When was the last time anyone ever thought of blogging at 8 am on a friday morning ?

But then i dont actually remember the last time i actually enjoyed working from dawn to dusk every day of the week either.

Living in a small town in a big house* with super cool parents** = 25 mins to work (which is actually 20 km away) + Nice, extremely cost effective housekeeping, backoffice and car maintenance => Superlative productivity, use of time

It is kind of like the first time in my adult life ive actually spent a big stretch of time here at home & i have nearly 100% stopped feeling out of place or feeling bad about work.

I cant explain how exciting work is - i can now shoot off cost estimates for sq.ft or cu.ft of 9 inch brick walls / 4.5 inch brick walls (with / without fancy finishing) or GI panels with single skin fill / Honeycomb or PUF infills - design from scratch Class 100,000 AHUs for big layouts with VFD controlled blowers, motorized dampers and skada powered automatic pressure balancing, air conditioning loads and so on..

With nearly 50% of the major hardware installed, we're thrilled with preliminary results & i already have approval for phase III - in addition to the lab (id always been obsessing about) - cleanroom work & capacity balancing for the other plant.

Theres of course a lot of implicit pressure on me - i am expected to sell - smoothly - nearly double the quantity from what we've been producing the last year or two - not just one - but two products now. Lots of Dossier work, that much is sure (MS word, HPLC work and pain in the arse)

The next year, i expect, will take out a lot of empty pages from the passport. (Subject to, of course, the plant turning out as sexy as we want it to turn out)

And um, does anyone know how this place will look like in the middle of October ? Fear not, if you dont know - we'll find out soon enough. Visa forms have arrived.

* & ** More on Marlon Brando & Zeenat 'Bharatmatrimony' Amman (and her latest obsession) later on when i have the energy.

Song of the month

We've gone without a song of the month for several months now. Heres one.

This song is of course part of Rabbi Shergill's brilliant first album (which of course every1 remembers because of the wildy famous 'Bulla Ki Jaana Main Kaun') .

This one, called Tere bin is also apparently part of the OST of some Hindi flick called Delhi Heights (starring another Shergill, Jimmy in this case. Related, are they?)

Now that the world has been saved by the brilliant Rabbi Shergill, lesser mortals like myself ought to get back to less glamorous, mundane things like reading oneself to sleep & hope to wake up on time for another week of PIC/S, ICH and *shudder* this.

News

There has been cause for substantial excitement this week at work - The lorryloads of thrislington panels have arrived - the Air handling units already in place and a couple of major client related hitches have been fixed. The order book is back to really robust levels and old man is actually spending most afternoons reading or staying at home.

Onto specific details:

I have express, unconditional approval for completing the Lab up - including a new spare Modular HPLC, Agilent 7820 GC** WITH a studly 1883 12 vial headspace sampler. Possibly also redo layouts, a new copier, possibly another Stability chamber, QA space with sample cabinets and so on.

I am doing up a sort of a webpage with more specific information on the lab - possibly basing the content backbone on the newly released PICS Aide Memoire* on Inspection of Laboratories. Mostly to be able to take comments from more knowledgable friends from the Industry who otherwise dont have the time to sift through these long emails i tend to send them with questions.

All the excitement aside, i feel a little pressurized because a) The whole project - done over the next 3 months involves an incredible amount of hifi hardware & money b) I am more than concerned about getting / training people in Madurai to do justice to all this fancy equipment.

Dont blame me if youre bored. Cant manage coherent thought on anything else.

More later.

(*You have to love the French. They call white papers "Aide Memoire"s which means that they are not strict guidelines but a sort of information document which can give a broad sense of the subject. Frenchification of terms does give them that added glamour :x. no? )

(** hell, i'd like the Agilent 7890 - with 2 simultaneously mountable detectors & inlet pressure controllable at 0.001 increments - but it costs about 8000 dollars more - a bit like Pulsar 150 VS Pulsar 220 - for buying a decent mobike for smalltime use in Madurai)

Stephen fry

Stephen Fry - we all know that the man can write. But the Hippopotamus, which i started with hardly any expectation at all - is more than brilliantly done.

Easy to read, almost Wodehousian in structure (this one is sort of set like one of those Blandings stories in a loose sort of way) - but Fry's outrageous fruity language will Im sure make Wodehouse blush in his grave if there is ever a comparision made :x

I ought to pick up his, rather queerly named, biography - 'Moab is my washspot' next.

Remember some of the elements of the 'power of the first person narrative' we discussed in the last post - this is another sublime example.

Mostly Miscellany, some MFS

Its been a hecticy, HUGELY productive week. Loads of work cleared through in Bombay, Vapi, Daman, Pune and now the last 2 days in Bangkok and back to Madras for a possible day or two.

One trip to Emporium's Kinokuniya already done. Theres one book in the bag - Travels with a Tangerine.

Will be leaving for another round just before leaving for the airport later today - after i make my mind up and pick two from a long list of Where Im calling from, Stephen Fry's Making History or The Hippopotamus - a few more noted down on paper subject to whats left on display.

