The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Good music, writing, art, ideas... stay away from them. They are brutal killers.

All subtle art is cruel. It seduces, entraps and regresses you, and all the while makes you believe that you were lucky to have the perspicacity to appreciate the finer points of the world around you.

But when you listen to that momentary sleight of notes in a stupid piece of jazz or read a clever twist of words in a book, your mind and heart pains and aches, and longs for something larger than the sum of everything you are. It kills me.

Oh, and by the way, to maintain the continuity in my previous post, I won the Oktatabyebye contest and had a vacation of a lifetime traveling from Delhi to Manali, Keylang, Leh, Pangong Lake, Nubra Valley, Kargil, Drass, Srinagar, Gulmarg and back to Delhi. I blogged about it on the Oktatabyebye website. My blogs have now been broken into destination-specific travelogues on the website. A big thanks to Webchutney and Makemytrip for giving me this larger than life experience!

ok-tata-bye-bye

Tomorrow is what seems to be the final round for the oktatabyebye travel contest. If you're looking at the profiles of the people on that link, you will find the amazing levels of passion for traveling and travel among them. Especially Mridula, whose travel blog is a delightful revelation. Who'd have thunk that HR professors could live such an interesting life?

oktatabyebye is a to-be online travel community, which I reckon would be a bulletin board enhancement based on travel (?)

After you travel sufficiently for leisure in your life, you begin to form opinions about travel... travel as a hobby, industry, the media associated with it, etc. With strong opinions comes a natural disgruntledness, a desire to make things work differently, a feeling of 'they could have made it work that way'.

Travel is picking up greatly in India, but strangely, people are spending a lot more on travel than they could have. Indians by nature think of leisure travel as something complicated and dangerous. In my hometown Pune, Maharashtrians are known for their affinity to what I call the Raja-Rani-Tours-and-Travels mentality. On a tour to Ladakh, the typical Maharashtrian would rather be more worried about the food he/she will be served there than whether he/she is carrying enough woollens. Which is why a Raja-Rani-Tours-and-Travels pitch like 'We serve you assal shrikhand-puri and batata-bhaji when you are with us, no matter where you are' works magnificently. The premium for these homely service is high, but the Maharashtrian would rather be safe.

This is the sole reason why my uncles and aunts have been to Dharamsala-McLedoganj twice but do not know what a Momo or a Thukpa is. And I think that's pathetic!

Many people visiting oktatabyebye would have strong opinions about leisure travel based on their own travel experiences. You get a bunch of people like this together on a forum, and they have the strength to change people's perceptions about travel! So regardless of who wins tomorrow, travel in India and the backpack-culture is sure to move forward. If Webchutney pulls this off properly, that is.

In other news, I've been underground for some weeks getting PaGaLGuY.com in its new avatar. Take a look at our new design (http://www.pagalguy.com/). We've also tied up with two of the best international companies in the MBA business. The first is with TopMBA.com, the guys who get us Stanford, Tuck, Harvard, INSEAD, Chicago GSB at the annual World MBA Tours. The other is with Manhattan GMAT, who're at the top in the US in the GMAT training. Both tie-ups are for content exchange. There are exciting times ahead!

Win Free Go Air tickets

PaGaLGuY.com is doing a rather unique campaign! Allowing the world to win 24 Go Air return air tickets in India just for blogging about them. The concept is simple. All you need to do is tag four of your friends while making a blog post for which the details are given below.

Best of luck in winning those free free free air tickets!!!

## Start of GoPaGaL Tag ##

If your blogger friend has tagged you, follow this link to participate: http://www.pagalguy.com/goblog/

GoAir and PaGaLGuY.com bring to you the GoPaGaL Campaign where you can win free return tickets to the destination of your choice. Winning is simple, just copy paste this tag on your blog after adding answers to the questions below and publish this as a blog post on your blog! Then head out to http://www.pagalguy.com/goblog/ , fill in the form and send us your Name and Blog post URL & Finally, tag 5 more blog users and let the world know. Promise! Its that simple and should take you no more than 5 minutes!!

