Out of the thousand things, is it ok if I miss out on few?

Okay. So,

I have been trying to make something of myself. The specific attempts haven't always been successful but I'm trying nevertheless. I'm trying to do different things and I'm trying to empty out all those hypothetical to-do lists in various domains of my life at once. It seems quite the contrary although I haven't achieved much in this vacation time... not even half of what I had planned. And I do hold myself accountable. Part of it has been laziness and pure disinterest. Time is short and there is a lot to do before I leave graduate studies. I have this feeling that I've probably overlooked people who have been there for me. This post is to say to my family and friends (ESPCIALLY FRIENDS....ALL FRIENDS) that if ever I was a little busy or couldn't respond as thoroughly as I did earlier, do forgive me. But I still want to know what is going on in your life and will always do. That is something I never want to miss out on. So this may seem like asking for a lot, but keep in touch! I don't want to call you up after months and know you got married or you had this gig or you solved that problem or you went there for a trip. Not AFTER everything's over. I would like to have that information real time. Regretfully, I have started forgetting birthdays which's very unlike me. But we all have too many mediums to kill each other on. Facebook and Whatsapp being the quickest. New directions always come with the trade off of leaving the old trodden road. Only the road though not the people.

Cheers!

PS:  This is a confused blog post.

Twenty five multitudes

erm..... Surprise?!

Between two 'writers', I guess a special space in this world of mine is the best intangible gift I can personally give as the day ends (in exactly an hour)...After all...as dramatic as it sounds, it's only words and words are all I have.

(Especially amidst all that overdo of friends, celebration, online/whatsapp presence and FOOD :O)

Dear Bubblegum, as the world knows you other than (khurafaati, narad muni, jaadu padu(whaaa?), duvidha)

Two births (yes, the name is definitely supercool) and it's silver jubilee time for you (hell this calls for a super grand mega celebration). But at the end of this day today, we all know you would have just been nineteen for 6 years.

It's been what.....ten months since we met at Gulmohar CCD? That very day in my mind I shook my head. One whole year of this Mumbaiah Gujarati warble about everything under the sun???

Ten months. That's not much . That's not enough to know someone. Definitely not.

Even then this is to say that the time that I have with you is superlative. We've shared some real good times and turned okay times great (... "handpump ukhaad diya, papa!" sunny deol style) through all of the two hostels (heck ....we lived through Rizwan/Salmaan's food!). That king sized laughter on each of our silly li'l jokes and the realization that we can really.... really laugh over nothing sometimes. Kudos for putting up with me in this room, to top that.. :P Being the 'bachhu party' of the house always worked to my advantage and for me, our walks are the fun-est part because it gets you talking :P.

I just know we can fight over who will switch off the room lights, I'm all attentive when you start off statements like "I was like you before" and I would have no idea who your brain is in a race with all the freaking time even if we went on those very walks for years...there'd still be this one non-Madhuri non Bollywood side of you undiscovered somewhere. :P  I titled the post 25 multitudes because with each year you seem to add one multitude to yourself ever more!

As an individual I now see you trying out different choices and prepared to tackle all the roadblocks that come your way with all the more.... (should I use the word?) .....wisdom. You have a lot of people around you who you cherish and are able to give time to. Perhaps that's something to feel fortunate about. But more than all of that, I must learn how to be myself and how to be fun!

Robert Frost said, we have promises to keep.... and miles to go before we sleep. Especially since you now will start moving around for your career..... to take you through all of that, wish you all the more huge gang of very close friends, (and with all empathy to him, the 'someone special' too...),  and wishes for this new year, and your career (....soar high girl! really. As that song says..... you should hear the song itself btw, "Defying Gravity") and many.....many more blog posts that I can read (pliss.... pliss keep writing) and everything else in the years to come.

This is Shubharambh.

"Oh, Tamil? I see. I thought you were a ..."

This is what happens when you meet new people. It is this unavoidable tendency to place people in that virtual, highly inaccurate geography  in your mind and then typecast accordingly with a pre-cultured algorithm.

When I ask Chinese students where they come from, I ask them which province just so I could look it up and know the provinces in the country better.

This write-up arises from an incident I have witness just 15 minutes ago. I have done these mistakes too and have tried not to repeat.

