One of the better and worse weekends of my life

This week I had to go to Bombay (I prefer Bombay to Mumbai) as I had a few unfinished businesses to complete. It was an eventful week with the SAM and watching Dwight swing to Indian tunes while I held my glass of "Teacher's". It was one of those good times. I wanted to attend Sripathy's farewell party and get sloshed out again. My wife likes me when I am drunk coz I am a bit sober and funnier then.

Anyways making the long story short, I took a Metrolink bus to Bombay at 7 am (with the Mrs). Having just cozied myself, I saw this huge blob infront of me. It was Srips and his two henchmen, Vasanth and Devesh, who were carrying Srips 4 bags. I thought of it as an Act of Faith by the Almighty and all of us traveled happily to Bombay. Srips promised to meet us for dinner at a place called Spice Tree in Bandra on Hill Road.

Natasha and I went to Chembur to finalise our wedding reception album and DVD. Natasha wanted to buy a pair of earrings for her friends in Japan. But because of some unfortunate talks we didn't buy those. Came back and slept like a log till 8:30 pm.

Srips called up asking when would we be meeting him. We decided to meet up at 10 pm at SpiceTree. But FATE had a different plan for us. By the time we reached Bandra Srips managed to reach Lucky's (another famous restaurant of Bandra). We went together to Spicetree.

Spice Tree is a wonderful restaurant. It looked very similar to Angelo Mio restaurant that I had been to at Santa Clara with Dilnaz and Joe albeit the expensive chandelier and glass cutlery. There were a mix of hip youngsters and goras. We settled into a table at a corner of the restaurant. Srips, me and Natasha had a wonderful time over there. Me and Sripathy had 3 Cobras each and Natasha had her first taste of a Screwdriver. This was accompanied by different starters.



I was drunk that day and did some crazy things. I asked Sripathy to take a snap of us while I hugged Natasha tight.



After that we headed to Naturals across the street but Srips pushed off to do some more "important" work. We had strawberry ice cream and coffee walnut ice cream. I had to take a leak and went to Cafe Mocha. I saw this guy there.



Razak Khan

After this we took a rick, picked up Srips from his friend Abhijeet's house and headed to Bandstand where we had a nice long walk and discussed about Jeevesh Terrace and other important things in life.

Later we headed to Cafe Coffee Day and had cold coffee. This was the parting pic of the night.



On Sunday we were invited to ITC Grand Maratha Sheraton by Natasha's cousin Charul who works there. We reached the grand hotel at around quarter past 2. We were damn hungry and this place turned out to be one of the most poshest places I have ever been to. We were invited for lunch at the Pan Asian restaurant. For starters we had Tom Tom and sweet corn soup with some momos. This was accompanied with white sparkling wine for me and orange juice for the lady. Later we had some of the best Chinese food we ever have had in our lives. There was some Tofu preparation which was simply great. In between we were served a shot of Screwdriver. Natasha had it and was "jhooming" for some time. LOL. Later we had excellent desserts.

Charul played the perfect host and turned this to a perfect afternoon.



As a souvenir of this day I kept a pair of chopsticks.

Later in the night we returned to Pune not before arguing on somethings which makes me realise my current situation and the responsibilities associated with it. Well I have decided to do something and take charge of my life from now on. If everything goes well with the blessings of the Almighty, I would turn into a very learned person. I just to plan well and execute it.

30 and counting ..

0.083 year... 30 days ..720 hours ... 43200 minutes..

This is the amount of time I have been married.. And I can't believe the luxuries that I am enjoying. Someone once said "The grass is always greener on the other side...". I agree. The grass on this side is lot greener than what I was having earlier. :D

Have a look at some pics from Leela Kovalam.







Having your best friend as yor wife gives you some of the most pleasurable moments of life. I am lucky to be one of those. I get good food everyday, my clothes are washed and hung for drying and nicely folded and kept into the cupboard.

Life was never so easy.

I feel like a king. But these 30 days have made a slob. Yes a slob.

Slob of the third order for those of you who are more mathematically inclined.

My attitude towards work has been something of this sort.



This graph shows my slobbiness level.



I realise that this one month I have lazed around more than I can remember. The last time I had lazed around like this was when I was less than 12 months old when there were only 3 states in my life eat/drink, sleep and poop in different permutation and combinations. Sometimes these states occured simultaneously too. Now at least they were different. But the fundamentals remain the same.

Life has come a full circle.

I get all I want. Literally :D. And I am happy. Truly happy.

Anyways I just wanted to record that the past month had been eventful.