— Answer the question below —

Q) On which GoAir Sector would you like to win a free air ticket?
A) Mumbai - Srinagar
( Answer the above question after you visit http://www.goair.in )

[ Link (Tag) 4 other blog users in your network so that they too get a chance to win the tickets. Without you tagging 4 other bloggers, your entry will stand disqualified.]
Tag
I would like to link the following bloggers!
(Please include the full URL to the blogger you are tagging)
e.g: http://insane.pagalguy.com, http://whatblogmen.blogspot.com etc etc

1 — Neha - http://neha16.blogspot.com/
2 — Zarine - http://toughmorns.blogspot.com/
3 — Siddharth - http://blogmia.blogspot.com/
4 — Neeta - http://could-it-be-mpd.blogspot.com/

— End of Question & Answer —

Now head over to http://www.pagalguy.com/goblog/ and submit your entry to win the tickets. New winners will be announced every fortnight!

Why? What? How?

This is an unique campaign run by ‘GoAir - The People’s Airline’ and ‘PaGaLGuY.com - India’s largest MBA forum’.

We are giving out over 26 return airtickets over a period of two months!

Join the insanity and find more ways to win tickets at http://www.pagalguy.com/gopagal/

Visit GoAir - http://www.goair.in
Visit PaGaLGuY.com - http://www.pagalguy.com

## End of GoPaGaL Tag ##

Music that put a smile on my face

Long time since I blogged about music.

An overwhelming feeling of sadness came over me as I read the papers about Naushad's passing away yesterday. As obituaries upon articles mentioned his songs, I relived all the memories of childhood when I had discovered Naushad's music. I also felt a sense of pride in having being able to discover and appreciate a composer whose music was not exactly 'in' within my generation.

There is a lot to Naushad beyond Mughal-e-Azam and Mother India and I think his best can only be appreciated by listeners who take some effort to find their music rather than music finding them through radio or TV.

I don't know what it is about songs like 'Uthaye jaa unke sitam' (from Andaz) or 'Do sitaron ka zameen par hai milan' (Kohinoor) that everytime I play them in my head I smile to myself. I can say the same thing about every song in Baiju Bawra, perhaps Naushad's best.

I cannot claim to identify with the lyrics of these songs because they speak about a different era but also because I am not that deep as a person. Yet, I can attach every time of the year, every turn of the weather and every place that is close to me to some or the other song by Naushad.

It is largely thanks to Naushad that I developed a taste for Hindustani Classical Music. I was probably 8 or 9 years old when Dad's huge collection of tapes and LPs of Kumar Gandharva, Jasraj, Bismillah Khan, Kishori Amonkar, Hariprasad Chaurasia et al caught my curiosity and attention. I still have images ingrained in memory when I began to neglect school homework and started listening to that music fulltime, flooding Dad with all sorts of questions the moment he returned from office about what differentiated Raag Kedar from Raag Bihag, or how one counted the Maatras in a Taal, and the works. Dad has a way of explaining things that you 'see' it immediately.

But it was in Naushad's songs that I found validation for my understanding of all these complex concepts of music. Thanks to Naushad, by the time I was 12, I understood enough about Classical Music to be able to sit through entire 4 hours of a Hariprasad Chaurasia concert fully knowing what was going on each second and fully enjoying it.

What I learned then has stayed with me till today and helped me play more than a dozen musical instruments without any formal training. I might have explored other forms of music over time, from the glass-shattering mayhem of Pantera to the deft piano runs of Chick Corea, the gruff vocals in Dire Straits to the ghazals of Jagjit Singh, but the music from those years remains closest to my heart.

Very little from the film music nowadays feels like home. I can clearly count songs that have really touched me in the recent years. Parineeta's music, especially 'Raat Hamari Toh', or 'Bawra Mann' from Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi or 'Luka Chhipi' from Rang De Basanti are the only ones that really make a mark.

Living Portugal

How much effort are you prepared to take to have a truly quality time when on a backpacking trip? When I heard of Korlai, I knew that it would be worth it to learn Portuguese and then visit the only place in India where over 900 people still have the language as their mother tongue. And I wasn't wrong!

