Memoirs of "His and Her" - 4

[Continued from the last part available here]

When you see yourself in an unfamiliar situation, you normally tend to think in every possible direction.  This is exactly how his brain was working now. He had to figure out a way to find the mysterious "Whg 26". " If we find out the name of the person who used to live her before, maybe we can ask the people and find the house", he suggested. He started trying the smaller of the keys into each of the letter boxes. 

"Aljabarya" read the name the postbox which spewed, free-newspapers, pamphlets and lots of advertisements for home delivered pizza's. He had found the name of the previous tenant of the house successfully after ten minutes of letterbox-key-matching exercise. She smiled, as it looked like that they were finally going to get a roof to stay on their first day in the alien country.

He had to repeat the exercise of knocking on doors and asking the surprised inmates, this time however a different question. " Do  you know the house of the person named Aljabarya?". The success depended a lot on how he would pronounce the nine letters. 

German uses the Latin alphabet. This is where the similarity between English and German ends. The letter "J" is pronounced as "Yo" and "Y" is called "Epsilon". This makes Jaya  as Yayya and a telugu second name like makanaboyina no short of a tongue twister. Aljabarya had two of these modified letters. 

Ten minutes into the search for the unknown house to which he had the keys, he knew that asking people about this strangely named person was futile. He wasn't even sure if he was saying his name the right way and had scrawled it down on a piece of scrap paper and hopefully showed it to people. He said, "Now only one way is remaining". 

He knew that he would be seen more as a thief than as a future neighbor by doing this but he had to do it. 

German houses are very well insulated. They need this to keep the cold winds out during the winter months. The double or in this case triple glass windows not only keep heat from within the house from being lost to the outside atmosphere but also keep all kinds of sounds out. More often than not, there are huge screens covering the windows in the German houses. He knew by the strong disapproving looks that he had received by knocking at the doors at the odd time, that Germans loved their privacy; and now he was going to do the most unimaginable. With his key, he started to tried each door where he wasn't able to hear or sense any motion from within the house. He hoped, that the mysterious door, behind which lay an respite from the immediate misery showed up soon enough. 

"Let us be clever", she said after he returned from an unsuccessful round of trying different doors on the floor above. 

"If it is "Whg 26", it should be on the second floor."

"Yes", he agreed. "But where is the second floor? ". The elevator had only the buttons marking the odd numbers one and three. On the first floor all the usual suspects had been inspected. 

"May i try my luck", she took the lead now. In a problematic situation, if the regular guy has run out of ideas, it makes sense for someone else to take lead. This may hurt the ego but saves the situation. 

He looked at his friend who was telling about his job and what is where in Ulm. She had been on the "Hunt for the Whg 26" for the last 10 minutes. He expected to hear a shriek of triumph any moment. All she saw was her stepping out from the elevator. Before he could ask, she gave a report of all the doors she tried and visited. There had been two doors that had opened and one where the key had entered completely and was turning through the keyhole, though the door wouldn't budge. The doors that could be opened where the connecting different floors. 

"This has to be it", he said as he heaved against the door and pushed. Sherlock holmes stated 

"when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth".

With the typical sound of the locking cylinders opening, the door opened. She started jumping and he smiled. They where in their temporary abode in a foreign land, away from home. "Schritte-1" - Step1 in the journey was complete. 

[Here ends Chapter 1 of Memoirs of "His and Her". Based on readers comments further chapters would be written!] 

Memoirs of "His and Her" - 3

[ Continued from part1 available here ]

The ICE entered Ulm station and was slowing to a stop. Unlike his own country, there was no tea vendor who jumped with the rhetorical "chai chai"; no rush of people trying to enter the train from every possible crevice to secure a seat; no shouting of people trying to take control of the situation; no bravehearts swinging out of the door to check on which side the platform would be. "Here everything is well defined", he thought. She stepped outside to collect the heavy bags as he heaved them out one after the other, after the automatic doors hissed open. The direction of the platform was already marked on the bright LED display near the doors. 