1. Got married.


2. Pulled off the wedding reception successfully.


3. Made my near and dear ones feel happy once again.


4. Found great friends in Joe and Dilnaz (me and Natasha got to take them out to Vie Lounge).


5. Got to meet Ruhi, the cutest baby till date.


6. Had a great honeymoon (wink wink)


7. Having a good time setting up our home. (I decided against calling our place a love nest and a house, the former having a touch of lust and sensuality, and the latter being too impersonal)


8. Had some good conversations with Hemant, my future PWM (Personal Wealth Manager)


9. Got a shit load of credit to take care now.

I hope I can get my life on track again. The next two months are going to be crucial
professionally. My life will soon be at a Y junction where I have to decide whether I should take the blue pill or the red pill..

Hope I take the blue pill and discover myself and the real truth!

Rendzenvous with Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO, NVIDIA

Today was a real great day. I got to meet the great man himself, Jen-Hsun Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, in flesh and blood. This is the man who revolutionized the Graphics industry with his company NVIDIA for which I work proudly. My association with Nvidia products goes back to 2000 when I had persuaded my parents to buy a Rs 4000/- NVIDIA Riva Tnt 128 Mb card. I still remember what all I had to listen.


It was kind of completing the circle when I met Jen-Hsun Huang today.

To begin with he has a lot of energy and infectious enthusiasm. He single handedly gave his presentation and answered lot many questions. I found him very approachable and enthusiastically mixing around with the people. I had a fun chat with him while we were having a round of drinks.

Front to Back, Left to Right :- Rajib, Jaya, Parag, Jen-Hsun, me. Shazia, Surath, Bibhuti, Kali, Karthik, Sachin. (Missing - Bhaskar and Meduri)

Here are some of the points that I noted while I was attending his presentation.

• Be in a "sustainable" industry some place where there is potential for growth.
• The field should have very few competitors.
  
• The solution provided by you should help a lot of people.
• Always do something that is worthy to do.
• Create a brand name minus the hoopla of advertisement. Nvidia hasn't spent a lot on money on advertising. It is only by word of mouth that the brand has been built.
  
• Create an ecosystem around the product to advance in the future. Create something that initiates something more. In Nvidia's case it is the CUDA technology that is doing that.
  
• Create demos to shock /awe / inspire people.
  
• Focus on the needs of the next generation.No one in the 90's ever thought that their cell phones would have music on them, could capture videos,etc.The next generation can't live without these on their cell phones.
• The leader has a self deprecating sense of humor. Jen Hsun has a great sense of humor. He laughs at himself and makes us laugh too. There was this instance where he answered a question with something that was totally not what was asked. Dwight had to correct him. So Jen Hsun said that he was afraid he was turning into an old senile man. :D
• Focusing on your competitor is not a good strategy. People always kept on asking him " Why don't you compete with Intel / ATI ? ". He says that you need to focus on your strengths and keep creating innovative stuff so that your competition has to catch up with you all the time. Don't spend time in thinking how can I dodge / attack my competitor.
• Put in funny incidents in your speech. While speaking to us, I observed that he used to put in stories and make them interesting. This story telling ability with a sense of humor is a potent combination.
• Build on your competencies by age 30. This is something that I concluded from the talks that I had with him. Develop your armoury, your skills by the age of 30 to see that you can develop something really fruitful in your life.

For other party pics please visit my photos.

The Homosapien thought..

Today I was having this weird thought.

Why are we humans named as "homosapiens"? Didn't the nomenclaturist / the person, who is supposed to give names to the human species, think of something before naming our spieces ? From homo habilus to homo erectus, all the known evolutionary species associated with humans starts with a "homo". Dont take me to homo erectus. Will write about that some other time.

This raises a huge question in my find. Are we all born "homos" and we get conditioned to become "hetero" so that there might be that one lucky couple which gives rise to the "heterosapiens"? So in the future we may have a movie aptly titled "Planet of the Homos".

I seriously wonder what happens when we meet aliens. When they ask us "What is the name of your species?", are we going to reply back to them saying we are HOMO sapiens.

Or have we already been visited by aliens ?

I guess we have already been visited by aliens. No, I am not supporting the Seed of Life on Earth theory but just randomly guessing that this naming issue is the work of those bast#$d aliens. They might have camoflouged themselves as the group of people working on choosing a name for the human species. And they have chosen it as homosapiens.

At the end of it I don't know why the martians or the dumbass scientist named us homos. But I do know for sure I am straight as a "ganna" (sugarcane for those who can't ...).

10 years down the line ....

