Extra long weekend

Early in 2008, I had ranted about the need to create long weekends whenever possible. I dont know if the policy makers of my company glanced at this post or not, but the thing is, I am now enjoying a 4 day weekend since 26th has been declared a holiday for us.
Of course, we did compensate this day by working on a Saturday earlier this month!

Sick weekend

I finally consulted Dr.Shetty for my cough, on Thu evening and he diagnosed it as an allergic reaction. He has given me a cough syrup and some tablet and to cut a long story short, my mornings are groggier than usual, due to changed sleeping hours.

After the interviews yesterday, I had to go out with my father, hunting for the floor tiles and water closet for the bathroom that we are re-doing in the Besant Nagar house. I had to go out in the dust and polluted air of Adyar and Kutchery road and it hasn't really helped my health. On the usual digression note, the kothanaar never showed up today and informed us much later that he wouldn't be able to make it today!

I felt bad that I couldn't spend any quality time with Arvind, when he visited us this afternoon. Of course, he is also to be blamed for not letting me know about his presence in the country much earlier - my theory is that if he'd informed me about his impending visit to Desh, which would haven't been complete without a stop at my home, I would have consulted the Doctor last week itself in preparation for the same!

Anyways, though my coughing has subsided considerably today, ironically, I've got the "sore throat voice" only now!

The need for long weekends

Why shouldn't the offices - Government/Private/Corporations etc. - adopt the US style of long weekends?

I agree that most of the holidays we have are religious in nature and so we cant really change the date to match a weekend. All I am saying is that we could probably work around the holidays, so that we get few contiguous off days.

Take the "New Year's day" leave of 2008. Jan 1st was a Tuesday. So invariably, many people take the day off on Dec 31st. And with the lower attendance, not much of routine work can take place in offices. In offices, we are dependent on so many of our colleagues in our team or other teams or other departments, that such leave days impacts overall productivity.

The offices could have declared holiday on Dec 31st and let the employees take a good 4 day break. Similar is the case for this year's Pongal leave. Its again on a Tuesday. And since there is a religious significance, the number of people who need to be with their family increases. And if you work in a city far away from your hometown, you have no choice but to take the day off on Monday. Effectively, there is thin attendance in the office and nothing really progresses.

If I had a say in these things, I would have that one day that everyone wants to take off, as a holiday. And if service companies are worried about the loss of revenue since they cant bill a customer, what I suggest is that they can compensate that day by getting the employees to work on a subsequent weekend in the same month or the next month at worst.

Perhaps I am taking a very one sided stance and not looking at it from a Business owner's perspective. But as long as I am on this side of the border, this is what I want.

Ho hum

The darned extended holiday season is over. Gotta return to work tomorrow and wait until the Christmas week, before I can get such official breaks.

This Deepavali has been one of the best that I can remember. I got to burst a lot of crackers. I didn't spend too much on them - in other words, I spent a lot of money and got lot of crackers (unlike the previous year). I had a lot of sweets and savories. There was no untoward incidents during the festival - burns etc. Saw quite a bit of TV.

Then on Friday, I went to the branch of my office closer home, along with couple of others from my car pool. I did this 'coz my teams at my regular branch were all on leave since they got my permission to compensate last Friday by working the next Saturday. Many teams in my office were doing it and I found it quite a sensible thing to do. I only hope that the organisation also implements it. I say this because, when I went to the office, I found very few people there. Though the car park did look full, I couldn't see enough people around the campus. And one needs to factor in the fact that many people would have come to this branch like me!

That day, I even left the office around 12.45-1.00 and was home by 1.30. Went out that evening as our dear friend Nilu was giving his birthday treat at The Piano in Hotel Savera. Nice dinner buffet and it really helped that I was
wearing my bigger sized trousers. ;-)

Didn't do much on Saturday, other than going to the Sholinganallur house and having it cleaned by a couple of guys whom we took along. The cleaning was mainly for the exterior of the house - too many shrubs and lots of grass had grown. We've arranged for some helping hands to clean up the interior as well. In the evening, I went out and bought my next TV.