Ten minutes into Ulm and he realized that he his friend who had the house keys was no where to be seen. First things first, let us try to move the baggage to the railway station exit. He could see the anxiety replacing the excitement that was on her face, as she stood in a country that was not hers, speaking a language in which she couldn't communicate, having customs which she neither understood or knew about. 

"Welcome Bhai. How was your journey?", enquired his friend as he heaved the heaviest of the bags on the rental trolley available at the railway station. The pleasantries where exchanged as they painfully dragged the trolleys in the direction of the exit. The mercury had moved northwards in the meanwhile and it was a pleasant twenty six degrees and the sun was shining. "These are signs that things will go alright with us" he assured her as she was looking around to find out what should be their next step. 

"Nein Nein, zu viel Gepaeck", murmured the cab driver as he looked away when we approached him just outside the railway station. He looked at his friend, hoping that he would provide a solution. "Maybe we should try there", he said pointing at a bigger van like taxi standing at a distance. A burly looking guy lifted the bags into the rear of the taxi without another word. He made the thirty odd kilos of luggage look like feather light. It was less than ten minutes and they stood in front of a building which looked like a building complex. "Ten Euros. Three for the bags and seven for the travel". He paid him without thinking much. He wanted to rest and so did she. 

His friend handed him the key. "Whg 26", stated the keychain. He explained her that it meant "Wohnung Nummer 26" or "House Number 26". He knew that technically it was not a "Wohnung" but a "Appartment".  The building complex  was in the shape of a square with a garden at the center. The buildings on the four sides where atleast four storeys high. He did not know where to find the door behind which he would be living for the next three months. "Let me try the second floor", he said. The elevator was key operated one. This was a surprise to her; As back home, keys where meant to open doors not to take one to a particular floor in a building. 

"Hello, I am looking for house No. 26", he asked in German the lady who seemed to have been startled to have someone ring her bell on a lazy Saturday afternoon. " Who's house are you looking for?" she enquired. " I am coming from India. I have rented an apartment here and i have the keys which say that i have rented apartment number 26, but i have no clue where it is", he said. "No Idea" she said and further even told that she didn't even know what her apartment number is. He knew it would be wasted effort if he pursued this further and moved on after thanking her for her time. A couple of door bells and repeating the same story over and over, he knew that hardly anyone recognized apartments by their number. He would have to ask his friend to give a call to the owner, since he did not mobile connection.

Asking someone for help is not always easy. He knew that in Germany, life was different and everyone was living in his own cocoon with every social interaction being a well planned activity. Most families got together with their parents and siblings once a year, normally during the Christmas time. Everything was timed and planned.

 "Can you help me. Could you please make a call to the owner". After five futile attempts and reaching the mailbox of the owner for the fifth time he gave up. He had to find a way to find "Whg 26" and there was no one who could help him. She was already looking worried. "What should we do now?", she said. He could hear the quiver in her voice. " This is not typical in Germany, everything should be easy to find", his friend gave his five cents to the situation. He looked at the key pair in his hand and wondered. 

Five gyaan points from Linkedin

I found this on linkedin. Lately i have almost gone through 4 out of the 5 notions described above. Quite clearly to me, No.3 is the one that i have to really go through and become what i "should be". Here is brief of my thoughts about these -

In my thrity odd years of life on this earth the last twenty of which i quite distinctly remember, i have noticed that quite often it is only a thin ray of hope that you receive from some corner of the cosmos that propels you to finally succeed. I am quite sure that even the greatest achievers had more than their share of people who did not believe in them directly, openly or indirectly and discreetly. They say that "Log Kya kahenge" has killed more dreams than anything ever did...and as a satire to that Neha once told...
"Log kya kahenge, agar yeh bhi ham soche, to phir log kya sochenge". 
So point No.1 - 100% true. Point of caution, please make a distinction between opinion and experience. If you can learn from other persons experience, do learn from it, but do not fear it. 

No.2 is the most common think the achiever experiences. Success breed success. However, it also reduces the endurance against failures. Quite often we start hating ourselves due to the one incidence that happens and trust that life has nothing but misfortune and failure for us. A quote that could perhaps take  you through this when you are really low...
"Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday". 