Maybe it is that lone young people don't board the ferry that leaves the Gateway of India quay at Mumbai for Alibaugh on weekends too often, and if they do, they are instantly branded dubious wandering explorers by the locals from Maharashtra's coastal belt.

For as the boat chugged away eastwards from the Mumbai skyline, a group of fishermen folk had identified me as one, perhaps because I was the only one on board who was not surrounded by a huge group of college students or a better half.

Soon I was the centre of attention of the hoi polloi. "Why you go alone? How you will spend your honeymoon if you go alone?"

So I made an attempt to divert attention from this alleged irregularity in my existential setup was by asking them where near Alibaugh that town was where over 900 inhabitants spoke Portuguese as their mother tongue even today.

"Oh you want to go to the town of Firangis?" came the quick reply. "Go to Revdanda and ask for Korlai!"

Yes, that was the one I was looking for. The way from Alibaugh bound south for Murud town – with its majestic sea-fort of Janjira – isn't quite a path well trodden. So when I learnt that tiny fishing towns on that road were once the hotbed of Portuguese colonial activity, I knew that stuffing my backpack up was the inevitable thing to do. My intuition told me that Revdanda was the material that would make for many delightful private discoveries and have you wondering if you should disclose its existence to the world. What if millions of tourists throng this place tomorrow and kill the charm of this place?

Hitting land at the Mandwa port, I boarded one of the 8-seater shared rickshaws just where the milestone read, 'Murud – 58 kms'.

The rickshaws here are staple transport for the locals, all of whom seem to be traveling from one village to the other all the time.

Noticing my backpack and camera, a croaky voice belonging to a passenger asked in Marathi, "Going to Revdanda?"

As I replied in affirmative, another fellow commuter spoke, "Revdanda is a boring place, I don't know why youngsters go there. There is nothing to see in Revdanda."

The rickety vehicle carrying us trotted along a highway that ran just next to the sea all along. Every now and then, villages with houses covered in dense foliage appeared and disappeared, adding and subtracting people from the rickshaw. And then the blue sea crashing against the now rocky and now sparkling white sand shore returned to be the winding road's companion.

The rickshaw pulled off below an old ivy-covered thick-stone archway that is the entrance to the erstwhile Portuguese fort of Revdanda, formerly known as Chaul. The road runs through the town for a couple of kilometers until it passes under a similar high archway and opens up to a bridge over the Kundalika river mouth. The entire stretch of the road between the fort walls is covered in a thick canopy of dense tropical vegetation, which makes the hot and humid weather bearable.

The black-stoned fort walls are really thick, perhaps to nullify impact from huge cannonballs shot from warships. The Revdanda fort was built in the mid 1500s to augment the Portuguese military control of the coast.

The fort's walls and citadel are mostly in ruins, but at some places there are plaques on walls and on top of doorways with the seal of the Portuguese empire in a surprisingly perfect condition.

As you inspect the fort, you run the risk of becoming the subject of amusement in the tea stalls clasped to the fort walls.

"That's all of the fort that you can see. The rest is not accessible, too many dense bushes," called out a creepy onlooker in a very I-keep-seeing-many-of-your-kinds manner from a Chinese food stall thoughtfully named 'Maratha Hu-Lin'.

He pointed me to a street that went in the direction of the sea, proposing that I might like to check out the old chapel where St Francis Xavier lay buried. St Francis Xavier in India? Yeah right, I thought.

There, just next to a well stood a roofless ruin of a structure that had the looks of a could-have-been chapel.

A fairly new marble plaque at the ivy-infested entrance read 'St Francis Zavier Chapel'. Maybe 'Zavier' was not the same as 'Xavier', perhaps the people of Revdanda had a casual sense of spellings or maybe they had achieved more phonetic progress than the Americans, I examined all the possibilities.

I recalled a tourism department handout which claimed that St Francis Xavier had delivered both his first sermon on Indian soil and the last discourse of his life at Revdanda. Surely if that were true, the monument would not be an abandoned ragtag now.

