UPDATES

I am so sorry that i havent written in a loong time.....and how i have missed my blog!! pretty strange how u miss a thing so much more when u want it and u cant do it.....had planning to post in an entry over the weekend but as happens with all weekends, the two days flew by and monday morning was there before i could take a deep lazy breath :-(

then on monday i was pretty free at work and was browsing thru dates for the L0 certification exam. since so many people are taking it, i had heard that it was pretty difficult to get dates so when i saw that 29th was available, i took it before thinking twice......and then!!!!! i saw the material to be studied and my heart sank sank sank.......the volume was so so much that monday to sirf material dekhne mein chala gaya :-( well i planned to tackle it from tuesday since i dont believe in staying in office after 6.30 and of course u dont think of office when u r home.....

by the time tuesday was over and i was nowhere near completion, i realised that i had to take emergency measures....i mulled over it whole of tuesday evening and finally decided to reschedule the exam. wed office aate aate i went to change the date and lo! i cud not do it!! then i came to know that reschedule was possible till 3 days before the exam and not 2 as was my impression. I had already hit the panice button and now i literally jammed it!!! wed din bhar i tried to become a ghissu with intermittent attempts to locate the "Cancel" button. Sekar had cancelled his L1 using some "cancel button" and i desperately tried to locate one! (btw last tak mujhe woh button nahi mila and i wonder whether he was telling the truth!) by wed evening i had not been able to cancel it and i had started planning to fall sick on friday as a desperate measure! fir pata chala ki one day prior to the exam, u get a mail which has the elusive cancel button......i clutched at that straw!

thursday aaya aur subah se us mail ka intezaar shuru.....in the meantime i spoke to people.....60% was pass marks and the best marks were only in 70s....it seems that u can get 60 but above that i tuf....yahan to 60 ki hi fight chal rahi thi....i now resolved to use the cancel button even though it meant losing one attempt (and the result would be "not cleared" and not "absent")......i started going thru a ppt to while away time while waiting for the mail.......and that stupid mail came at 5.30 in the evening! the situation was actually pretty funny....i was giving my cubicle mates and hourly update on the status of the mail and they were making fun of my attempts at studying! by the time the mail came, i was so bugged that i resolved to write the exam even if i failed.

friday subah se every body was waiting for 3 o clock in anticipation. by this time everybody in my floor area knew about my condition and ghar pe to of course ppl knew! ppl were betting on how long i wud take to finish the exam (the duration was 2 hours)....and who wud give the treat depending on wthr i passed or failed......bangia ne to countdown bhi shuru kar di and he had a field time when i stopped studying at 2! khair exam diya and before i clicked on the final submit button, i stared at it for a couple of minutes and invoked all the gods i knew.....and mercifully i scored 73 :-)

yeh thi taaza khabar jiske karan main orkut, blog, phone, mail sab se gayab thi :-)

and yes, salary to aaya par sirf slip while the account balance is still zero :-)

Jhoom Barabar Jhoom

The only thing i can say is that pls don't watch this movie even if somebody takes you for free.......And watch it for money only if you don't have money for the next meal.....
it was after a long long time that i went to the theatre and this is what happened!!!!

This week has been really hectic in office and looks as if it is going to continue for the next week too....i am trying to become an efficient "document generator" (yes, this is what MBA's do! but now i have stopped wondering why the english and formatting is so much more imp than the content......fine u want to create an impression and want the doc to be self explanatory but discussing what color to put for highlighting is a bit extreme!!!! but then all MBAs have to earn their salary at the end of the day!!!!)

The good takeaway from the past weekend and this week are that now i can drive in almost every condition.....night, day, rains etc....and dd has now agreed that i NEED a car!!!! good for me!!!

Finally shifting to aundh this weekend....although i dont want to :-( not seeing chikki is smthg i dont even want to imagine :-( this weekend i ll just go and put in all the stuff....will actually start staying there from july.....

But, on the whole i am enjoying life.....just need to figure out what to do next to keep the interest going....if u dont have a boyfriend, u need to keep thinking of different things to keep u entertained!! for me gym and guitar classes are next on the list.....

gotta go to office....ciao!!!

