who is thyagu from chennai?

Who is he? is he some kind of super human who has knowledge on every subject? Is he even from this planet?

Chances are, if you watch India 60 minutes on NDTV 24×7  regularly, surely the same questions would have crossed your mind. There are harldy any days when his comments dont appear on the show. His views and comments could be often be categorised as average- socialist- populist-protectorOfIndianCulture-proDeathPenalty-IndianRightWing but so are the rest of those scrolling comments on NDTV, or for that matter any other news channel. What makes thyagu special is his urge to SMS his views everyday, without fail, no matter how different the topics are. The only other person I know with such immense knowledge is Rahul Bose. Only Mr.Bose could give his views on anything from political to entertainment to sports and culture. Has he completely forgotten that he is just an actor? And the funny thing is, even Rahul Bose makes his intelligence available exclusively to NDTV? Is there any pact between NDTV and Indian intellects? If so why wasnt’ I given a call?

Anyway to answer one of life’s biggest mysteries, the origin of Thyagu, I need a small favor from people who are reading this. Please put up this question mark image on your blog/site/profile etc and link it to this post. I’m sure through the comments on this page we would surely be able to identify him. No, i’m not tricking you into increasing my view counts. This is a genuine cause to find out the most intelligent person in India, besides me, of course.

score 1 for atheists, it dint rain today

Nope, it hasn’t rained yet, still 15 mins left to midnight, but the chances of this blog becoming #1 is far greater than the chances for a shower before midnight. It has been a day of personal triumph. Let me explain to you whats happening here. Come August and you just cant bear the festive spirit of chennai, its just too much to handle. There are loud speakers tied to every lamp post that keep playing really really awful devotional songs. Yes i’m talking about the mariamman (said to be a form a goddess Durga) festival that is usually held in the first sunday of August. The speciality is that unlike other festivities like ganesh chaturthi or diwali, people celebrate this festival by walking on fire. Like this guy right here

Whats funny is that anyone can do it. You, me or even jimmy there (i’m talking abt christians etc). Even more funnier is the fact that they dont walk, they run, run like wildboars. Its a scary site to see, and some get pushed down. There have quite a few accidents here, but nothing too serious. The interesting part is that, for the last 5 or 6 years, everytime this arcane ritual happens here, it always rains that night. My mom always attributes it to the divine power of god. I have tried to explain to her that it could for any number of reasons

1.It could be that the smoke from the burning wood, causes a micro-climatic change, and since this ritual actually takes place at many parts of chennai during the same day, it might cause rain throughout the city. (Vague i know, but it could happen)

2. A conspiracy theory,  I sometimes suspect that they fire some kind of rockets (the firecracker ones), that bring in artificial rain. (Yeah, i’ll come up with anything to prove them wrong).

3. More widely accepted is that it rains beacause its monsoon season.

Inspite of the above arguements, I’ve somehow felt like I’ve been losing the argument everytime it rains. But today,  it dint and I feel like the losing battle has been won in one swift blow.

Update: Midnight has passed, yippie!

The Hindu, A Lefty?

It doesn’t suprise me that much, to see New York Times labelling “The Hindu” as left wing,  it just comes as a mild shock.  I was reading about Dr.Ron Paul’s Times front page article, when i came across this line

Paul is surely the only congressman who would cite the assertion of the left-leaning Chennai-based daily The Hindu that “the world is being asked today, in reality, to side with the U.S. as it seeks to strengthen its economic hegemony.”

Wow, now this is the Times man, branded by some as Left-Wing elitist paper, calling our Hindu, left leaning. Certainly things will never be the same from tomorrow morning. I guess the ads and the obituary column (my favorite, as always) are the only sections i’m gonna be going through. I should’ve known when they let that socialist/Maoist Keshav do all the caricature cartoons, and how their OP-Eds sometimes greatly supported that moron Chavez even when he is proclaiming himself as the emperor of Venezuela. I regret that,  it dint even strike me when N.Ram got Chomsky and Stigltz to give their famous anti-Globalisation talks here in Chennai. Bad Bad Editor! But I guess its my fault too, i failed to see the big statutory warning right on the front page.