An opportunity quite seldom knocks your door if you really haven't worked to build one. I would say luck favors those who really work for it. Lucky charm, Numerology etc if really would have worked would have produce enough billionaires to fill whole of china. These are just mental calming mechanisms. They instill the same time of confidence that believing in god or getting blessing from elders does. This is a topic of psychology and should be perhaps dealt in detail in a later blog post.

The last one really is the icing on the cake. Beginning a day with a grateful heart just is the best stress buster you could ever think of. Our movies have of late portrayed that this is essentially a nerdy un-cool way of starting a day. A day should be fully of energy...blah blah blah...Well A day should be all that and along with that a humble and grateful heart makes the whole thing perfect. Why? When you are humble and grateful for the day, you know that you are only in so much control of the day as it allows you control over it. My dad's quote on this...
" Like the sun becomes smaller as he goes higher, so should the ego of a person as he grows in life". 

That's my 2 cents worth of gyaan on this wonderful placard. 

Memoirs of "His and Her" -2

[Continued from Part 1 available here] 

The time was running out and the train arrival was now just moments away. He was getting worried. He wasn't sure how he could go around with all the bags looking for her. The regular patrolling in the airport meant that if he left the bags there without being around most likely his next few hours would be with the Bundespolizei. 

"Phew" is the english expression to describe the sense of relief. I think the word hardly does justice to the emotions that ran through him when he saw her walking towards him, bewildered by the enormity of the Frankfurt airport. Controlling his anger for her unworried us attitude and at the same time reminding himself that he was at fault by not informing her about the exact train departure time, he asked her to make hurry. 

"ICE" stands for Inter-city express. These are the high speed trains that connect major cities in Germany. These includes not just the capital cities of different states also called Bundesland, but also many other large cities. These trains have separate sections for the first and second class passengers, most often separated by the pantry car. He referred to the chart on the notice board to position himself in a place so that he could easily get into a second class compartment. The sparse density in trains means that there is no mandatory reservation. One pays for this ticket and if he wants a reserved seat he would have to pay slightly more additionally. Back in his country, he wouldn't have a chance in hell to get a seat on one of the express trains if he hadn't chosen a ticket with reservation and even then there was the possibility that someone would encroach his seat. 

Their share of problems hadn't been finished yet. Just a few minutes before the approach of the train, she observed that there was some text being displayed on the screen. He looked up and realized that the position they had chosen to stand would park them directly in front of the pantry car. The coaches in this particular train had been shuffled. 

There are exceptions to every rule. It is not without reason that Murphy's law is such a famous one. On the train he noticed that there was hardly a single seat that was vacant. It was more difficult for him to squeeze his baggage between the seats and the compartment walls, but with the famous Jugaad  technique he did manage to arrange them. The stood capriciously in the corner when she said "I am hungry. But i don't feel like eating anything". He knew that this meant, that she was hungry and because she was worried about spending money in euro's she wasn't willing to have anything. If you would expect that after paying more than forty grand per ticket, you would get a stomach full of meal on an 10 hour flight journey, you are quite mistaken. You do get a meal and a snack, the later of which could be easily mistaken for warm wet sponge. He knew this and had promised himself that he would try to resist his temptation to back calculate the costs from euros to his home currency while spending in Germany. 

Eight euros and Fifty  cents was the bill and he said "Nine please". If it were not for god's remarkable design with her eyes, they would have popped out in surprise. After the waiter made his way back with a nonchalant smirk, she blurted out "Nine? Why?". He smiled. She remembered what he had said, " New country New rules New us". 

He just remembered that his train was running late by thirty minutes. He knew that in a country that was so finical about punctuality, this wouldn't be short of an embarrassment. This country is changing, it is not what it used to be....But wasn't the arrival of likes of him was the effect and cause of the situation. 

Every change has two sides to it. You make the change if the side that you don't like has lesser influence that than the side that you like. They too had taken the decision after giving it a lot of thought. She had chosen to give up a lot for him. Her job, her freedom of speech since in Germany she could be hardly understood without her knowledge of the language, her friends, her family which constituted the better part of half of her home town. For him it was his parents whom he loved, his pampered life, his friends and office team, each member of whose had been hand-picked, supported and groomed in someway by him. 

