Football Lessons

Euro 2008 frenzy is all around me here. Especially with the dutch kicking ass of the world cup finalists, all Oranje fans are convinced that this their year. I am cheering for the Oranges this time too coz well you know they being the host country and paying for my holiday, it only seems fair. So all was well until I got too excited and decided to test my rusty legs on the football field again before the Germany-Portugal match. I went along with my footballer friend to the field where we met 14 other guys (some dutch , one spanish , 2 italians and one afrikaan). Everybody shook hands and then teams were decided with one side to play with bright green training jerseys. Now I know that football is a round ball that is supposed to be kicked around with your legs , occasionally with your head and you are suppossed to pass the ball to your teammates or put it between the legs of the last guy standing on the opposing side. But I learned a lot more yesterday and the lessons were very painful.

Lesson 1: Unless wearing shin guard ,dont provoke the Italians. I tried and he responded by well placed kick on the shin and thanks to him I am now walking around with a wobbly leg.

Lesson 2: Dont try to dribble for more than 5 seconds. Chances are you will be elbowed in the guts, shouldered in the back or simply kicked in the nuts while you curse your teammate for passing the ball to you. Did I mention there was no refree.

Lesson 3: Never volunteer to be a part of the wall that blocks free kicks. I did and was smacked right in the face with a  lump of smooth rubber travelling at 60miles/hr. Somewhere in my previous posts I mentioned something about a broken nose. Talk of predictions….

Lesson 4: Heading is not a good option if you arent doing it regularly. Apart from being downright ineffective it can also affect performance at workplace i.e. if you are not already underperforming.

P.S- The Dutch have now been knocked out so I m rooting for Turkey now.  They might just do a Greece this year.

Average Monday

8:30 am - Alarm breaks the silence of morning in my room , no rather in the whole neighborhood as I scramble to find it and then slink back into the quilt reasoning with myself that 15 minutes more wont cause a disaster.

9:15 am - This time I get up , draw open the curtains to let the sun or rain or whatever is coming down that day into my room. Then head slowly down to the toilet , taking care not to disturb the peace loving people around me with the creaking stairs and flapping chappals, not to mention the roaring sound of flush , announcing to the whole wide world that I just took a crap.

9:30 am- Pick up the toothbrush , wash it (though I dont need to , hardly any dust , but its a habit I picked up in hostel), put toothpaste and roll it around your dentures wondering at the same time what excuse am I going to put forward for the late arrival to the supervisor.

9:35 am- Head into the warm shower and as the good hot water hits me , I slowly forget about the time until 20 minutes later when I stop doodling around coz its 5 minutes to 10 and I am not even dressed yet. I quickly dry myself , head into the room, put on some t-shirt ,then a sweat shirt and then a jacket, because in a day in nederlands you are never really sure how many types of weather are you going to confront in a day. It can vary from hot sunny - cold sunny- pleasant windy - cold windy - cold hard rain - cold drizzle and so on.

10:05 am- For the lack of time as well as decent culinary skills , break 3 eggs put them into a glass , shake with some salt , I pretend I am James bond and its a dry martini and gulp it down. Then I wash the glass and pour some juice into it and gulp that down. Now I have effectively fooled my stomach into thinking that I just had some omelet and juice.

10:10 am - Saunter out of the house , unlock bicycle and cycle for minutes on a separate lane with car driver actually waiting for you on intersections to cross it. Really respect people on cycle here not like in India where you have to get down into the rough every time some car comes by on a narrow lane.

10:15 am - I walk into the Atlas building and avoid eye contact with your supervisor because I am now one hour late than everyone else in the building. But its coffee time so everyone is busy crowding around the machine and I join them after switching on my computer. The coffee is pretty crappy , maybe because its free or maybe the dutch like its that way, the only thing worth drinking is the hot chocolate and I usually take that. A few hellos and how r u’s later I settle in the front of my computer at about 10:30 and the first thing I open is Mozilla firefox and simultaneously open up 3 tabs , orkut , ibnlive and cricinfo. Trivial things like my project work can wait until after I have checked my scraps , devoured the news and read the latest cricket news.

10:45am - I open MATLAB and let it remain, to be switched to whenver I want to be seen as working seriously. Then I open the gtalk and check if anyone has an interesting status message and the usual suspects are Aniruddh , Deka and Bahl with Bahl mostly giving out youtube links. Usually during this time one or other of my friends ping me up to ask if I am going to paris , how much time will it take to cover Amsterdam and if there are any other places to see in nederlands. I usually give out different answers to diff. people and make up storiesas to why a particularly non descript village is absolutely a must visit. This is not to misguide, but just to make this inanely boring conversation interesting and if by chance somebody does end up there, who knows , we might laugh about it later.

11:15am - This is usually the time when my supervisor sneaks up on me unannounced and I hastily close all gtalk conversations and minimize the firefox. Then I give an innocent smile and start babbling nonstop about 2d modelling of …….. and then using the books open in front of me I pretend this work and internship is a life changing experience and my ultimate goal in life has now changed to become a hydrological researcher. Well I know all these emotions on one face sounds tough but it gets easier with practice.

