JACK & SPADES

How To Get a Seat In The Metro.

A little background: I travel in metro for nearly two and a half hours daily and I do that 6 days a week and I've been doing THAT for the past 4 months. So in case you had your doubts, I am well qualified to write this post.

Disclaimer: If you're the kind who prefers leaning on the metro door and staring out into the world and have deep intellectual conversations with yourself while Coldplay's 'fix you' runs in the background:

1. Why are you reading this in the first place?

2. Please stop pretending like you're in a movie. The most dramatic thing in your life is the fact that once you lied to your boss and bunked office to go visit Akshardham temple.

For the rest, a lot of whether or not you'll get a seat depends on where you are standing on the platform when the train is yet to arrive. Yes, it starts that early. I won't explain why, but your best bet is: right next to the ladies compartment. Now, it's extremely important to be the first one to enter. Not third, not second. FIRST. By the first two week you'll know the exact spot where the doors open. A few inches on either side and be ready to stand next to the sweaty guy who thinks scratching his crotch in public is his birthright and he shall have it.

Now that you've entered, quickly take the lone empty seat which is usually the one reserved for ladies or the elderly. This is trickier than you think it is because there are two doors to a compartment and rest assured the guy on the other door is just as aware of these hacks as you are. The fact that the ladies compartment is right beside you, the probability of any lady entering yours is precisely what the world had of ending last year, so you're fine. The off chance (like barely 95%) that there is no empty seat, is when you need to rack your brains a little. This is experience talking so listen up:

There are only limited kind of people who travel in a metro and you need to identify each one of them, know their address, their travel patterns, their habits, and what kind of underwear they wear. Haha just kidding, I already did that for you. I'm the Jason Bourne of Delhi Metro. Anyway, what I mean is, you need to identify that one person in your compartment who'll be the first one to leave and stamp your authority on his seat by standing as close to him as possible without making it obvious that you swing both ways.

Essentially there are only two kinds of people who travel in a metro:

1. Ones who get down at Rajiv Chowk

2. The Driver

Not really, I just wanted to use that as a joke, here's the actual list:

1. The typical 40 year old office going uncle: Don't even bother. He'll always have a seat when you enter and will still be sitting when you leave. And not just any seat, it'll be somewhere around the middle because aisle is too risky, there is a pertinent danger of a more deserving candidate asking you to vacate. No one really knows where his office is. I once took the train from the station it starts and he was ALREADY inside reading the 4th page of Hindustan Times. It's almost like he takes his seat at 4am while the train is still in the yard.

2. The uber-cool Delhi dude: Its practically harder to NOT spot him. He'll be the one wearing shades inside. Also a hideous hair cut that would shame a porcupine. He'll probably be getting down at a stop which has a mall nearby or he might go all the way to Sarojini to buy fake 'Being Human' t-shirts and meet his uncontrollable need to look hip. You can take your chances with his seat but I won't promise anything.

3. The uber-cool Delhi girl: Yes, I will talk about her because no one else does. There will always be that one lone girl in your compartment who'll prefer standing by the door for an hour long ride even when half the metro is empty because obviously taking a seat in a metro is too mainstream. Also, just when you'll start to notice her, she'll pull out a Durjoy Dutta or Nikita Singh from her bag and pretend she's intellectually superior to everyone else present, which is like adding 2+2, getting 5 as the result and considering yourself to be the next Einstein. If only someone could tell her reading Duttas and Bhagats is actually a bigger turnoff than saying "I don't read". I would not take her seat even when she dared to take one herself.

4. That old uncle with a Note II in his hands and absolutely no idea what to do with it when it rings. Forget it. He'll be too engrossed in figuring out how the phone works to realize his stop passed away an hour ago or that he took the wrong train and is now standing in Ghaziabad though he intended to be in Gurgaon.