"I had to inform him. I hope he still waits for us. He has our keys!!", he said to her. He was mentioning about his friend who had collected the keys to his temporary accommodation in Germany. He was supposed to meet them in the Bahnhof. A delay in the arrival of the train would mean that he wouldn't wait or miss them or just assume that something was wrong. How humans behave is unexpected situations is a area under study for several years now. He by no means was an expert at this. 

[To be continued]

Need by night and weed by day

India is a country of 330 million gods they say. Quite clearly the number is inflated and according to vedas there were actually 33 prime gods. Even if we ignore the two numbers and just take a count of the festivals where we have goddess as the protagonist then 3 festivals pop out in my mind, namely Durga Pooja, Kali Pooja and Sharada Pooja. The former two being the biggest festivals in the east of India especially west Bengal. 

Based on the above statements it is quite clear that the feminine divine form did get a lot of mention and power in our religious history and continue to get a lot of attention in our current way of life as well. Having set that context, i would request you to please visit this link ..

If you have bothered to click that and had the time to go through the video, you would realize that a very important question is being posed at us.

1. If these girls are really such a big curse on the society (by the way the society treats them), then why did we create them in the first place. 
2. If we really are not hypocrites then why are we not respecting the women the way they need to be respected.

Personally, i am not against prostitution. It has been one of the oldest thriving businesses from times immemorial. The disheartening part though is that the treatment that these sex-workers get is worse than one would give to a dog. Every business is governed by the principle of Demand-N-Supply. In India approximately two million sex-workers are living in the shadow of fear, insecurity and mostly a bleak future. To have a supply of two million, we do definitely have significant demand in terms of libido outside of the currently "socially acceptable" relationships. 

Our society is the one that doesn't want them by the day but loves to have them by the night. Why shouldn't we legalize prostitution in India, if this can at least guarantee that the industry doesn't have to do things clandestinely.  Though, there is nothing clandestine about it. People know which areas are so called "Red-Light" areas and who are the sex-workers. We only are shy to accept that we know about it. This illegal aspect of prostitution leads to several layers of exploitation for the people who are at the very bottom of the chain, the sex-workers.

In a way every country that doesn't legalize prostitution but also is unable to root it out in a morally right way, is just covering up its cowardice and impotency. Every human being who is not causing harm to another is useful to the society. Why do we have to treat sex-workers as untouchables if it is our carnal lust that led to the flourishing of this industry? 

What could be a morally right way (if we choose to use that solution!!)? you could ask...because this "Dhanda" has been there from vedic times...The solution is simple, reduce the demand...by market law the supply will stop. And provide alternate paths for those involved in the supply part of the chain. To reduce the demand penalize the receiver of the sex-services and protect the provider...

By the way...This could be another way

Neither legalizing it nor uprooting is just like sitting on a time-bomb!!

Memoirs of "His and Her"

His posture was calm and composed, defying the thunderstorms of anxiety building in the underbelly of his outer composure. She was sitting next to him for the first time in an international flight. That however, was not the reason for his anxiety.

The last few days had been quite a chaos. It was more of a fluke that everything had worked as if it was pre-planned. The reality was a far cry from that. The tickets had arrived just two weeks prior to the departure. The third bag had been purchased just days before their flight and only in the last week did they order haphazardly on the online web portals, giving little thought to who was giving the best prices in the town; The things that would perhaps be their most important tools for survival in the days to come. 

The land though not new to the him, held still a lot of challenges that it would throw up once he started living there. She looked more calmer than him. If it was her obliviousness to problems which were to come or her immense trust in his abilities to look out for her and keep things under control couldn't be made out by her looks. 

The captain announced the arrival of their flight in the Frankfurt airport with the outside temperature hovering just a few degrees above the freezing point of water. "Typical German weather for this time of the year" declared the mid-aged person sitting next to him. He had tried hard to get a 2 seat slot on the flight, but had to end up sitting on a 3 seat one with him sitting in the middle. She was to his left and had slept on his shoulder most of the journey. 