Jus Kidding!  I always knew they were leaning left, and the other paper i read , ET,  is at the opposite of the spectrum. I believe the human mind should be wooed by both wings, and left alone for sometime to ponder which one is idiotic and which one is practical. I just thought getting mentioned in the NY Times is worth blogging

Long Live Dress Code

You read that right, dress code lives long, never dies, right from our time in school, through our days in college to the work we do now. Got pulled up for dress code again this week. My supervisor told me that I wasnt’ wearing a wacky tacky tie on monday and said that it was a gross violation of their “make-mondays-even-more-pathetic” policy. Really, it just pisses me off totally everytime someone tells me I’m not dressed properly. Already I feel I’m becoming one of those 9-5 (or midnight sometimes) software guys who look forward to friday, those thank god its friday types. My mondays are always blue, with each monday bluer than the one before. Life just moves at the slowest pace on a monday and to top all this off, I’m required to wear a tie. I have to confess that I still don’t know how to knot one and that I never usually remove the knot if someone had done it for me. The only tie I have, had been knotted on october 9th, that was the day i joined the company. I cant even remember where it lies now, probably someone took it, my friends have this funny habbit of taking my belongings without my knowledge.  So as she was telling me about it, I was kinda burning with rage for a few seconds there, but quickly cooled myself off and told her how I really felt uncomfortable wearing a tie. She gave the usual reply that clients from abroad often visit the office and how they usually like it when people working for them (yes, indirectly we work for them)  wear a tie. There were two things I wanted to make it clear to her. First, “what clients?” During my work there I had never seen even one of their clients. The office has this big welcome board displayed in the reception once in 2 months or so, indicating that a client is coming that day, but rarely do we ever see him/her, unless ofcourse they’re invisible. That could explain everything, including why i feel like I’m being watched everytime I read blogs from office. But being a product of science I could never adhere to the theory of invisible clients. So it had to be that clients visit very infrequently and even if they ever come here, they rarely come to work area. Second, how did they arrive at this conclusion that clients like an employee who wears a tie? Questions, I could never actually ask her.  I dint want to be so direct, after all it actually wasn’t her intention to pull me out for dress code. The complaint, I heard came from HR. Those pathetic a*holes, they have the most easiest work in the world, but all they do is play big brother with the employees. Probably thats part of their job too, but its the part I despise. I told my supervisor that I would like to talk the to guy from where the complaint came (I’m pretty sure who it is) but she said that it was not part of the problem. The problem was that I was not adhering to that archaic policy called ‘dress code’. She told me that I was still stuck in my college days and that I should be more “professional”. ‘Hold on’, i thought, actually it was in college where all these dress codes applied right? Hmmm, now who’s still stuck in the college days? Finally I told her that I had read too many libertarian literature, that taught me about my basic birth rights, the right to freedom of expression and speech etc and that it is not in me to “take these rules”. I mean it, I really said that, come to think of it now I can’t stop laughing at myself. Now,  I could sense that she din’t really like my reply. I paused for sometime, then I thought, ”why am I so mean to her?” She was indeed just a messenger, conveying whatever the HR people told her. So i told her that I’ll consider it and may be wear it from next monday. That was all that she wanted to hear, after that the conversation quickly moved into a more technical note, about the days work etc.
It irritates me a lot when I come to think of why schools, colleges, and even corporations insist on a dress code. I mean, we don’t usually come wearing threatening costumes. I have never seen anyone coming to my office wearing shorts or ultra casual clothing even on the so called “casual fridays”. Software people, especially the ones in big corporations, usually dress very conservatively. Casual to us is jeans and t-shirts not 18 pocketed cargos topped off with a wife-beater . Still people are always bent on implementing dress codes and I just don’t understand the basis for that. Why? Because it can somehow improve productivity? Bear with me please for those technical words. Are these foreign clients psychologically or for that matter culturally inclined towards outsourcing their work only to companies whose employees show with up ties? I guess not, they usually offshore the work to whichever company that can deliver the project at the cheapest rate with the optimum quality. Or even if thats the case, why only on mondays? Why have they chosen that god forsaken day and ignored the rest. Do clients usually turn up on mondays? I’m always left with nothing but unanswered questions. Whenever I wear a tie on a monday it feels like a tight noose around my neck. I could prove it to you that mondays are my worst productive days, the minutes I spend staring at the screen without doing any work is more than any other day. The tie would just add fuel to that raging monday fire because I’m not that relaxed or cozy wearing one. Boy if only I had my own company, I would gladly allow my employees to wear whatever they want. They could even turn up in bikini’s, probably they would get extra perks for that, you know. Sheesh I’m just dreaming too much these days. The point is, the more freedom you give to your employees the more productive they become. The whole of the austrian school talks nothing but freedom, liberty and how it encourages more production and in turn higher profits. I always wonder if I’m the only one bitching about dress code or if there are a whole bunch like me, except that they’re two time losers who don’t have a blog. When we were in school we had this uniform which took our self expression away, college was supposed to be like the way movies showed it to us, but the sad part was that there too, we had dress codes (more about my college dress codes in a later post) and finally when you thought work was going to be different, a very creative and a free environment, it ends up being no more different than the others. Hmmm, enough said, have to find my tie now, wonder who stole it!