A large tablet with inscriptions in Portuguese lay on the ground inside, while two huge cannonballs from yore lay along one wall. If somebody were to decipher and translate the text on the tablet, perhaps the truth about the chapel would be known.

"There was a man who knew all about the history of Revdanda. He had found secret passages inside the fort walls. He died in 1978. His ghost comes here during stormy nights. But you might want to check out the Birla Temple across the river," said the man from the Chinese stall as I returned back to the fort archway.

I took the cue from the fishermen in the ferry and asked him for Korlai, which turned out to be the next village down the highway. Passing over the river bridge, I could see the Korlai fort far away in the distance, standing majestically on top of a hill jutting out at the mouth of the Kundalika. Small needle like things protruded out of the fort's vantage points. Cannons, I reckoned. Sparkling white sand beached bound the blue water and land together all along the coastline.

The Korlai village is divided equally into the Catholic, Hindu and Muslim communities. This part of the Maharashtra coast looks like a very unlikely place for being a hotspot on the world etymology map. But Korlai village, with its population of 3,003 (as written on the state transport bus stand sign), speaks 'Korlai Creole', the purest living form of Portuguese in the Indian subcontinent. About a thousand Catholics in the village have the language as their mother tongue, though the other communities too speak it because all the children study in the same Mount Carmel School. The language is a mixture of Portuguese and Konkani Marathi, the former being the dominating component.

Around 1515 AD, the Portuguese families that immigrated here mixed with the locals and settled down here. Of all that they passed down the generations, only the language survives.

"These people can't read or write Portuguese. A Portuguese national today might be able to make out what they are saying, but they wouldn't be able to understand modern Portuguese," Father Diago of the 350 year old Mount Carmel Church told me, as I climbed up to his flat
teeming with the odor of freshly cooked chicken.

"There is no recorded history of this place. A historian from Revdanda had done huge research on this place but I don't think he's alive now," he remarked as I made a connection with the ghost that haunts the man at the Chinese food stall.

The school attached to the church had just ended, and a mass of children streamed out of the doors as if a dam had burst open.

Identifying a few idle ones, I asked them to teach me some of their Portuguese. Knowing some modern Portuguese myself, I could make out the difference between the pure form and the Creole. 'Eu' (I, in Portuguese) had become 'Yo', 'Voce' (you) was 'Vaache', 'queira' (to want) was 'halla'.

The path winds through the village to a narrow strip of land that connects the Korlai hilltop fort, once known as 'The Rock of Chaul'. Climbing up mildly along the sea facing side of the hill to the lighthouse, the path provides a beautiful view of the huge U-shaped beach of Korlai, marine blue water breaking against white sands till more then two miles until a hill extends itself out to close the bay.

Few cross the lighthouse complex to climb up the 150 steps to the Korlai fort, but the tiring ascent is well worth it. The ramparts run along the ridge of the hill which is surrounded by sea on three sides. The fort is a long sequence of seven doorways, one after another, and
is hardly ten meters in width. The topmost part of the fort has the citadel with a dilapidated church and a temple facing a water tank.
Cannons lie facing the sea in all directions. The lowermost gate that opens up into the mouth of the Kundalika river has a seal of the Portuguese empire with the inscription 'No entry without a fight' on it. The fort has its share of snakes but one can hardly see them outside their hidden shelters except when its monsoon.

I took one last glimpse at the Korlai beach from top of the fort and returned to the highway. A rickshaw going further south along the coastal road was waiting to fill one vacancy so I stacked myself in.

Ten minutes later, the road descended down a hill in a hairpin bend and suddenly a beautiful blue beach kissed by the setting sun unveiled itself. Kashid Beach is the most famous beach in these parts and the location for several advertisement and film shoots. Few venture out here, which explained why I had the entire two mile stretch of the beach bliss all to myself.

One doesn't get much to eat here, except bhurji-pav and tadka-Maggi, but some commendable soul has put up hammocks along the entire length of the beach.

Checking into one of the hotels here, I settled into a hammock with a book, watching the sun sink.