Addendum

An addendum to the previous post......
Yesterday evening, while coming from office in the peak rush hour, on a crowded 2 lane road, a six seater came towards directly in my lane. I stopped and waited for him to move back into his lane since there was a steep drop on my left and no pavement......For my refusal to edge towards the drop on my left and try adventurous stunts, i got a really murderous and exasperated "oh my god, these female drivers" look....but as my jijaji says, inka kya jayega, yeh roz marne ke tareeke dhoondhte hain, but for me if i do one silly mistake my driving permit will be revoked!! so i prefer safety and the snide remarks :-)

WOMEN DRIVERS.....

the topic and its related abuse has plagued us poor superwomen since the beginning of time......but why have i decided to voice out the fairer sex's side of the story now.....its all because of this .....i normally dont give a paisa for what Pune Times says but today it touched a raw nerve!

I really have tried to understand objectively the attitude of the men drivers towards their colleagues in the opposite gender....Just because we are the fairer, and (supposedly) daintier sex, doesnt mean that we are careless and irresponsible driver who will mow down someone because she was checking out her make up in the rear view mirror or who cannot parallel park her car! Women across geographies, generations and societies identify with this victimisation ....the reactions range from muttered expletives accompanied by a loud and forceful "these women drivers" to vociferous diatribes on the level of driving skills and traffic sense we women have.....

Lets come to the facts and figures.....how many rude drivers and shouting matches between two vehicles due you come across everyday? Pretty common, i should say....Esp in NCR region, you become accustomed to seeing two vehicles parked right in the middle of the road, the drivers shouting at each other while the other vehicle try to edge in from the sides and continue.....Now, out of these people, how many are women?

How many does it happen that you are driving peacefully, minding you own business and way, when suddenly a driver cuts in front of you or tries to take a turn right in front of you, not ready to wait for the extra few seconds in which you would have gone and the road would have been quite clear for him/her? Out of these people, how many are women?
These are the things which spoil our mood and leave a disquieting feeling....now the typical man who things that when he cuts in traffic, he is adroit and when a woman does it, she is clumsy, will argue that since the number of woman drivers are less, we don't see these things.....but even if we consider the ratio, we find that it will not be comparable.....in my driving "career", i cannot remember a single lady driver who stopped her car/bike just to shout at me and vent her frustrations of mid life crisis.....

Lets look at the case of accidents.....number of accidents involving women is very less and for that i agree that lesser number of female drivers is a reason to some extent but if we look at the following data and i quote from this source:

In a data set of 14030 car drivers, 62% have never had any accident while the remaining 38% had at least one accident while driving. What factors may characterize accident free drivers, he asks. One possible factor is gender and a cross table answers the point.

Men% Women %
Never had an accident while driving 56 68
Had at least one accident while driving 44 32
Total 100 100
Number of cases 7080 6950

It appears that women are safer drivers than men. Zeisel then recommends that before closing the case we should consider introducing additional factors, which may modify the conclusion or at least give some warning. He proceeds to include a factor namely ‘amount of driving’ He introduces two categories, those who drive more than 10k miles annually and those who drive less. Now we can compare genders within each of these sub-categories. The result is surprising.

Men Women
Drove above 10k miles Drove 10k/ less Drove above 10k Drove 10k/ less
% of persons in that group

with at least one accident 52 25 52 25
Number of persons 5010 2070 1915 5035

It appears that there is hardly any difference between genders. The earlier apparent difference is attributable to the fact that women generally tend to drive less than men.

We find that if we not take the gender ratio in consideration then number of accidents is not based on gender while if we don't then women are safer drivers!!! Accidents are a good indicator of the driving skills coupled with the couple of points discussed in the beginning.....

I leave you to draw your own conclusions as to why men so loudly denounce women on roads....maybe its just another (of the numerous) way of dealing with their insecurity and boosting their ego......

Reflections

yes yes, i know its been a long time since this space has been updated and yeah i am upset about it! i just cant seem to manage my time....my blog and my orkut page seem to come in the bottom of the priority pyramind with Jehangir Hospital and bus timings occupying the apex.....life's been a bit of nuisance with everybody falling ill one after another but its easy to cope with it once u stop asking the "Why" and accept it as "chalo yeh bhi sahi"......

so what have i been doing? office is fun till now! esp as i have some work which keeps me busy.....not important enuf to make me forego the fun part and not trivial enuf to make me bored! great colleagues ( would be writing in more about that later!!!!) the bus rides are terrible with around 3 hours being wasted in it....but on the plus side i m getting to catch up on music....a love which i had to neglect in the past few months....