"It is going to be cold outside. Try to keep yourself warm", he warned her as they started removing the stuff from the upper cabinets after the plane had come to a complete halt. Already the semi-chaos had broken, with kids starting to cry due the sudden change of pressure and noise, young software engineers who had come for the first time trying to get a glimpse of the land through the fogged windows of the flight, trying to not lose a single minute of their time on the foreign soil to look around, In-transit passengers looking for where they had to go to catch their connecting flights and so on. She knew that the next step was to collect the bags. That had been a point of worry in his mind, since they had lots of them and knew that the concept of a "Coolie" which was fast dwindling in India, was hardly ever present in Germany. 

"Woher kommen Sie und wie lange beleiben Sie bei uns ?" ("Where are you coming from and how long are you going to stay here?", asked the guy at the immigration desk in a police apparel. He knew that she would look at him for the answer and had accompanied her to the desk, inviting strange looks from the people around who knew that normally one person could approach the immigration desk at a time. He explained, "I have got a permanent job here. We are going to stay here for unlimited time". For a moment it took him back to the time where things were not working out for him and everyone around him told him that he was not good enough to do anything to but continue at the mercy of his current bosses. Thankfully, he had not believed them and had applied for job positions in Germany and as luck could have it had landed himself a job in a well reputed company. He smiled for the first time in the past eight days as the immigration clerk, stamped their passports and said "Viel Gluck. Aufweidersehen" ("Good Luck, Goodbye). 

Luck and Destiny! That is what had got him here across seven seas. He needed the former more than the later at the moment. Looking around he found the symbol with the text "Gepäckwagen".  It took him a moment to realize that he had to pay two Euros as a deposit money for the trolley and could use it to take his heavy bags down to the Railway station. How he would bring them back or where he could leave them at the end was still something he hadn't worried about. Happy that she would not have to drag the bags herself, he was relaxed. He knew all too well, that she was too puny and would really have a hard time pulling the heavy bags. 

Frankfurt am Main, one of the busiest airports in the world, has a direct train connectivity in the floor right beneath the airport. The flip side though is that from the moment you left the airport the outside air wouldn't be too kind to you. It would suck every bit of warmth in your body, no matter what you wore. He had to time their exit from the heated airport so that they did not have to bear the brunt of the cold outside air. The free Wi-fi provided him an opportunity to use the VOIP based call to their parents, who both of them were already missing. He was worried that she would become too emotional. She did not get emotional and that was a surprise learning for him. He had never taken tickets from the D-Bahn terminal by entering a code. Back at his own country, no body would send you a code to print a ticket. The concept simply did not exist. He didn't know if it would ever work. He had always had the privilege of travelling by plane from the starting destination to the end point. 

She wanted to visit the rest room. He looked around, showed her the entry door to the ladies toilet and explained her that he would wait just before the exit from the airport and entry into the railway station. He waited for her. The wait kept getting longer and he got exceedingly worried. 

Humans, Dolphins and Orangutans are among the few species which have a huge frontal lobe in their brains which gives them the immense power to imagine. This imagination leads humans to do wonderful things like paint masterpieces, build bridges, create compositions which would melt the hardest hearts, achieve remarkable sport feats. On the flip side this also leads to internal conflicts. The realities of two people are never the same since both have a part of their perception polluted by imagination. For him though, his imagination was right now hyperactive.  Had she got into some trouble? Was she crying now in the rest-room? Had she got lost he way in the humongous airport? Had she missed the spot where she had agreed to return ? Time on the other hand was running out. He realized that she was not aware of the train timing. 

[To be continued...]

Atheist and Theist

A few years back i wrote a few things about the ideas i carry about god and religion.[ here] In the years from then to now, a couple of things have changed my views about these subjects. 

Before i write more, i would like to place myself as a "Questioning Believer". At the same time i carry the view that both atheism and theism are matters of personal choice, one not being superior over the other in any respect. Today i would like to just put a few things into perspective for those atheists who write off every believer using scientific reasoning. 