(Published in April edition of Darpan, the Indian Airlines in-flight magazine)

Not even the ABC of India

Check out this highly superficial news clip on ABC News about the Rise of India. It is hilariously inaccurate, especially in the part where the reporter asks a woman in a jhuggi how long she's been living there. She replies "Do saal" and he translates "Twenty five years!"

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=1674437

Craziest workplace s-logged!

The insanity continues at http://pagalguy.com/slog/

All about the craziest workplace this side of the M-17 Nebula! :)

Of firing the hiring as we know it

My greatest headache of this day and possibly of all time is turning out to be hiring a Full-time Journalist for Inzane Labs' PaGaLGuY.com. No, we have no HR Manager on the rolls because we haven't been able to find the right person, The One, yet.

That leaves me alone and totally clueless in a game I have zilch idea about. Which is a great thing, because I can reinvent the wheel based on Common Sense. What works most in my favour is that I am NOT an MBA, so my mind hasn't been jargonized and filled with that horrible word called 'processes' yet.

On the flipside, what makes it super tough is that I am not settling for anybody less than The One, or someone who shows me the scope to grow into The One.

Where do I start from? How do I reach out and get in the resumes? How do I judge if they're fit to survive in an obsessively entrepreneurial environment that we have fostered in the company?

I began with making a detailed job posting, looking inwards of the MBA Forums of PaGaLGuY.com for the dream journo. I also spammed the other avenues (Yahoogroups, Orkut et al). I knew that many of the applicants we liked from this lot might not be from Mumbai. I can do the telephonic interview and make other checks through contacts. But even then I would be clueless. How do I take a call on someone without having met them? I would next be going to Journo Schools, but there's time before their placement season starts.

That is when we realized, that if we were looking for The One, we should be willing to put in the effort and the money during the hiring process itself. So we decided to do what probably no other company on Earth has ever done: Give every prospective the complete return flight-ticket expenses to stay in Mumbai for a week and work with us. If we like you and you like us, cool. If not, cool.

Otherwise, what is the point of being meticulous?

Imagine when the company grows 1,000 strong and EACH and EVERY employee is chosen this way and is none but The One. That's the way this company will work.

Who is The One for a PaGaLGuY.com Journalist? Somebody who has the balls to question everything about how journalism has been working until now; we don't want to be a Media company where the Editorial and Marketing departments co-exist in a bitter and estranged vibe, cursing each other all the time in a conflict between marketing and news content battling for space.

There is a way to have each of the Editorial content, the Marketing content AND the user/reader interest to co-exist peacefully, each in full-throttle, with Zero Conflict between them. It is just that nobody has ever put adequate thought to it.

Our being a Web medium helps, because we can put Advertisers and Readers in direct contact using web-forums/bulletin boards. Go do your dirty fighting there. That way Editorial content remains truly sacrosanct and out of advertisers' influence, something you can't do in the print/electronic media. Things then go to the next level.

Does this sound too idealistic? Maybe. Does it make business sense? You decide. Is it better to die trying? Any day.

Can you see this Big Picture? Would you like to be a Journalist who is also a great Entreprenuer and can take this insane organization further? Can you take Content as we know it to the Next Level?

If this makes sense to you, do take a look at the Job Posting and apply! If we see a spark, we'll give you a buzz. You decide your salary! :)

Mutual No Tag Agreement

Before doing this tag, I am declaring a Mutual No Tag Agreement (MNTA) with Neeta, Subbu, Puneet, Zarine, Neha and everybody else who have tagged me in the past. You, yes you, if you have ever tagged me, please consider yourself a signatory. Henceforth after this tag, we don't tag each other. Let's make this world a better place to live in.

Puneet, Subbu and Neeta have tagged me to write about 8 qualities in my Soulmate.

1. She should be happy, confident and at peace with herself. She should be an ever-optimist.

2. I am a little weird in the sense that I don't think like most people do. I am both an introvert and an extrovert built in one person. She should be comfortable with this and believe in me and what I am trying to be. I guess this takes care of everything else.