I was having a discussion with Suman (my partner in crime and business) as to what will be the scenario of companies like TCS, Infosys and Wipro. The rate at which these companies are recruiting people and training them in "IT", I guess we will be able to match the strength of Indian Army. From what I observe, year after year, WITS (Wipro Infosys, TCS and Satyam) has been recruiting a record number of graduates. Wipro kicked off with its campus initiative called WASE. Infosys is tying up engineering colleges. This has become a boom for the engineering colleges as the tie up will ensure that the engineers are "employable" when they graduate. But what I see is the loss of quality. I believe that in quality and timeliness of work lies customer satisfaction. A streak of innovativeness goes a long way in building a good relationship with the client. But with the kind of work these companies are taking onto themselves, I sometimes pity the engineer who is supposed to work on them. From what I see, standard maintenance projects for banks and billing and network maintenance projects from telecom companies is the main source of revenue for the IT companies.
WITS is now claiming to provide end to end solutions. They say that they are a partner in business of the client and understand what the client needs exactly. I agree to a certain extent with this view but these companies have no clue at large. There are managers in the system who take a project and execute a project in any manner. These companies claim to be SEI CMM - 5 and a 6 sigma certification. But from what we have seen from the inside, its all a hogwash. There are too many processess and very less of actual engineering. Engineers are meant to solve engineering problems and provide better solutions each time for the same problem. Here I see there are very few real engineers at work in these companies. Freshers who get recruited from engineering colleges are promised some work and are put in something else. I cannot understand how can a person from electrical department of a REC get into embedded software system group and how does a person interested in Operating systems end up doing SAP. But some how the managers are able to execute a project and deliver "production quality code" to a client. I pity the client too.
I have seen many people on the bench, wasting away like vegetables. Instead of that, if these guys are allowed to work on some projects of their own choice and are allowed to interact with professors from IITs and IISc, they can develop something new. Who knows the next Google can come from Infy bench.
Looking 10 years down the line, I see a lot of people having the same exact skillset and balance of power tilting to organizations in the demand and supply game. I believe that every engineer has to read up and get to know about the latest developments in his / her field of interest. 10 years down the line, if you are not distinguishable then you will be a nobody. This article I guess will help you more to understand about the importance of stuff 10 years down the line ..

--Vishal

Restart Blogging

After a long time, I have finally decided to start writing my blog. I have been reading up blogs by Himanshu Bhat Sheth, Guy kawasaki, Scott Adams and Rashmi Bansal. It seems to be interesting. So let me see as to what all can I think and blog about from now on.

Currently I have diverse topics to write on that vary from my personal life, tesch stuff, my readings on the net and about my work life.

I am not able to decide as to what should be the first topic on which I should be writing.
Hey I can write a film review. It shouldn't be that tough. So let me see.. umm...I saw Tararumpum and Namastey London last week with my girl at E-square.

So here it goes.

1> Namastey London : Unforgettable movie (Big pun intended). Plot revolves around discipling a young girl whose thinks she is British by nature. She hates everything that is Indian. Her dad tricks her to India where he gets her married to a Punjabi guy. The girl is unhappy and goes back to UK with her parents and her husband the night of the marriage. The girls parents are happily deciding to hold a grand reception for the newly weds when the girl throws the bomb.

She declares her marriage to be null as there are no legal documents to support it. The guy is devasted. The girl feels sorry for the guy and tells him that she is love with a British guy. And the guy tells her that he will wait till she gets married to this guy. Many incidents happen, the girl and the guy get close to each other. And finally when the girl is at the altar to get married to her prince charming, she realises that her true love is in fact the Indian guy.

Apart from the song "Ye veeraniyan" there was nothing good about the movie. Although the movie experience was great (My girl was sitting close to me arm-in-arm and smiling all the time :) ). Although the movie had some funny scenes like
i> A prospective groom is extremely influenced by "saas bahu" serials and repeats major pharases thrice and turns his head each time he says it.
ii> Vir Das, a standup comedian, (also a prospective groom) tries to make use of statistics to find compatibility between him and the girl.
iii> Rest were not that great but good for one time laugh.

So finally I can say that this was a passable movie. So if you haven't seen this flick, don't worry.

2> Tararumpum : My girl is a Saif and Rani freak. And if the two are there in the same movie, I have to watch it no matter if I was having a heart attack. The movie tickets were booked for the 1215 hrs show. So I woke up at 11 pm (Actually she came and whipped my ass and asked me to get my lazy bum into the bathroom). We reached the theatre at 1205 hrs. Lo behold. The parking was full at the theatre. I managed to find a small parking lot nearby, parked my vehicle and rushed back before her temper got better of me.

We managed to enter the theater in the nick of time. It was the silhoutte of Saif on the screen. The sound was loud. And all the girls were going "OOOOOohh ..Saiff". Even my girl goes weak in the knees for Saif. I wonder if he is actually that good. And so began an ordeal that lasted for 3 hours. Its funny feeling. I usually see Hollywood flicks which don't usually cross the 130 min barrier. But Bollywood!!! They need 180 mins to tell us that one should plan for the future but enjoy the present too. Are we fools or what ? By the time it was intermission, I had the feeling one has when he is drowning and can't swim back. His only hope is that someone pulls him out to safety or the water level recedes before he dies. The movie ended with fianlly and I was happy.

There is nothing more... Oh yes I lost 240 bucks watching this movie।

Useless I say !