11:45am - Ok enough hard work till now, time to take a coffee break again and try to see if any free event has been listed around the machine. I am in luck , there is a wine tasting event this thursday(free for students) and I make a note in my calender to remind myself.

12:00pm - Its nearing lunch time and I start thinking what am I going to buy for lunch today, considering cash is not used here, I have to buy 10euro chipnip cards to buy lunch and it gets over in 3 days flat. Soups are good but sandwiches are eatable only on certain days. Anyways as the lunch time draws nearer the frequency of chats on gtalk increases which is really frustating because that eats into my precious lunch time.

12:30pm - Its lunch time and I suggest to the other hardworking souls in the room that we should go for lunch. This is always met by “sure” and “yeah lets go” and the german girl takes about 10 minutes to pack up  her laptop and keep it under lock and key while me and the Austrian guy go to the adjacent room to invite the Italian lad. So finally at about 12:45 we descend down the building and depending on the weather go outside or eat in the canteen itself. Now the topic of discussion during lunch is usually the crappy food of the canteen, sometimes stories from our respective homelands and a few lines about the yesterdays match. The conversation is pretty easy to follow as the others are not really super fluent in English, however owing to diff nationalities its the choosen mode of communication. Infact I suspect I have a better command over it than most of them. But while others are talking or making a point I am usually thinking of a funny one liner or a clever repartee. As I am about to deliver this punchline, I am interupted by the mafioso who decides to chip in his with his 2 cents. I mutter a slew of abuses in Hindi towards him under my breath at the same time maintaining the smile. The topic changes after that. But while walking back to the workplace I manage to bring it up again and ramm in the punchline. Bingo… ‘Jhanda gaad diya’ as Sid would have said.

1:30pm - Time to pretend again. This time I open a different book and continue to scourge the net for interesting blogs, stories and anything really just to pass the time. The time after lunch I am seldom interrupted by my supervisor, however if she does arrive I always have a slew of academic nonsense ready to make it sound that the work is really complicated and it would need more of my time to get it done. The next 4 hours is a test of my time wasting tactics honed over 4 years of highschool and 3 years of IIT life and at 5:30 I pass the test with flying colors. It involves spending time refreshing your own orkut account, jumping from scrapbook to scrapbook deriving vicarious pleasure out of reading other’s talk, checking out photos of hot girls if possible(Pic lock thing - I hate that application) and trading on cric-exchange, checking out our anony IITG community for its hilarious content.

6:00 pm - The Mscs and Phds leave at this time generally exhausted with their continous struggle to churn out something useful after a day of simulations and calculations. I on the other hand put on my I-pod, clear out my desk and with a big smile on my face bid everyone good bye and skip out of the building after another funfilled day at my internship.

Reaching home the first thing I do is change my status message to New Post Up with a link to the blog to whore it around coz it hasnt got a decent following yet. I enjoy the rest of the time watching the stats go up.

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Bollywood and Scriptwriters

Its been almost 8 months since the writers strike in the US and it has literally brought the entertainment industry to a halt.It has resulted in one award event reduced to being a mere announcement and threatened to stop the giant cog of televised soaps and movies. Whats most interesting to me is how much power and sway the writers guild holds over the big studios and how all the big actors have shown solidarity with them. Can you imagine the same situation in India or Bollywood? I doubt there is even a guild, much less a suffrage movement for better pay. And that for me is one of the key reasons why Bollywood continues to snitch ideas off popular hollywood fare and still regarded as its poor cousin , that makes exotic song and dance dramas.

A movie or a film is nothing but a visual representation of a good screenplay which in turn is derived from a worthy script. Whats perplexing and mindboggling for a moviegoer is that an industry as big as bollywood does not give the due to its scriptwriters. More than half the movies go on floor without a finished script , half of them without a script. And theres only so much creativity you can experience on the spur of the moment. We often hear actors blowing the trumpet of having bagged an AUTHOR backed role. Yeah well this Author has been perhaps the most neglected feature of bollywood , marginally faring better than the spotboys themselves. Of course there are exceptions , I can already hear some of you say Salim-Javed , the golden combo that shaped the phenomenon called Big B(angry young man) but does any other name come to mind? No , yup thats the difference. There they take 1 year, erhaps more haggling for the right script , here we take the same amount of time to haggle for star dates. They demand higher wages , here they demand wages , sometimes out of misery even a token compensation.

The fact is that as we celebrate bollywood going Global and try to find out new markets in the quest of more money ,recognition and fame, there is also the danger that all of our “Inspirations” are going to be discovered and bollywood exposed for what it has sadly become , a recycling unit of movies. And industry that does not give the writers its due is doomed for sure , if not today then tomorrow. With the advent of professional business houses entering the entertainment market , I hope they invest in good scripts rather than trying to fool the viewer with the same star face in varieties of an”Inspired movie”. After all there are only so many times one can see King Khan raise his arms in front of the alps and still be swept away.