3. She should love endless witty conversations and a have pleasant sense of humour with her one-liner sense in place.

4. We should be able to say a lot to each other even when nothing is said.

5. Love for books, tasteful art and things, ability to spend hours in a bookshop, being as comfortable in an antique shop as in a mall.

6. Love for walking just for the sake of walking, without a predecided destination.

7. Respect. For her family, friends, all people around her and me. She should be able to fit in inside my social circle and gel with my friends.

I guess if these seven qualities are there, everything else can be taken care of :)

And I tag nobody. May this menace end forever!

My IIMs, Your IIMs, Their IIMs

This has been a week of interesting insights. A story long in the pipeline was published, after being called 'untouchable' and refused by several newspapers and magazines on the grounds of being 'too sensitive'. Posted on Pagalguy.com forums, it elicited several rather passionate reactions. Do take a look at them. I hear the story has reached the internal bulletin boards of all the IIMs and other major B-schools with discussion threads.

Negative, one-sided, malicious, not-presenting-the-complete-picture, unfair to the IIMs... I liked the adjectives. A couple of IIM students frantically called me to register their protest, saying the story would put off future students and prospective employers. "Teri hamse kyaa dushmani hai?"

First, I don't think a newspaper story can harm the IIMs' popularity and reputation. That's catastrophizing the issue. Second, I neither take myself nor my stories so seriously to believe that they will harm that big an institution. I am no expert on the IIMs. Third, I don't want the IIMs' reputation to be harmed, I am no IIM basher.

Fourth, for 40 years everybody, media included, has sung continuous paens about the IIMs. I guess nobody asked for the 'other side' then.

For me the most interesting part was that all negative facts about the IIMs were given to me by serving and former IIM Professors and Deans themselves with full consent to be officially quoted, except for one professor. One friend pointed out to me that they may have personal agendas for doing so. But in the end, the facts they gave me were each time backed up by actual evidence I independently fished out.

Given all the problems the IIMs ail with, would a truly passionate individual be able to survive in such an environment? Does the IIM culture respect passion, incredible pre-MBA backgrounds, leadership?

From what my IIM friends tell me, no matter what your age, experience or background, a 22-year-old fresher kid who happens to be your senior will rag you high-school style on your first day on campus. Birthday celebrations are about making the subject roll in mud and cake, get kicked and beaten by many, doing inventive 'fun' things with a batchmate of the opposite sex and more. They call it their culture. To the Common Sense it looks like humiliation. Maybe my senses are warped.

Any IIM student will tell you how group assignments are done. All the work is put on one guy while the others freak out or play games on the network. That's world class excellence.

And then is the placements thingy and the dirty childish games some IIMs play among themselves. IIM students reading this post would know what I'm talking about. Jobs become your complete life worth. Maturity goes out the window.

The IIMs should by all means go global. But will they survive global competition if their faculty are paid the same pathetic salaries? I hear that Wharton, Tuck, Stanford and Darden are setting up campuses in India in the next 10 years. Will the stagnant culture in IIMs stand that kind of world-class competition? I pray for IIM Shillong.

On the Pagalguy.com forums, I continuously see debates challenging the projected glory of the IIMs and people changing their perceptions 180 degree. One user calls the IIMs 'talent pickup joints'. Sooner or later, more people will write about it, more perceptions will change. You cannot fool all the people all the time.

I love the IIMs, they're my country's pride. But when I see the rot-like situation inside, I feel like doing more 'one-sided stories'.

Concert photos I dreamt of taking but never could being the Ignoramus that I WAS.

Yet, at parties and other social occasions with ample show-off opportunities I shall continue claiming that film cameras are the best.

Dominic Miller (Sting's guitar player) and his band playing at the Kala Ghoda Festival, Mumbai is best caught on Allwin's Digital Cam which I have been procrastinating on returning since months.

The Festival is a godsend for jazz-lovers. The level of tastefulness of all the music I have heard this week (Sanjay Divecha, Amit Heri, Charlie Mariano, Eric Lohrer, Dhruv Ghanekar) should be hard to match anywhere in India. I'm smitten!

