Of pot bellies, IT and maa ke ladoos..

Yes, I sympathize with the policemen not because they spend long hours on road regulating traffic but because they have pot bellies! And yes, I do know the state of mind of the women who die for their husbands to lie about their weight each time they glance in the mirror and ask “Aji, main moti toh nahi dik rahi na?” Yes, this is me and ironically I have changed and wouldn’t mind to take a woman of Tuntun’s size for my wife. Er.. OK ! …Thoda zyada hi emotional ho gaya. I owe this change in me to the non-exercising attitude of mine that has resulted in me developing a nasty belly and now I feel like endorsing things like chubby checker and sugar free stuff. :) It’s hard to believe how a person who used to train for 3 hours a day can grow fat but that’s the way it is, IT lifestyle does spoil ones habits.

Not many people read this blog and to the few (the number is 2-3) who by mistake stumble upon this place thinking that there might have been some change in my writing style for a change I would have started injecting sense into this blog, I assure you I am back and with more nonsense. So that practically makes no readers for the second leg of my writings. I wish I had been a woman blogger, would have had a comment even before the thought of posting stuff conceived and materialized into a post. Yes, out of the few woman bloggers that I know each gets a huge chunk of comments on every post of theirs. I ain't raising questions about the content but then I am suspecting that people do not like disorganized thoughts like the ones you find on my blog. No one wants to know the similarities between 2 pastimes like women and cricket that occupy an immature mind of mine nor does any one want to know what happens when your life turns and swirls to make sense. I guess this has been my longest stint away from the blog and I have forgotten about the IPL cheer girls completely. But here I am back and I am not a bit worried of writing about Priyanka Chopra's ,Lara Dutta’s reviving passion in me and petty things that go unnoticed by many or my uncanny habit of cribbing about things that sound utterly useless to the people around me.

So last week my mom called, nothing unusual in a mom calling her only son who stays away from her but the reason she called me was so silly that I am sure she would have put all the project managers in Infosys to shame(considering half of them do silly stuff all through the day).
She said:
Ma: Haan, kya kara raha tha, naashta??
Me: Haanji , bass aapk ko hi phone karne wala tha..
Ma: Tu sochata hi reh karna math (annoyed that I don’t call her)... acha sun tu aa raha hain iss weekend?
Me: Nahii, kyu (wondering if mom would mind that answer and would deduce that I come down to Chennai only when I have work there :))
Ma: Kya museebat hain yar . yeh Nirula wale uncle ne 2 kilo ladoo de diye aab yeh kaun khaye ga . !!
So my mom wants the very presence of mine in Chennai to eat ladoos. Aab ladke ki sithithi (position, for the ones whose Hindi is no better than Katrina Kaif's)... badi romanchak (nothing to do with romance) hain. Dekna yeh hain ki ladka weekned pe Ms Dutta (Priyanka is her first name for the Bollywood illiterates) aur Ms Kaif (Katrina is her first name for the ones uninitiated on the fashion front) ke sath enjoy karega ya Chennai aapni maa ke ladoo ke liye ja ye ga? Jaane ke liye dekhiye dharawaeek (Serial) Maan ka laddo ya maa ka ladoo. :)

I have been so busy in the past few weeks that I would have smiled less than a jovial Manmohan Singh (I swear this one Prime Minister of ours smiles the least). The situation (sithithi for English illiterates) remains grim, I am still getting a lot of work and life is hectic forever but I do read the newspapers sometimes and I do also know that the US elections are over and we still see the Federal bank of US bailing out banks. Here in Infy, things have changed, they have implemented cost cutting to the extent of putting the elevator fan off. And somehow I feel the whole IT world is a big illusion. There are people around me who might be earning more than my dad's gross income; mind you, My dad worked 15* 7 hrs and 365 days a year and the analysts here excel in resizing columns of a spreadsheet and fill stupid trackers for which the get paid anything around 60-70k pm. The weekends are spent lavishly at a certain restaurant that charges bizarre rates for the food ordered but do they mind? NO. I wonder why there is so much inequality in salaries. And if they say that the amount of hard work that you do directly translates to the amount of money you earn then I guess a software professional should be getting peanuts. And if one says that the amount of salary one earns is directly proportional to amount of brains and discerning sense that one puts into his work then again software professionals should be getting peanuts. However though there are a few brilliant people in every project because of whom Infy mints money still these are outnumbered by a huge herd that is still mediocre and does nothing but gets overjoyed at the prospects of a weekend approaching and wishes each weekend in a colorful way. The work that we do here is no rocket science. We monitor, maintain and test systems (IT jargon to make sound everything professional) in almost every project in Infy. In short we nurse a wound and take care of the patient and when he's alright he pays regular visits for medical check up, creating babies, cloning and producing new life is not our work at least for not most of us and we don’t need strength of 100 thousand to do all this. Sadly, I am in the thick of this action.

We software professionals have had life easy, very easy I say, including me. All this makes me wonder if this situation will stay forever there are so many things defying our IT industry and that I am pretty sure and pragmatic when I say there is something really wrong with the system. There are onsite returned people who bring back home dollars and love to spend it in posh hotels. I struggled literally to get money from my dad for books, sports and school, college treats but today is a different day and we have treats and parties every fortnight spending insane amounts at these certain westernized joints. You may call it globalization or consumerism but then this shift is one sided yet having a profound effect across various classes of societies resulting in a wider gap between the haves and the have nots. Infy started to cut costs and started giving reasons as budget problems when it was time to hike salaries even as it grew at the rate of 40-50% YoY. There are very less companies in the world today which grow by that proportion. Are the IT companies in India accustomed to such huge profits and don’t want to let go of the profitable growth. Well, no body would like their profits to come down and it would be stupid for IT companies to do this but the system has always been wrong from the beginning. The salaries, the billing, the costs, the expenses et all. It’s a revolutionary situation for the IT companies in India and how well we manage would answer questions about its continuity else like every other boom and bust we shall see another one; a part of which we have already seen, companies reaching their saturation level in terms of resources and now cutting costs by sizing the work force. The concept of ramping up more than required resources for a simple assignment and then billing the client for the same is no longer going to be existent. Infy now talks about liner growth which means less number of people and more productivity.

A few of us should be thankful to the IT boom in India, people like me would have never landed up with jobs holding just a bachelors degree as a fresher and here I am earning 15k pm . However a few of us should also realize that bizarre salaries do not mean mindless spending and with that thought of mine I shall set the argument in me to rest. Good night.