Since lunch in the canteen is usually a trade-off between two programmed functions for us drones:. haveAverage() vs. die_of_Hunger() and the time it takes for you to reach the counters are highly crowd dependent and you end up chit-chatting meanwhile...So this aged person (and visibly someone who knows the India map) asks me, "You're Tamil is it?". "Yes", I replied with visible interest. This was one of those few rare occasions when people had got the state right. I had adorned a jeans, a kurta, ear-rings and a stole.It was a regular puja day and resulted in a bindi-kumkum-vibhuti too. Easily place-able? Sure.

"But you look like a Punjabi!"

Oh no. There goes.

He was a regular there and seeing that I avoided everything that had something to do with egg, garlic or non vegetarian food, he asks me a couple of days later, "Brahmin is it?" "Yes", I replied, this time with a visible disinterest because then the resulting conversations in my experience always go on to those how Brahmins are not supposed to eat non vegetarian food and still come choose to.

BTW, how am I supposed to respond to that? Should I start hogging dead chicken to prove you right? Should I throw statistics on how many pure non-vegetarians turned vegan this year? What? Hello, Vegetarianism is a choice I make for myself. No dependence on caste, religion or culture. At least for me. Geography, my health and availability of appropriate food? Yes. Sure.  

"Do you know how to read and write Tamil as well?"

"I'm not fluent with the script but I can speak conversational Tamil"

"But.... but Tamil Brahmins are supposed to be able to read and write Tamil. They even used to teach Tamil back in the days."

"Yes they did. And yes, I should know the script but unfortunately for me I've been brought up in a different state of India so did not have much exposure to Tamil in script form. I learnt the local language instead additionally and do know the basic script of that"

"Oh!", he replies as if I was one of the countless sources for universal destruction of Tamil as a language.

"So what will you teach your kids?"

I'll teach them the maps and how upbringing changes the languages and habits we put to use.

"Would learn, if required."

"What if the man in your life doesn't know Tamil at all? Or knows much more than you do?"

I'm only here to have lunch, Sir

"That's not a problem."

"Oh so you are open minded, is it?"

Anyway. Put this aside.

Many occasions have occurred when people have tried to "place" me in different regions of India. I am proud to announce that barring the most coveted North East which I cannot, now, have the facial features for, I have almost covered each region: North, West, East and of course, South. Most of them resulting from the attire that I chose for that day. "Oh, you are a South Indian? I thought you were a Bengali.....oh well". "Oh you tooooootally look like a Punjabi!", "I thought you spoke Marathi at home"

When people who have an idea about all states of India (especially those who know that South India has different states) tell me this, I find this typecasting business pretty amusing and can't help use it as a tool to cheer me up sometimes. There is this amazing sense of belonging when you can actually be interpreted to have come from so many different places. But call it mean or discriminant, if I am interacting with those who do not know the map of India even remotely, I do feel like telling them, "Mate, for you, I'm just a fellow Indian.". The reason for such a response can be explained by these couple of interactions with students of graduate level:

Incident 1:

"Aap kahaan se ho?"
"Main Tamil Nadu ki hun"
"Oh to aap Malayalee bolte honge ghar pe..."

(Perhaps it is cruel on my part to expect so much. But you just might want to remember the main language a state in your own country speaks just the way I did for your case. It's not difficult.)

"Nahi humare ghar mein Tamil bolte hain"

"Oh wahi wahi... South Indian... ye donon alag cheezein hai kya? Malayalee mein to bolna aata hi hoga. Kitna hi fark hai donon mein?"

Please, people. There is one more way you can phrase such a question and be less 'typecast-y'. You could ask whether I also happen to know Malayalee, which FYI is a different language than Tamil. Just as I cannot assume that a Gujarati would know the Rajasthani language, the same way one can't assume I would know any other 'south indian' language. Another FYI, Kannada is a language. Not the community of people living there.

Incident 2


"Aap kahaan se ho?"
"Main Tamil Nadu ki hun"
"Tamil Nadu matlab kahaan Rajasthaan ke bhi upar aaya?..." (Facepalm, I'm not kidding this is a real question.)

I mentioned "highly inaccurate world map" in the beginning of this post. The tolerance for that is only so much. It is on such occasions that I sit down and explain to them where Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu lie on the Indian map and that the term "South India" is really, in reality....a collection of different states with different states, different languages (and therefore scripts), different cultures.

