Shell Shocked

A normal day, i thought, when i woke up this morning at 10; "4:30 am" ringing at the back of my mind. "Harry Potter and the half blood prince" would now be officially on sale, at all major bookstores. I wanted the UK edition badly, so had booked my copy at Indiatimes 2 weeks earlier, which they promised to deliver a day after the official release. "I can wait that long" i had thought then, and only yesterday i had been to work wearing a custom made Harry Potter t-shirt :D, the euphoria still alive and kicking.

Feeling rather lazy, i started browsing through the day's newspaper and as i read i found, not so surprizingly, the paper full of Harry Potter news. After having a go at the day's news, i was brimming with curiosity about what the book would be like this time around.

I am rather notorious at the office as well as among my friends, for being a bit of a , if i can say, staunch supporter of HP books.

After a few quick calls and chat with friends, most asking me whether i have already bought the book, and some suggesting me places where i could get it at a discounted rate, i got all the more edgy to get my hands on the book.

....the book would reach me a day late, and i will have to wait, i told myself, with a lone voice in my mind hoping i would get it this very day.

All was going fine, when i was informed that my book would arrive a week late owing to some transportation issues. The News on TV was full of the mad rush for the book, and my hopes started to wane. I would have none of it, a weeks wait would be suicidal; while everyone at the HP club at office would be discussing the story, i would have to just sit and try not to hear anything. I decided to scourge around the city for the book, but not before cancelling the damn booking at Indiatimes.

I had been idle the whole day, and now i was ready to leave for jayanagar, hoping a few books would be lurking around for me to latch on to. I got a call from ashwini, asking me if i had plans for the day. I had the only plan, and i told her the same, but she would have none of it, and told me that our group would meeting at crossword near Brigade road immediately. I would not need to cancel my plan of buying the book, since i could buy it near brigade road. After getting another call from ashwini about change of plans, and that the group had decided to meet at gangarams book store i couldn't have asked for more.

except rashmi and myself, none in my group are known fans of Harry Potter stories :D. I thought it was a lucky coincidence that they had chosen to meet at gangarams, and also left me wondering if ashwini had suddenly developed a taste for HP books :D.

After wading through some serious evening traffic i finally reached Gangarams, and there stood ashwini, karthik and pothnis enjoying bhel-puri and giggling ear-to-ear on seeing me. After parking my bike, i got ready to barge into gangarams-already overflowing with ad's on Harry Potter, but held back thinking that i should meet my friends before hopping in. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, and the still giggling ashwini, i jumped the gun and proclaimed that i had to urgently go to gangarams to get the book. still giggling, ashwini putforth a plastic bag handing it over to me. puzzled, i looked into it. There it lay, neatly placed, a book, the letters on which read "Harry Potter and the half blood prince" !.... the words "it's for you !!" took time to reach me, but it only aggravated the pleasant shock i got.

while my friends let me savour the moment, i stood there, like a kid who had had his wish fulfilled the minute he asked for it and shocked beyond belief !

I opened the book, after karthik guided me to the first page, when i had instinctively had moved to the last page, and there on the page were written the words:

To Jaggs,

Science is a Sham :-).

It is one thing to buy a Harry Potter book, but to be gifted one, it becomes priceless.

Thanks guys !

IT is not like that !

"....yavaag foreign ge ?"

The familiar sentence is arguably one of the most frequently asked questions , losing only slightly to the even more grave one "...yavaag maduve ?", to someone who unluckily happens to be in the IT Industry and in Bangalore. There was never a better conversation topic for the older generation to suck every drop of blood the poor bloke manages to save despite working as a techie.

It's a wave that everyone wants to be part of, and everyone wants to show they know. The word computer is now a house-hold name. A good relief for many topic starved aunties and uncles, but our poor techie gets stuck like a nail that's half into the wood when it's head decides to painfully break lose.

The popular following that IT has gotten in recent years has been more due to the lucrative travel, than what the techie believes is due to his work. This time it is the uncles who have the upper hand in making a conversation, owing to some 'extra' knowledge, thanks to 'external' contacts. Aunties resign to just asking "...yenappa computer aa ?" ( literally means " are u a computer ?", but it is supposed to be "Are you working in the IT field ?". One must be ready to field a volley of smirks and barrage of questions, if the victim answers a "no", though it would be the right answer for such a question. For if you are not part of the bandwagon, then you'd rather term yourself a foolish old crackpot and be happy with that, than get a loathesome look from the omnipresent aunty.

IT has such a popular following here, most do not know what they are following, but just drift along to be 'seen'. Our aunty gets into her form, and asks our techie, "you computer, my son also computer" ...our techie, just out of a ctrl-alt-tab-enter, has no idea how to respond to this inhuman potrayal, by the aunty, of her son. He just smiles and says "wonderful aunty, which company ?" and is hardly interested in what he hears. The aunty carries on.. " nun maga sapoo"...the indianised MNC becomes "sapoo" from SAP, while our techie replies back, "i work for GE"..aunty is a bit concerned on hearing that, and blurts out "is it a good company ? didnt u get in infosys ?"...techie is at his wits end to explain; aunty is in no mood to understand. aunty's techie son is blushing ear to ear.

while the general social understanding of an IT company hovers between Infosys and Wipro, some good souls give respect to "Vorakal" too. So aunties are generally happy if one is from any of these companies. The other companies will only mean a detailed interrogation about the techie's academic credentials, past criminal record, if any, and a sure minus point as a prospective groom.