Cheap Mentality

I have been following the national news quite diligently over the net and over the past few days the fuel price issue has been hogging all the limelight. Now I have not had the chance to intricately study whatever prompted our soft spoken PM to spike the prices with the elections around the corner , but if its one thing I am sure of that the decision was taken by Manmohan - the economist rather than the politician. I dont think anybody else has the guts to do that with Vote-bank politics and the leftist bastards baying for blood. We all know fuel prices have been rising all over the world, we also know that fuel among other things is one of the most subsidized entity in India all over the world. In fact most of the things are at their cheapest in India. Dont believe me , just google Big Mac Index and find out for yourself.

We crib about hikes in petrol and kerosene and yet celebrate weddings and every other function with atleast 4 generators gulping litres of fuel by the hundreds for the whole night. We crib over taxes even when most of us conveniently siphon off sales tax every time we dont take the receipt at the local store. We will buy swanky new cars every six months to upstage the equally big show-off neighbors yet we want to buy petrol for the price of mineral water. We dont ride Delhi Metro , even though its a world class public transport system , we would rather travel with friends each in their own vehicles criss crossing the roads with sound system blaring deafeningly loud. Its rather unfortunate that we dont use our famed bargaining skill to make the arabs and the US sell to us cheap oil so that we can continue doing all these things.

The problem is we are so used to subsidized value of everything that even when most of us can afford to pay the bills we raise a hue and cry as if the PM himself has stabbed us. I have no doubt that Congress is going to lose the next general election because they dared to save the economy at the expense of populist measures. I am also sure that after this Sonia Gandhi is going to do everything she can to appease the “Cheap” mentality of average Indian joe to soften the blow of single digit hikes in fuel prices.

By the way I know LPG has been hiked by a big Rs 50 , good job , we could all use some raw salad and fruits instead of oil soaked and deep fried shit we eat day in and day out.

Silver Jublee

I have been here for about 25 days now and slowly starting to get a hang of all the differences in eating patterns and sleeping hours. Didnt have to adjust my body clock too much because i was used to sleeping at 3 oçlock in the morning back at the university and time difference being 3.5 hrs , i adjusted quite easily. Initial ten days i struggled with food options , with the dilemma being whether to cook or just eat outside. Thankfully my hosts are very gracious and i usually eat my dinner with them , occasionaly cooking whenever i have time. Lunch is a 4 euro affair usually with a large sandwich and a glass of soup in the university.

About the work , well , I manage with online help via gtalk and some constant surveillance by my supervisor . She has already caught me chatting everytime she walks in to check my code , but I guess has accepted it as a part of my quirky ways which by the way also include coming late to the office atleast half an hour late by everyone else. But I guess the student’s room where I work , we have Phd’s and master’s students coming in even around noon so that is kind of overlooked. It might also be due to the fact that I have already been paid in full and hence the fear of alieanating the supervisor is not there anymore. But to my credit though I havent missed a single day of work till now , a drastic surprise to my friends who know me at IITG. Reasons range from working in the same room as pretty european chicks to having free coffee and hot chocolate throughout the day. It almost makes reasearch sound fun.

Well another thing , everyday I am bombarded with gtalk messages from overexcited batchmates enquiring whether I have been to amsterdam and had some dibbly dobbly action :D(pardon the stupid word , but i dont want firewalls to screen my post). And well reality is not as exciting as imagination. The town where is live is a very quiet city even though it has bout 30 k students. No late night parties , no booze evenings nothing till now. I havent even heard a car honk for 25 days. :O and so I m kind of getting annoyed at all these requests asking me for mushroom n weed prices and the cheapest dibble dobble in amsterdam. How the hell would I know? Everybody has net , log on , surf and book early if u want any discounts you cheap bastards. Better still , just go there and bargain like your life hinges on it , might work. But dont act retarded and try to get student discounts on your ISIC card in the red light district.

In my personal opinion , I would rather do those things that we woudnt get a chance to do back home like adventure sports n all. Better to go back from Europe with a broken nose than herpes I guess

Weekend Blues

I have completed my first week in Wageningen and boy , now a lonely feeling is creeping up. Maybe its the weather , I was supposed to travel to The Hague or Den Haag as the dutch say , but rain played spoilsport. And I was stuck all weekend in my 4 by 4 metre bedroom , underfed and highly bored. The market remains closed on sunday, which quashed any hopes of dinner at a resturant. Its such a pain to cook , eat and then wash the dishes all by yourself. I used to think a good meal prepared oneself was far better than shitmuck served by the mess but now I am not so sure. Maybe I am just too lazy. Plus I miss all the free coffee and hot chocolate you can get at the university. Ironically , I cant wait for Monday to get here, I’ll have my computer , the net , free goodies and the fact there is a cute german chick working next desk does help.