Um, before we switch subjects - Ive decided that i am going to stop buying books in madras from now. You end up buying up some trash just because theres nothing else interesting on display. The folks at landmark ought to learn from Kinokuniya - there's roughly the same amount of shelf-space - but the books on offer are like much better in terms of quality, diversity.

On to another subject - I had earlier acquired a copy of Amit Varma's 'My Friend Sancho' - mostly because i was curious (Im sure every1 who reads his blog is) and its extremely cheap. Ive got through it in the last 2 days here. While one is sure to be reminded of a certain Chetan Bhagat - there ARE definite differences - noteworthy, in my opinion.

While on this subject - Bhagat deserves all the ass kicking he got because of writing something as commercial as '3 mistakes of my life' (or was it 5 mistakes?) - but there WAS that trace of originality in this first book - 'Five point someone' which made it stand out.

MFS is the story of Abir Ganguly, a young reporter living in Bombay and events occuring over a period of two weeks of this life. The whole book is 75% first person narrative, 25% conversations always featuring Abir with other characters or in some cases things like some funny illusional objects. (like the much hyped, but poorly used Talking geck0)

Before we get on with the review / gyaan - heres a typical passage from MFS - typed out, verbatim:

I tend to wisecrack a lot because of which i am not taken seriously.

When i was in college, a girl i had the hots for once told me that it was impossible to have a conversation with me because i was always dispensing one-liners. I realized that my wisecracking was a nervous tic.

When it came to that particular girl - Roma, she was called - all roads led to Roma in those days. I was terrified of making a fool of myself by saying something stupid. I was terrified of saying nothing at all, because i was so nervous that i couldnt think of anything but her lips and breasts.

(Actually her breasts: I just wrote 'lips' to sound a little respectable .) (Im kidding) So I'd wisecrack.

At first it would work, because chicks like guys with a sense of humour.Then they 'd get tired of me because they wanted something besides the bloody sense of humor. Anyway it did get me further with Roma than with any girl before her. We held hands while watching a film in a theatre.

Ruined the film, im telling you. But i did feel proud afterwards, as if i was no longer a virgin.

The book essentially is about a hundred odd pages of stuff similar to the above excerpt.

As anyone reading his blog will probably know - Varma writes short, incise, sharp stuff. With that in mind, it appears to me that MFS is like one of those ideas which went like : 'Ok.. i have this Angst-filled-Bong-Abir Ganguly character thought out, inspector Thombre, Journalism thing.. some interesting idea about illusional objects talking to Abir, Angst, Witty monologues, nicely sarcastic one-liners and my already rampant obsession with sex & bad words' and somehow finally it had to be somehow written up and published

- i dunno maybe to pay bills or something - without bothering about a lot of other things - lots of gaps in the story, the plot does not interest you one bit (hmm wait a minute, there is no plot! if you think of it that way) - its almost as if Varma wanted to get over with it and move on.

That said - now that ive finished it up - its easily readable (I read it on the Plane, in the Loo, on a bus - mostly sober, sometimes drunk and sometimes hungover - Now show me 1 book which is as easy to read as this :x) and fun in most parts.

One cant help but think of The Catcher and Salinger. But Varma, im guessing, needs a lot more patience, depth, a stronger storyline, more deeply illustrated characters and the discipline. But is a decent enough start and MFS is worth an hour or two (On a plane, in the Loo.Drunk/Hungover :x)

Ok. Thats long enough.

Had a great time here in Bangkok over the last 2 days. Great time at work. Feel happier than ive felt in months.

Did you know that :

Half a bottle of 4000 bhat/bottle Remy Martin Brandy + 4 rounds of Absolut Vodka (Raspberry flavored) + a totally B grade, 3 hour long adult cabaret show (All Courtesy Sh & Sk) + Really late kabab, salad dinner which ran into the wee hours of yesterday morning + 2 Hour foot massage = Sleeping through 3 alarms + Going red-eyed to morning meeting + Extremely upset stomach + feeling like a total juvenile asshole.

(Ok. Just before any1 gets any wrong ideas: I was totally joking about the foot massage and was hugely playing up the boozing part. But then this is how Abir Ganguly would have narrated.No? Heh)

The Loveguru - Part II

Yet another session with our studly Loveguru -

It famously started with a flamboyant - "Welcome to the real world of venus women, my dear marsian" - but then ran into a lot of 'chee chee' stuff - involving a lengthy discourse on this with specific fundae on the apparently 'very important aspects' of this

I have the following observation:

Our Loveguru's gyaan / theories are centered around the fact that Girls are very different from guys: complicated, moody, unpredictable and hard to interpret.

I dont agree - i think that Girls are the same species - physiologically slightly different - and like us, split time between doing work, cursing the work, bitching, shooting bull, indulging in various forms of attention seeking behaviour when in the mood and constantly obsessing about male equivalents of Megan Fox :x (Him** maybe?)

Eventual progress in such matters will come about if one's strategy is aligned to the school of thought/philosophy that appeals to each individual (Hari: Venus/Mars thing Me: My thing).

We'll see, wont we ?

(** Did you know that this no-good-SOB- is married to Scarlett Johanssen ? Lucky dawg!)