Cartoon as Vindication

Funded travelling

I have not spent from my pockets on a trip in a long time. Usually, I find some pretext to turn a holiday into an assignment and get funding from a publication. Though under such a plan, one has to be careful while spending and collect hundreds of bills for every small item bought. Often, there are no ATMs at your destination so you have to carry all your money distributed in different pockets of your clothing and your luggage. As the money gets spent, it is replaced by bills for Bisleri, camera batteries, cabs and food. When you return, it becomes a big nightmare to collect all those bills at one place and make an expenditure account to be sent to the publication. The toughest part is recalling which Bisleri bill was incurred on which date, small details that the accounting guys are very particular about. I procrastinate royally on this activity.

Getting paid to travel is a wholly satisfying experience, because the story you write is very personal. I especially like Editors who are flexible and don't mind some wit and politically incorrect humour thrown into stories. Fortunately, most that I have written for are like that. I think you cannot know about a culture without their humour. What do they laugh at? How do they play with words? That tells you a lot about the place.

Two next travel assignments coming my way are on small long-forgotten Portuguese fishing villages south of Alibaugh near Mumbai. I hope to get lost on my way several times. I am looking forward to exploring some history there and sporting my newly learnt Spanish, which I believe is quite close to Portuguese.

In other news, PaGaLGuY.com now has a fully functional office in Fort, Mumbai with fulltime a Marketing Manager at cracking big deals. If our visiting cards are anything to go by, this is going to be a crazy workplace that will change many ideas about business online and offline.

Down with Sundays!

"Santa Cruz->Churchgate->Fort->Churchgate->Santa Cruz->Grocery store->Home"

That is largely my life, interspersed at times with assignments that take me out of Mumbai. Those assignments, though, are outliers at best. Most stories get done inside Mumbai. Now it is not as if I don't like this way of life, it was my own choice after all to move to Mumbai and jump into the spiral.

I think what spoils it for me are Sundays, those evil speedbreakers. When your hobby becomes your profession, Sundays are boring. They suck the life out of a comfortable rhythm of work. It is like being placed on gate duty during the most happening event of your school or college. When I walk out of my house on Sundays, all I find myself doing is staring blankly at faces on the streets, who in turn stare back at me in what seems to be a completely pointless exercise. To escape that agonizing experience, I sleep the whole Sunday off often to find a day of my life wasted. It is a wholly unsatisfying thing.

What I would love to do instead, is work continuously for 3-4 months without a single holiday, and then take off for an entire fortnight. There is so much to do in Mumbai. So many stories lurking behind the old structures in Bandra and Fort, so much of history to explore and be fascinated by. You need a long break to dig substantially into it.

I have spent more hours consuming the contents of the Times Food Guide, than I have spent eating out in Mumbai. I have mentally made long lists of eateries I'd like to experiment with. I hear there is a restaurent in Thane that serves food from Uruguay! It has been long since I ate at 'Momo's Point' at Kamla Nagar in Delhi, which is having me crave mad for Tibetan Food. It would be great to have twenty days off just to explore food joints in Mumbai and around, one after another. So on Day 1, it would be Lebanese for lunch, Uruguay-ese for dinner, on Day 2 it would be Konkani for lunch and Thai for dinner... and so on till Day 20.

Then I want to learn and play squash good enough to represent my company at one of those Press tournaments. 20 days of practise is enough to get me there. I cannot speak enough about the trekking and hiking options around Mumbai. It is also time for my yearly pilgrimage to the Himalayas, worshipping those mountains by walking on them till my legs can't take me another meter and camping in the snow and eating Maggi cooked on firewood.

I would give away all my Sundays and public holidays in return for just those 20 days when I can bury my mobile phone somewhere deep inside my wardrobe, put on my sneakers and pack a light rucsack and become laapata for some while.

But only for those wrecked things called Sundays!

I want I want

Irresistible!

Make no bones about it

Will Swami Ramdev now stop teaching all aasanas that require one to turn their bodies to the left?