Today, I got to meet my college buddy Karthik after nearly 7 years. I last met him in Los Angeles when he and a couple of his friends had come there during the Christmas holiday weekend. Shankar also came along and we had a good time catching up with things at the Fruit Shop.

This evening, I went to Spencers (where else) with Raghu (who else). We were quite shocked by the crowd there. Rather, the shock was due to the lack of crowd. All shops were open, yet there hardly few people around the place. The eating joints were REALLY empty. The Arun Ice Cream outlet guy said that they were barely doing 50% of their regular business. The place was so damn empty, that we left it within an hour's time.

So anyways, the holiday weekend is coming to an end now. I gotta resume my duties at work from tomorrow. Since 24th Dec falls on a Monday, there wont be too much activity that day, what with most people trying to make it a long weekend. The same holds good for Dec 31st as well. So if I can take a day off some 2 weeks from now, I can pace myself through to the end of 2007!

Hectic weekend

This weekend - Oct 27-28 - has been quite a hectic one for me.

On Saturday, I had to go to a resort near Mahabalipuram for an official project party. I had a lot of fun there, especially playing cricket.

In the evening, I went out to dinner with Raghu, Madhu and Nilu. Was meeting Nilu after almost 4-6 weeks I think.

We had a pretty good dinner at Wang's Kitchen in Adyar. Nilu and Raghu conspired to make this my birthday treat in advance. While booking the table (and occupying it first, buy virtue of arriving a few minutes earlier than us), Nilu had apparently told the staff there that he would be joined by a birthday boy and asked them to do something special.

So I was surprised when a place of salad was brought to the table. There was a carved capsicum in the middle and inside it was a small candle. I humored these guys by blowing out the candle. One of waiters had even come to enquire about who the birthday person was and after being pointed in my direction, he even shook hands with me!!!

Anyways, dinner was good, though we couldn't finish most of it. They did screw up our order of fried ice-cream. I used my negotiation skill and had one of the extra items on our order canceled out.

We had ice-cream at Arun's Unlimited in R.A.Puram. It was nearly 11 when I returned.

On Sunday, there was a small hiranya shraardham at home for my father's mother. In the afternoon, I went to Raghu's place and dragged him along to buy a watch for me. You see, my mother is gifting me a watch for my birthday and sanctioned an amount of 3k towards this.

So, I went with Raghu to Landmark at City Center. Got a Casio Edifice watch costing me 3.5K post discount.

Then, there was a dinner tonight, hosted by my colleague Rajkumar. Ganesh, Raji and Vidya had come too. The dinner was at Creame Center. The place is really good. Great ambiance. Good crowd too. However, I wont give them good marks for their Mexican dishes. It failed on all parameters - taste, quantity and price. But it was a fun evening.

After such eating binges, it comes as no surprise as to how I've managed to put on 6 kilos over the last one year and how I've increased my trouser size by 1 (pre-eating).

Happy Feet - good movie

Finally, I got to watch the movie Happy Feet. We have been trying to see it, but due to scheduling conflicts (yeah right) or preferences of seats and theatres by Superthumby effectively delayed the D-day.

When all things came good last Saturday, Neeluking couldn't make it for the evening show. Since he skipped his morning Yoga class, Guruji promptly called him up and asked him to attend a session that evening.

So our Mukundan had to step in for him. After much delay and seemingly never-ending phone calls of "where are you?", I finally got into the theatre some 5 minutes after the picture started.

But didn't miss much actually. The movie was really really good. Probably a little bit too much of song and dance at one point, but that can probably be the only teeny weeny bit of complaint I have.

Robin Williams, though he is not the voice over for the main character, has done a great job. It was simply superb.

And the animation quality was stunning. The depiction of the penguins and the sea were really amazing.