its tuf to relate my office with the image the company held in my heart when we passed from college (yeah college for me still means surat, not mdi! )....at that i wud have given so much to join here....just for the fact that so many of my friends were here....and today there is no one from the old gang....some have left the company, some have left the country and some have left my life......but i am happy because after a long time i m at a place where i want to be and not because i have to be (or chafing at my decision of being there)

chikki is doing good...the fight for the name continues....i think i ll win simply because i am the general PA around the house and i wud be sent to apply for the passport hence she wud be having the name i fill in the form!! its fun watching and holding her (i can understand how working parents feel when they have to leave their kids at home!)

friends getting married right, left, center!! u login to orkut and status of 10 ppl wud be changed....for once i am happy to sit back and observe the proceedings.....in sekar's words "i'm still happy"!!!

one good thing out of the past travails has been that now i can drive AND PARK by myself! and believe it or not a 26 year old is NOT allowed to drive till hinjewadi alone :-(
thats it on the personal front.

and yes, i havent seen a movie for ages.
looking forward to reconnecting with friends :-)
and i ll try to be more regular on orkut.

P.S. all my questions and confusions regarding fate and god have been shelved and stored and hopefully not forgotten and ignored forever!

Updates

Well, yeah i m bak with the updates!!
Finally my VACATION is over......sigh.....bhool gaye the ki kya halat hoti hai din bhar formals pehen kar rahne mein.....din bhar us "comfortable chair in AC" mein PC ke samne baithne mein.....and the new thing....the long long commute to office.....

some things good....some things bad with this new innings....the work culture definitely "seems" to be better....lets see what happens as we go forward.....the BAs(Business Analyst) are made to believe that they are an exclusive breed on whom the project depends for its smooth execution.....talk about misplaces self importance!!!! endless boring ppts ...as usual......with no takeaways as usual!!

hinjewadi is really far from pune!! i dont know why they had to make the software park there.....and getting up so early in the morning is a real pain....abhi me and bhaiya have worked out a compromise....we go by car so that we can leave late and although i have to wait a bit for him while returning, at least i m getting to improve my driving skills.....
during the first two days of corporate induction, we had sessions from chennai broadcast on VSAT in which all the centres joined in....pehle presentation mein beech mein bande ne poochha "any questions".....nobody asked (pretty surprising....since the audience was a bunch of dumb MBAs!!) fir ronnie sitting beside me wondered why gattu wasnt asking a question....and at that very instant the speaker announced "we have a question from bangalore"!!!! yo gattu...way to go!!!! for my non mdi friends gattu is one of the reliable persons who will definitely "interact" and ask "intelligent questions" in a ppt which will surely leave the speaker stumped!!!!

the food is horrible as meenal had predicted and i just hope that i dont put bak all that i have lost without even reaching my target point! and sreeni says that the food in our cafeteria (the building where our training is held) is much better than in the main building!! hey bhagwan!! yeh kismat!! btw it was fun meeting sreeni again....2 days we went together in the bus since we are on the same route and it was fun revisiting the college days and the path all of us have traversed till now!!

once u start going to office, weekends seem overflowing with chores :-( and my bike registration saga refuses to budge forward.....ek to rto is closed on alternate saturdays...upar se aaj gaye to pata chala ki the original person spsd to do the job to leave pe tha hi, his replacement was also on leave!! they want the original invoice of the bike otherwise i ll have to pay taxes on current prices!!! pata nahi yeh kahani kahan khatam hogi......

i have finally seen "Dor" and "Ijazzat".....actually training used to get over by 4 and i used to have a couple of hourse to killl....the video parts of my various ipods were tested then! but now i have my login etc so vellapanti curbed from monday.....and to think that these movies had been loaded in my ipod by Anup during convocation aur abhi tak mujhe time nahi hua tha....really busy me!!!

the only sad point of my new life is that i get so little time with chikki...i miss her throughout the day!! i wonder how it will be when i move out or if she goes abroad :-(....all my rights have been usurped... ab sab kuch dd karti hai....i hope she will still recognize me....and yes she has recovered beautifully from chicken pox so things look great for the moment!!

thats the update of week 1....getting so tired in the evening without even doing any work in office shud not become the norm, i hope.......and yes, all the best to all people starting work on monday.....