blog begins to change. You begin to blog for the people who turn up to read. Not that there's anything wrong in that. Its just that I've realized that I write my best when I write for myself.

What made me do it? Well, I think Angie's partly responsible. Her first post on the new face of her old blog set me thinking. Especially this line that goes "..someday you will take pride in who you really are, and not gather your identity by who's reading you and who's not." Go read the whole thing if you want to make sense of it, a lot of it echoes my feelings exactly and she's put it in words beautifully.

So god forbid, you DO want to read one of my earlier posts, forget it and go rant on her blog here. :)

Now, I think I should set some guidelines for my posts, something that should give a structure to everything I post here and a few do's and don'ts. I think I'll probably keep adding to this list as I come upon more things I love, hate or want to include.

1) Proper Capitalization. Which means no more "i went to the shop". It'll always be "I went to the shop".
2) I hate sms language. Words like 'wen', 'y', 'frenzz', 'thru', 'hav', 'cmon', 'der', 'gettin', 'luv' etc. will never appear in these hallowed pages except as part of a direct quote or maybe to be ranted against when I feel like.
3) No more hasty posts. Every post should be debugged ;) thoroughly and reflected upon, before it appears on the blog.
4) No joining sentences together with "......" unless it actually adds something to the flavor. Great big grazing herds of full stops were a common sight in most of my old posts. They become extinct, or at least 'greatly endangered' from today.
5) No more posts that look like Corinthian columns. The Enter key must be used once in a while to split the post into readable chunks a.k.a Paragraphs.

Well, that's all I can think of, now. But this list will certainly grow.

<:o)