All in all, a great movie and me happy on my feet that I didn't miss it. :D

Karting

Finally had my first experience of Karting. It was quite good. The best part was that Karting was not planned when my friends and I set out this evening. We wanted to see "Cars" and at the Mayajaal ticket counter we didn't tickets, only a highly impersonal 'house full saar' comment.

Then I suggested to my friends that we go bowling. Everyone agreed. But that was only until I made the enquiry about the financial implications of indulging in that westernised and glorified game of our local golee. Apparently, the charges levied were acceptable to my companions only if it was my treat. Since that was not going to be the case, we decided to get out of that place.

And after the usual dilly-dallying we finally decided to drive down ECR for some more distance to the south and then return when we were bored. It was decided en route to go boating on Muthukadu lake but that too didn't materialise due to the density of population around the boating zone. One of us mentioned Kovalam beach and we all agreed.

This beach, like most of its counterparts across the globe, had sea water on one side and sand on the other. Only a bit dirtier. And inhabited in large numbers by cheaters of varying skills - those who read ur palm, those who use the intellect of a parrot to help identify your destiny etc.So after spending an excrutiating 15 mns there, we started our trip back home and head out for dinner.

On the way, I suddenly remembered that there was a Karting track. I told the crew 'Here is one more idea to be shot down. Lets go karting.'. Surprisingly, everyone agreed. And we actually did enter the area. After much deliberation two of us - the vakkeel and me - decided to enter the track itself. Actually, cost-wise, Karting is much more expensive on a time basis, when compared to the bowling option discussed earlier. But then my intellectual peers decided on the net ruppee amount leaving the wallet.

I had a good time with the kart. It felt so nice to be able to drive like crazy and actually bump into the people who drive like complete nincompoops. I cant ever do that on the real roads and this track gave me a good chance to vent my anger on stupid drivers. And I was presented the chance and by Thor, I used it.

While I was enjoying the drive around the track at good speed, I noticed that I didn't see my friend who started off with me. I did remember him and his kart taking a liking to the rubber tires after the first round, but I just didn't see him after that. Only after I returned to the pit at the end of my time limit, I realised that the dude had actually crashed badly near the pit in his second round. Apparently, everyone had a good time watching a speeding object veer away from its intended path and crash. The other friend of mine who limited himself to spending quality time with his better half, did try capturing it on video, but the human side of him peeped its ugly head out and made him go help the crasher.

Luckily all is well with everyone, but I cant say the same of that Kart.

Finally, we reached home and then checked up all the decent restaurants around my house to be informed of either a long wait, or limited menu or a closed shop. We did manage to find a good place with a 5 minute wait and had a good dinner. We had some post prandial walk to a good ice-cream parlor and enjoyed it there as well.

So all in all, a good way to end a hectic week.

p.s: there is a good chance that some spelling mistakes are present in this posting, but am too tired to do a spell check and verify it.

sunday traffic

oh boy. the traffic on besant avenue is really annoying me. the cops are doing their best to slow down the traffic. they've placed these huge metal barricades on either side of the road, but that seems to be applicable only for any vehicle that has more than 3 wheels.
the other option that the cops have in place, is the speed breaker (or rumblers as they are known in only this part of the city). but that slows down everything except the SUVs. that breed of drivers are probably beaten to the post only by the 3 wheel demon called auto.
i think the only way traffic can be regulated here is by having the ubiquitous median or having a cop stand every 50m with a lathi in hand. and i defintely prefer a cop who likes to use it.

I went to see this tamizh movie called Jerry yesterday evening with aatha and naina. the movie was just about tolerable. for a supposedly full length comedy movie, it had around 15 minutes of real good fun. but then watching it in Mayajal, effectively blew a 600 buck hole in the wallet. somehow intelligently, i got my pops to pay for the whole thing. small pleasures in life :)

god, its monday in an hour's time. better get some sleep and start fresh for the daily 50km travel (each way) to office.