5. This is the guy. Whoever this is. If he does not fit into any of the above stereotypes, you have your man. Go snuggle up to him. Usual traits: He'll be the one looking out the window every two minutes trying to see what station it is. He won't be reading or listening to any music because he knows its a short ride. There will usually be a phone call which will have a "haan bas 5 min me pahunch rha hun" in it and suddenly everyone standing will turn their heads and look at you with a "You lucky bastard" written all over their face.

Congratulations you have finally managed to get yourself a seat in our beloved metro precisely one station before Rajiv Chowk where obviously you're getting down yourself. But what the heck, you beat others to it and that's what matters.

Of course all of the above is subject to assumptions and variables which will bring down the percentage of this being applicable to anyone ever to 0.28% but I'm a daredevil so I like taking my chances.

8 Things Your First Job Teaches You.

Technically I haven't started my first job yet, but I'm doing an internship at a startup which is practically the closest you can come to feel like doing a full time job without actually getting paid likewise. Lucky me.

Here are 8 things which I feel only your first job teaches you. I'll try and be as less specific as possible.

1. You know NOTHING. Remember how you ended college on a high? Getting your fancy job, with a fancy GPA, your ground breaking research projects? What you did in college is as close to what you'll be doing at your job as I am to becoming 7 feet tall. So before you join, step down from your throne of I've-had-it-all (take that Adele), drain your brains out and take it as a new school where you've come to learn. YET AGAIN.

2. Deadlines in college and deadlines at work are like two sides of a coin, no actually, they are like TWO WHOLE DIFFERENT COINS. You bragged about how you did the semester project just a night before it was due? Try doing that at work and no one fist bumps you and say "YOU SO COOL BRO". In fact, the only fist that'll come your way will be directed at a body part that-must-not-be-named.

3. Software developers hate MBAs. To them the only thing a management school teaches you is to draft excel sheets faster than the HAL 9000. With their lavish suits, expensive aftershaves and gelled up hair, they are the male bimbos of software development. If you ever planned on doing a Management degree after graduation, work for an year as a developer and ten years down the line(or twenty) you'll tell your(or your friend's) kids how crazy you were to think you wanted to wear swanky ties to work everyday.

4. What weekends mean. Yes, you think you know what a busy week feels like, "I've had enough of them as a student." Trust me you don't. You've heard Monday morning blues but you never really have them until you start working. A Monday test in school or a lab viva in College is NOTHING compared to the prospect of starting a whole new week at work. The Friday evening rush in your heart as you leave office(I leave at 8 on SATURDAY) is like attaining Nirvana and every Sunday night feels like the end of summer vacations.

5. There is NOTHING worth sacrificing your sleep over. Yes, unnecessary all-nighters where you watch the entire season of a sitcom or a movie trilogy, were hip back in college. Out in the real world, there is no "meri proxy laga dena" the next morning. Unless you want to be seen drooling over your keyboard while the sexy girl from HR walks past your desk, sleep on time. PS: The only one who ever looked good while drooling is Katrina Kaif in the slice advert.

6. Speaking of sleep, by the first month of work you will know the EXACT time you need to wake up so you reach office on time. If it is 7:41 am, it is 7:41 am. A minute early and you'll be groggy and cursing yourself all day for not getting enough sleep, if it's 7:42 am you'll be too late to brush or bathe or remembering you haven't put your pants back on before leaving your place.

8. Salary. Remember planning out in college how you'll spend the shit load of money you'll suddenly start making and how the earth will revolve around you once you start earning? Sadly it doesn't work that way. For one, we conveniently leave one little detail: our college life is a fully sponsored vacation of 4 years from our parents as a gift for making them work so hard for all these years to make us who we are. So once you start working, it should feel right to NOT use the debit card of the account your dad funds money in and start using the one in which you do. Do that and suddenly the earth WILL start revolving around you, only in the opposite direction. You'll realize what expenses mean, what it feels like to give half your salary for a roof you live under or the 50 bucks for a 1 Km auto ride.