It is the conversation between aunties that is the most funny and amazingly astonishing. Recently one of my cousins went onsite, and i being the scape goat , who still 'had' to be in India, was the butt of all discussions.

aunty1 : " foreign ge yaavaga ivnu hogodu ?" (when is he going onsite ?)
aunty2 : "gothilla, innenu swalpa divsdalley hogthaaneno" (He might go in some days !)
aunty1 : "hmmm...they say only brilliants(sic) are sent onsite"
aunty2 : "that's true !"

I was being murdered inch by inch, neat and clean. My reputation in tatters.

This is even bearable, but get this, if a techie manages to stumble on an onsite travel but is cancelled on that last millisecond, then his future is doomed, for aunties will have a field day disecting him and nailing him for not working well at the office. I have been most unfortunate in this case, so much so that if i had got a call to abort the travel 2 seconds later than what i got, i might have had to jump off the plane mid-air.

aunties started flowing in from early evening that day, some trying to stay oblivious of the situation, some trying hard to keep a straight face, and a few more giving their own versions of my story, which by the way i never told anyone !...well one aunty even had the nerve to ask me "did you have a fight with your manager ?"..well i was kind enough to say "no aunty, project got scrapped ", only to realize that the aunty had no idea what a project meant, and instead pressed me to agree that i had indeed done some mistake...finally she let me go when i blurted out "my manager had a fight with the airlines"....well that was enough for me to roll over on the floor and laugh at her, despite the 'humiliation' of not going onsite.

uncles are not far off, and are ever more eager to learn 'computers'. One uncle was particularly curious to know as to why we guys were paid for playing computer games !...apparantely he was of this view after he had seen his 9 year old son only playing games on his newly bought comp. I knew better than to explain, so i told him that it was because if we won, the company would get money. uncle's spirits rose, and in all probability he would have gone home and pestered his innoncent 9 year old son to teach him to play games in the hopes of joining a IT company in future !

uncles are a little more "knowledgeable" though. One uncle came to me one day, when i made the suicidal mistake of attending a social gathering full of aunties and uncles, and asked me as to which company i worked for, and i answered him hoping he would stop there. however , uncle had no such intention and carried on " yaav language ?"...though stunned, i replied back "c sharp uncle" ...uncle's face glowed and then he said " nun maga Java , c# bidhoithanthey!" (My son works on JAVA, C sharp has long fallen from grace) ..In most uncles view, languages are like company shares, the value of which keeps fluctuating on an hourly basis.

Though salary is something of a sensitive issue, uncles don't give didly-squat about that and continue questioning the techie on the same. I was ripped apart when i told one uncle that my gross was 25k, to which, in suspended euphoria, he exclaimed that his son earned 2.5 lakh per month at onsite. Having no room to argue, i kept mum, when uncle went off again "why dont u ask your manager for a raise".... I told him i would consider his advise and ask, though my manager was bit of a dragon, unlike my uncle's son's manger, who was a saint just short of a halo!

Even more weird is the funny way in which people take those mails managers send to techies and their team, as to the good work being done. one of my cousins who recently joined my company got such a mail from his manager, and he thought it was a good idea to take a print out and show it to his father, a folly he still regrets to this day. My uncle not only read the copy, but made a hundred photocopies and distributed it as pamphlets to his near and dear ones. My dad got one too, and i had to field some intense questioning at home, since i had not managed to get one such letter even once ! i had even gone to the extent of thinking about printing one on my own just to escape the 'humiliation'.

while it's often funny to listen to the weird misconceptions people have about IT, it gets irritating if it goes too far. It would be a boring place without the aunties and the uncles, but it would be a wonderful place, if they knew better than to draw conclusions about one's work, of which they know so less about !

Harry Potter Mania ?

With the Harry Potter - 6 due to release this month, the atmosphere is all about expectation and enthusiasm. The wait has been really long, but all i hope is that it's well worth the wait. I will be getting a Harry Potter T-shirt in a few days time, specially made to order, so i can't wait to get my hands on that one too.

Though many dismiss it as childish, which it definitely is not, not many understand that it is an amazingly creative work of literature. Imagining a parallel world, co-existing with our own, though is baffling, it is something we really can't completely brush aside as stupid.

People talk great lengths about science and technology, scientific bent of mind and blah blah blah, and carried away by it in thinking that science is all encompassing. For instance they talk about how gravity affects our life, but they forget as to why gravity is present in the first place. As in what is density, why should earth attract us, how did earth come to be in the first place ?

Man only tries to understand what he can comprehend, in effect he needs proof based on his traditional set of beliefs. There is no room for things that the human mind cannot 'understand'. We stuff ourselves into believing that we are scientifically advanced, that we have a scientific bent of mind, but we hopelessly fall short of realizing that by limiting ourselves to what we see, we do not get the big picture.

Many who dismiss Harry Potter stories are in fact victims of the same notion mentioned above. They are hard-pressed to believe that something that science cannot explain is not real or is a figment of one's imagination. It is, however, necessary to understand that science does not explain everything, and hence denying a creative writing by branding it as rat-piss is not only foolish, but is outright barbaric.

I enjoy reading Harry Potter books, and appreciate the author's creativity. I cannot entangle myself into the scientific realm. I do not go by scientific reasoning.

Science is a Sham !