A knot not shot

Reporting Amitabh Bachchan's illness had already made me a persona non-grata among my non-journalist friends, who held me as culpable as the more aggressive electronic media for generating what they called ‘constant gibberish’ in the name of news.

Yet, when I read about the stories from Bhopal and Philadelphia, where anxious fans had erected Big B Temples to pray for his wellness, or Assam where two poor buffaloes were sacrificed by equally concerned souls, I knew that my urban elite friends did not represent the real Indian news consumer.

Taking solace in this, I embarked yet again on another project, that of covering Aamir Khan's wedding bash at Panchgani, Western Ghats, one in which I risked losing approximately seven friends per news report I wrote on the subject.

Reaching Panchgani late morning on December 28, 2005, I gathered the facts: Aamir Khan, Bollywood's most selective actor, would wed his girlfriend of two (or so) years in Bandra, Mumbai the same evening and then arrive with a contingent of Bollywood's who's who to Panchgani the next morning to spend four days eating, drinking, singing, dancing, playing cricket, listening to nearly every genre of music in the world and keeping prying scribes, who had nothing better to do than to scoop microscopic details about the event, off.

Of course, he was right, because we really had nothing better to do. Celebrity lives, especially during weddings, are under public scrutiny all over the world and Indians are no different.

Reaching Il Palazzo Hotel, where Aamir would host his party the next day, I tried to enter through the main gate. At once, four hefty moustached men, who until then seemed to be snoring away in their chairs, suddenly became active and brandished their lathis towards a large board that read, "Trespassers will be prosecuted." The lathis subsequently changed their aim and pointed toward the gate, where I was standing. The Hotel officers were equally uncooperative when contacted on phone.

Walking away from the hotel toward the bazaar, I asked a random bystander what he knew about the celeb wedding that was taking place in his town. The three-minute non-stop information outflow that I received for an answer exceeded all my expectations. These chaps probably knew more about the wedding than Aamir himself!

Next, he offered to take me to a secret place from where I could get a bird's eye view of the party venue. Climbing for an hour through silver oak forests, we reached the top of a hill from where the property of Il Palazzo was visible in spurts and bits through a canopy of trees.

A TV journalist had already reached the 'secret point' before me and was excitedly shooting away blurry zoom shots of a swimming pool inside the hotel where in his words, "Aamir Khan would probably throw a pool party." That shot, an hour later, would run as 'exclusive breaking news' on that news channel. No kidding.

But just like the sight of even an ankle through a burqa excites men in some countries, unearthing this swimming pool before anyone else did translate into beating the competition for the paparazzi on the Aamir Khan wedding beat.

For the rest of the day till the next evening, nothing happened. Editors were screaming into mobile phones for 'the dope' but no information was coming. And then the unthinkable (read expected) happened. After all the guests had arrived on December 29 and Aamir's party was in progress with Satara's Divisional Commissioner as chief guest, one particular TV crew decided that enough was enough.

"Attack!" they hollered in their minds and a cameraman barged into the hotel to get some exclusive shots. He managed to penetrate the hotel premises three meters more than the best media attempt yet, when the able and strong-armed security guards of actor Ronit Roy's side business, Ace Security, spotted the uninvited guest and pounced on him. A bullfight ensued, joined by other media personnel resulting in two broken cameras and an injured cameraman. The mood was very tense. Shaadi aur barbaadi, I said to myself.

The next two days were no better. The evening's scuffle had left a bitter taste in everyone's minds. The occasional photographer triumphed, succeeding in catching an arm, a leg or a scalp of a supposed wedding guest.

I myself saw the futility of it all and instead used the time to do a travel story on Panchgani and even delivered a talk on Media as a Career to a bored class of adolescent students at a 150-year-old boarding school there.

At the end of it all, it seemed that Aamir Khan was bent upon proving a point, that of "defeating" the media by not providing them a single news moment. I still believe, had he stepped out for even five minutes to give the journalists what they wanted: a sound-byte and a photo-op, he'd have been left alone by the Press and everybody would have had a happy vacation in Panchgani.