9. Attention from the opposite gender. If you thought a high paying job will get you attention and suddenly every other flaw you had will be overshadowed in a pool of Gandhi pics, you my friend need a shrink. I'm not even going into how shallow that mindset is, all I'm saying is: You don't have much of a life to meet someone new outside of work. At work, the only women in office who don't already have an affair with your boss or have a husband IN THE SAME OFFICE are the ones who earn more than you, so going by your own thinking you are left drowning in your own soup, single and still just as miserable.

I'm pretty sure there must be more but it's way past my bedtime tonight and I feel I have this connection with the HR girl so I don't want to take any chances.

When love arrives.

Because somethings on the internet leave you with nothing else to say.

Credits: Sarah Kay & Phil Kaye

Just Do It

Personally I always thought bucket lists are sissy. Men don’t list what they want to do, they just live life as it comes, make the most of what they have and don’t plan too much. Apparently, I don’t see the point of lying to myself anymore, I think lists are cool. They give you a sense of direction, a meaning, a purpose and a motivation to make things happen. You tend to relax when you have nothing planned and I have had it with my laid back attitude, I want to get out there and do stuff now, stuff which I might have just procrastinated earlier, thinking there’ll be plenty of time later, convincing myself it’s probably not the right thing to do currently and making a million other unreasonable excuses. So I begin, today, right now, doing stuff I always wanted to, making things happen because there is no better day to start than today and there is no better time than now.

PS: Now if only someone would get this blanket off of me.

Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna

It started out with denial, neglect swooped in next, followed by indifference and finally it struck me with horror and disbelief. Yes, College has practically ended. Hostel life is over, possibly forever. People are waiting for the 21^st for the apocalypse to strike; I seem to be going through mine already.

There are a million things I could write about currently and they would still not suffice what College and hostel life meant for me and probably everyone who has lived through it for the past 4 years or anytime in their life. And nothing I can say or write about can ever come even close to describing the feeling of it ending. And that’s not the point of this post anyway.

People are inherently different. Their nature, their thinking, their emotional capacity, their interests and everything else taken together makes them who they are, stands them out from everyone else. But one thing that is probably common among all these differences is their reaction to endings. They make us sad. They make us nostalgic, they make us want to hold on to people, to hug them and never let them go.

I’m innately awkward around people, more so in front of people I love. So I choose indifference and neglect as a defense mechanism. I act like it doesn’t bother me because that’s the easy way out of dealing with endings. But that’s not it. Saying goodbyes to people you care about is like accepting the fact that you’ll never meet again and stamping your approval of it. I challenge that. I refuse to accept it and fail to reason why things can’t be the same someway into the future. Sure, we won’t be in College anymore but we could still be together, we could meet up often, maybe things might even be better than what they are right now. So I like to leave conversations in between, dues left unmet, goodbyes never said, just so whenever we meet, howsoever late that might be, we may start right from where we left each other. Like nothing really affected us. It was just a really long 'brb'. I know this is being over optimistic, but I have had my share of pessimism in the past and it hasn’t taken me anywhere.

PS: The title is simply because that's probably the last SRK movie I liked (and everyone else hated), 'Chak de..' released earlier right?

It's Diwali Afterall

So it’s that time of the month, no, all you ladies, not ‘that’ time, I meant the festive one. Now that I have started off with a gross and highly inappropriate joke I’m sure you might have guessed where this is going, in the drafts folder ie.

Anyhow Diwali, festival of lights! It’s not too hard to know that Diwali is round the corner (EDIT: This was supposed to be published a week before) and there are some very obvious signs all around to help us guess that:

Are you on facebook? What am I asking, unless you are a newborn (who btw might also have an account created by his parents for the sheer fear of running out of fb ids with their child’s name) or an alien(assuming something EPIC needs to happen if this ‘doomsday’ story is to stand out, I’m placing my bets on Aliens attacking Earth) or living in Brazil (apparently people there are still stuck with Orkut, I might have to consider changing my retirement plans of settling down in Rio after all), you MUST have a fb account.