With international crowd, this feeling becomes different. I want to enlighten then more about the state system in India. I want them to know where I come from and what was the culture there. So I tell them my state and roughly where it is located with respect to the popular cities that they may have heard of like Bangalore, New Delhi or Mumbai.

...And all of this brings anything but just sheer amuse.

The importance of being earnest...on LinkedIn

Generic discussion, disclaimer attached, all due respect, not rebellion and conditions apply :)

Professional networking has always made sense. One of the biggest professional networking portals is LinkedIn. Even when I think from the perspective of an employer and not a job seeker, I find LinkedIn provides a lot more user friendly interface than many of the other resume management systems and is an extremely under-rated tool. As someone looking to hire, I would be interested in every project and every entry of the profile I'm viewing and this portal definitely gives the candidate an opportunity for that. Everyone would like to see and show what one has done in his/her career so far. This is the age of Dont Ask Dont Tell Dont Care. But definitely not Dont Show (dear wandering mind, stop right there). I can add URLs of my project documentation, personal websites and professional achievements and descriptions of my work... all on a one stop shop. I sincerely wish it would become a universal profile/portfolio holder in the days to come.

There are concerns that job seekers always face when it comes to resume management systems. The concern is, each company has one of its own. I need a login, a password ( that is at least 6 characters with all combinations of letters and characters inside) and upload everything to each of these companies one by one... even to the level of individual position. This I need to do for the innumerable companies I would be applying to and each application would therefore consume say 15-20 minutes including cover letter formation. Clearly, if I even apply to say 10 jobs a day, 200 minutes are down the drain. This, only provided I have a super nice internet connection and computer access. Couldn't those 3-4 hours be more productive, or at least more entertaining?

While it is essential to define the uniqueness of a company by asking candidates to tailor their applications each time, it is better done through the positions and descriptions themselves rather than the database followed. I always have this pertinent question when people tell me to draft a resume and cover letter unique for the company to which I'm applying. My resume tells you essentially what all I've done. For freshers, there is little chance to have "relevant experience" in any domain, over and above "any work experience". If my resume consists an 'objective', it should mean I'm applying to positions that will potentially fulfill this objective only and not attempting to try everywhere possible. Otherwise applying to companies that wouldn't fulfill your career objectives doesn't make sense. All this of course is in 2 pages. Would it not be intelligent for me spend effort on this one holistic profile? Would it not be sugar coating and unnecessarily inflated descriptions my work on the resume if I tailored it for every position I applied to, making it tougher for the HR? Again, as an HR, I would want you to display your merit in your tasks. Not in how much you can alter MS Word templates to appear through our search engines.

A recruitment official for a decently sized firm will essentially put in keywords and prioritize all those filtered candidates on the basis of location, work authorization and (domain) experience/expertise. This process can be done (only once instead of umpteen times) even on a common platform like LinkedIn than on their own databases. I haven't played with the recruiters view of LinkedIn interface but I'm guessing it has the capability to filter out applications coming to the position advertised on the portal itself rather than a redirection to the company resume database. Rather than spending all his/her time in uploading the same academic transcripts over and over again and still have a rather bleak chance of getting an interview call owing to the competition doesn't it make sense for the candidate to work on and spend time in the betterment of a portfolio that showcases all his academic and professional experiences? A student would definitely want to document his project details on a separate URL and mention the link on his/her profile so that if a hiring manager finds it interesting, clicking the URL would provide detailed information (there's a catch here as to which URLs are corporate firewall allowable).

LinkedIn's USP is connections. If I know someone, I can get introduced to another someone regarding a project, a job, a friend, a colleague or a business opportunity. I can give and receive recommendations. All my professional activity is just out there. But I have also seen fake profiles and un-maintained profiles. Both need to be weeded out.

Therefore, here's to The importance of being earnest..... on LinkedIn. Those who don't believe in it, know that I've seen it in action a few times.

A later Update: Some random person on my LinkedIn 'liked' a HR girl's post describing a profile she sought for her company and it was displayed on my set of updates. It was my long lost school friend. The world works in weird ways.

Down to the last decimal. Life in the laboratory.

It is 2013 and the new year has begun with a LOT of good spirit.