When my parents where young, if someone would have told them that communicating with a distant land using a device that could be the size of ones palm, he would be considered someone who had had one too many. 

However, by records English caricaturist Lewis Baumer had miraculously got the vision and had painted this in one of his cartoon in 1906. Now, one could discount this as saying that already radio communication was available and he could have just minimized the size whereby nothing much to argue there. 

The point is that if something is not yet scientifically available or proven, but someone believes that it is possible, he isn't crazy. It is his idea or vision, which could be realized some day. 

Socrates the famous ancient Greek philosopher had stated that "What i do not know, i do not think i know". This is something that all of us have to follow, because unless proven untrue isn't true and apt in all situations. Nicolaus Copernicous from Poland, had proposed that earth wasn't the center of the universe. The church condemned him and even banned his work. Great !! +1 for all atheists. 

At the same time everything he stated was also not true. We know that Sun is not at the center of the universe today. Yes, he had experiments and hypothesis that showed that Sun was at the center, but his idea of the universe was as weak as today our idea is about sub-bosonic particle (if existence of such a particle could be proven in future). 

This could perhaps lead to the same surprise that followers of Newton's corpuscular theory of light had when Huygen showed them that light could and would behave as a wave. 

The point is that atheists who make fun of the theists should try to understand that even their own understanding is quite limited. The ideas that the theists carry are the ideas that give them comfort and a sense of well being, some of which could be at some point be scientifically proven. 

On the closing note, i would like to also point out that theists shouldn't also insist that every buys into their idea of god and supernatural powers. The atheists are qualified for their views as much as the theists are to their beliefs, howsoever absurd it may sound. 

So in the end, as long as we are not inflicting pain, misery and problems to the other group, each is free to hold their views on the topic. 

Note: In one of my previous post Rags had posted a question in the comments. I have been since then trying to find the answer to the question. Some recently acquired knowledge seems to help me comment on that topic. But that will be the content of following posts.  

Need of the hour - Engineers

The article here from times        quotes that a large portion our defense equipment still consists of parts from other countries. While blaming the government for allocating a smaller budget for defense research it also throws a handful of flak on DRDO, India's Defense research organization. 

On one hand while i feel that there is definitely a lack of discipline in the way some of our defense organizations work, i do not entirely blame them. As with any research organization there are a lot of slacks in DRDO as well. However, in spite of this we are have Tejas which flies. We have the HAL produced, Dhruv which also bags us some international orders. While we can endlessly debate if the current situation is justified in its true sense or could have been better, I would like to present an alternate view here. 

To be able to achieve something, we should start dreaming about it and be able to visualize it. In order to be able to visualize something it should be something that is presented always in the good limelight. for example, the American army veterans are almost always glorified for their services rendered to the nation, albeit at times they might have hardly set foot off the American soil. In India great scientists like C N R Rao, get the front page only when he makes a controversial statement (in the view of the rest of the nation), that a majority of the IT companies are having IT coolies working for them. 

I remember my colleague in college who presented a paper on "Counter-Counter Intelligence" and how technology was doing good there. He had the dream and the perceived his goal like a devil.Today he holds a Ph.d and works in pure research area. Had we produced more such geniuses we wouldn't have had to worry about the lack of discipline in our organizations. The reason why we do not produce such people in bulk is because no one really glorifies these career paths. He is just pushed around as a professor who  had nothing in his life but to learn. Isn't it true that IT had presented India with a golden opportunity to do what we couldn't do with the 1000 years of technology, but we screwed it up and ended up as service providers who because of our superior English and lower cost look like havens of cheap work to be done. 

In the end all engineering is about maths and physics. The latter borrowing heavily from the former. Mathematical expertise is not new to India. Vedic maths is still a subject for study in more than one international universities. Then why do we struggle to produce wonderful engineers. Computer Engineering is hardly about programming and programming languages. 

We have had enough of Implementation tasks....We need to produce now designers, Conceptualizers  and Innovators....Time to change is Now...or Never.