Alright now that we have established that you do, you surely must have been tagged by at least a dozen of those really heartfelt Diwali pictures symbolizing Goddess Laxmi, or Lord Ganesh (reused from the recently concluded Ganesh Chaturthi) or a candles or firecrackers or diyas or a really sexy chick titled ‘Patakha’ by that one pervert of a friend who embarrasses you in front of the ladies but is the only reason you still open your fb account, ok that might not be true for all. So what do you do? You comment your mandatory thankings/wishings and wait for a while before untagging yourself and asking forgiveness from the respective God/Goddess.

If you live at home, you’ll wake up every day not to the sound of your alarm but that of the vacuum cleaner. Also if you are a boy, you are automatically assured that the attic, where even spiders shudder to visit and no homo-sapient has dared foot since you were attacked by lizards same day last year, is your responsibility to clean.

And when you’re finally done and dusted in every true sense, you are challenged this one-time every year to prove your worth as an Engineer, yes, you guessed it right, the Diwali lights. Now irrespective of the fact that you are a software engineer who writes codes or a chemical engineer who makes chemicals(frankly I’m not really sure what they do), if you can’t repair last year’s Diwali lights or that hair dryer or anything that has wires or uses electricity, it is assumed that you have failed as an Engineer and should have been bought a shop to sit around. Speaking of Diwali lights, you are supposed to make way with whatever number of them you have and make them shine brighter than your neighbors’. This is really important.

After all this you are probably too tired to do anything else so you sit back and look at what’s new in the world but guess what, the only thing that the newspapers will tell you is that the Cadbury’s Celebration pack that has helped you rest your spatial repertoire for the past decade when it comes to gifts during festivals is finally out of trend and this totally new Chinese ‘Sandwich Maker’ which comes with a free mobile handset from a company named after a really famous breed of dogs and supposedly priced double than the sandwich maker itself, is the perfect replacement for those chocolates.

Having said all that, it’s really important to know that Diwali is still probably the only time of the year you get to meet people you cherish (or avoid, whatever) and your one-time only free pass to eat all those delicious sweets gifted to you, claiming to be made from ‘100% pure butter oil’ but specifically not mentioning the animal whose milk was used to prepare the butter (I hear it makes a two-pitched ‘hee-haw’ sound). I’m taking the liberty to assume that you haven’t actually planned to use these sweets as gifts for someone else, in which case you are totally my idol. Happy Diwali people! Cheers.

Just What Life Does To You

"No matter how hard you fight it, you fall. And it’s hard. Except if there’s an upside to free falling. It’s the chance you give your friends to catch you." - Grey’s Anatomy.

Alright, my mid-terms are starting from tomorrow. So what’s the right thing to do? Exactly! Get a crazy TV show addiction. But no, this isn't about the show. This isn't about philosophy, this isn't about humor. So what’s this about, let’s just go ahead and see where it goes, maybe it is about the show after all.

LIFE has changed, for good, for now. No, not trying to be a pseudo pessimist here but if you read my last post you know what has changed. The thing about changes is, you never know how long they are going to last. With major changes comes major transformations (yes sue me for stealing the Spiderman tagline). For one, I have lost the art of concentration. Yes, my attention span has reduced to less than that of a sparrow. So mid terms are officially screwed. But that’s not what is bothering me right now. In fact it’s the least of my concerns. The thing with attention span is, it’s required for far more important activities than study. To begin with, reading. The lost art it seems. It's been years since I waited for this moment, when I can read the stuff I want to read, as much as I want to read, without a hint of obligation to do something else, without the urgency to finish as fast as I can. And now that I have finally reached that stage, I seem to have lost the capability to read. Did I wait too long? Is it a skill you lose if you don’t practice it frequently enough? I don’t know and I hope it isn’t. Just want to go back to where I left it, for once I do not have the strength to start all over again.

While we are still ranting, one more custom made cliché. Why do we ever get over people we used to like? There are stages of letting others into your life: you meet them, you like them, you get to know them, you like them some more and then somehow you never realize when they become a part of your existence. Then, as time passes, in between those close moments and those distances that seep in, somehow, slowly you drift apart even when you never intended to. You meet new people, interesting people and the cycle continues. I want out, I want to hold on to people I have in my life currently, I want to break the cycle but this transformation I talked about earlier is exactly what might cause this cycle to start spinning all over again. It’s scary.

Anyway, let’s just hold it there. Not the post I wanted to write but if you don’t let your thoughts free fall when you write, you don’t deserve to write at all.

Adios, pray that I don’t flunk in what might probably be among the last sets of exams I give in my life :D

And then Life turns around!

So this happened last week.

I
GOT

A

JOB
OFFER

FROM

Ok Bye. :D

House MD

If anyone deserves a post on this blog, it has to be Hugh Laurie.

Some things are obvious and don’t need any explanation. Some things are not obvious but easy to explain. But then some things are like Gregory House, no matter how much you try and comprehend them or try and rationalize their behavior and actions, you just can’t.

There’s this famous saying that some critic once said for House “The most complex anti-hero in the History of Television”. That’s probably the most precise definition one can use to describe him.

The thing about that character is, it’s just not possible to sum it up into words. You think you know him, you think you understand what goes behind that Genius of a brain of his, you think you know what pain resides behind that apparently black heart of his, yet with each new episode, he will prove you wrong. He will show you a side of his that you didn’t knew existed, and yet somehow all these innumerable sides collaborate to fit together magically like a jig-saw puzzle and conclude something which you never could have seen coming. He will reason out all his deeds even when he doesn’t say a word.

It’s actually the understanding of the Human mind and the mysterious ways in which it works which stands the show apart. Maybe the reason I read too much into that character is because I relate to it at more levels than others do. I’m not saying I’m the loner genius who’s almost always right, can read people better than Sherlock, don’t give a crap about the rules of the society, a drug addict and incapable of showing emotions. No I’m not there yet. I’m simply saying that at a very basic and minute level, I can associate my view of the world to his vindications and account for his behavior which others might find unreasonable. So it’s possible you won’t like the show simply because his radical behavior is too radical for you to accept.

I’m in no way justifying his actions or the lack of them. No, he is definitely not the example I would suggest anyone to follow. As Wilson rightly pointed out in one of the episodes, “Intentions don’t count, what’s in your heart, doesn’t count, caring doesn’t count.”

But what is this thing about being “miserable” as they say about House?

Is it about being in pain and not letting others know about it? Is it about making people hate you because you are afraid of attachments? Is it about being selflessly devoted to your work and still pretend you don’t really care? Or about not knowing what you project to the world is what you deserve and not what’s inside you? Expecting too much out of a world that does not work the way it should? About finding faults in others because you are too afraid to look at your own self? Finding answers to reason out everything else around you except your own life? About knowing what is right and not letting the world teach you otherwise? About admiring yourself because that’s all you have left so you cling to it? About being so afraid to change, you’ll lose what makes you special? About manipulating people because you can’t handle any kind of real relationships?

I can go to still deeper depths into this character and yet I would have enough adjectives left to fill out another page but I guess you have the gist of it now. Watch House MD for the sheer genuineness in which the show has been made, watch it because of the insights it will give you into knowing people and not judging their actions, watch it for the awesomeness of the dialogues and their resonance within you even days after an episode ends and above all, watch it for the effort Hugh Laurie has put in to live up to this challenge, because all though he always says “Everbody lies”, currently I’m not.

PS: This post is a result of just one of the several withdrawal symptoms that I’m going through since the show ended.