Railways Always

One of the beauties of student life is traveling back home alone. The fun increases when the carrier is Indian Railways (My father made it very clear that he cannot afford my monthly trips home by air).
So, no matter how much you enjoy your privacy, like to read when traveling or are a strict follower of mamma’s pointers (“Don’t talk to strangers!!”) since the age of four - The cosmos conspires against your abstinence and you find yourself making lousy conversations with people whom you’ve never met before and might never gonna meet again. As a matter of fact, the designing is done in such a manner that the compartment resembles a typical indian drawing-room. If you don’t wanna talk, jump to the berth on the top and sleep (we don’t care if you snore), If you wanna stay here…listen to us…Listen to what my sons do…where they work….what my sister-in-law’s daughter pay package is…hear me today like there’s n tomorrow..

13th December, Mumbai-Jaipur Express
Coach AS 3, Seat Number : 35

Aunty 1: Dhokla?
Parul: No thanks aunty.
Aunty1: What do you do? Why are you going home?
Parul: MBA, Placements over, Break, blah blah ….
Aunty1: Oh good. By the way my sister-in-laws daughter also did MBA…her package is in crores.
Parul: Where does she work?
Aunty1: York…New York
Parul: York or New York?
Aunty1: Somewhere there.

Zoooperb! York’s close to London and NY in the US…
Just note the level of know-how of a far off relative she’s so proud of!

Uncle 2 jumps in the conversation with slightly more articulate facts.
Uncle 2: I also have a cousin who earns in crores. She works in California and is above 35. We can’t find a groom for her.
Aunty 1: Ya…ya… you are right. These girls these days, aiesi hi hain yeh ladkiyaan… na ghar basana chahhtee hain na ghar basega..
Parul: hmmmmmm..

Unable to make any kind of contribution to such a conversation, I shifted my attention to a four year old who started screaming as soon as I put some music on my laptop.

“KhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiKKKKKKKKKKeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”

Everyone started staring at me in the compartment as if they had seen me snatching a chocolate from the child. Not knowing what to do I gave my typical I-haven’t-done-anything-god-save-me-look to the kid’s mum. The unforthcoming mother then requested me to play the inscrutable request of her son– ‘Khaike paan banaraswala’ from Don.
The child went into hibernation half an hour later… Phew!!

Another funny sight was two boys who had brought stuff from home to make sandwiches!! Raw tomatoes, potatoes, cucumber, butter and a packet of bread!!!

These are few of the many encounters I’ve had in my trips to and from home to Pune. Train trips all in all are an amazingly interesting peek into dissimilar POVs, psyches and lives of so many different people.
For most of the people they are just to be forgotten conversations in trains, for some these rendezvous are a pastime, for some they are pure bullshit, for a marketer they are consumer interaction, for the talented - an audience, for egotists they are agreeable listeners and for people like me they are another reason to write a blog.

Experiments with Bubba - No men or two!

Her introduction would take too long but it should suffice that Bubba is close my heart and we call each other for counseling for all the major and minor ****-ups in life. What is of even more importance is that this is her first relationship and she believes in giving 100% (of what… I don’t know).

I’m neither trying a Salvador Dali here nor is it an effort to kill Bubba’s little-of-what-is-left called love life. It’s her final resolution after due consideration of not receiving adequate attention from her beau. Well, as far as Bubba is concerned two catches here:

One, the final resolution is often followed by a Final-2, Final-3, Final-Final, Super Final and Master Final (like Transcend ’06 budgets) resolutions.

Two, Bubba’s definition of ‘adequate’ differs from most of the species in most cases. When it comes to food, one idli would do. When it comes to romance, 10 hours on the phone wouldn’t be enough. You would have guessed it by now, Bubba is on a LDRP, generally known as Long Distance RelationshiP (read Love Decreasing Romance Perishing).

Scene 1

One day when Bubba Boy came to meet Bubba (they were not on talking terms as usual), I was dragged along as the mediator. I sat pokerfaced in a corner as there was hardly a conversation to mediate on. To get a little attention Bubba Boy took out a cigarette and put it in his mouth like Bond.

Bubba: “What are you doing?”

Bubba Boy: “Sorry I forgot to ask the ladies…Do you mind if I smoke?”

Bubba: “Why are you doing this to yourself….and me? What’s wrong? Are you OK? When did you start all this?”

Bubba Boy: “Why don’t you talk to me? What else could I do?”

Bubba: Oh baby!! I’m so so sorry! Trust me I’ll never be angry again. I love you!

Bubba Boy: I love you too baby! (Throws the cig away)

As always Bubba fell for this cheap tactic.

Meeting ended. Vacation ended. Bubba Boy returned to Delhi. And with that he returned to his old self too.

So after a lot of ‘missing him in his absence’, and repetitively telling him the same with no visible outcome, Bubba decided to **** all thoughts about him, **** his case and give **** to what is called relationship ethics. After due deliberation and deceptively pleasing abstinence from other men, she settled for the very popular, “No men or two” strategy and ended her play with chastity. Everything changed – from her attire to attitude.

Scene 2

Bubba Boy has come to meet her again.

Bubba Boy: “Do you mind if I smoke?”

Bubba: “I don’t mind if you burn”.

End of meeting. End of Love life. End of story. Suggestion to all my girl friends….

Follow Bubba if you wanna give them a hard time.

Don’t listen to ‘White Flag’ by Dido. Not worth it.

Past month I’ve been busy trying to give myself reasons as to why I haven’t been able to write a post. There were too many things to write about and there is no escaping the fact that one of them was the phenomenon faced by each blogger in her blog-lifetime where she doesn’t know what to write then ultimately pukes an apology for her inconsistencies as another post just to keep it alive.

Well I’m going to do nothing but just write below few things that happened last month. I wanted to write on some of them but never didJL

· Went home for Diwali. Loved the train journey with school-buddies Mudita and Neha. The fella-compartment wallahs had nervous breakdowns by the time they reached their respective destinations after being forcefully subjected to our sad humor and pervert stories in our very clean-n-respectable language. I’m sure Mudi taught a thing or two to their kids which they themselves couldn’t.

· I always knew I could never study at home but I thought because my exams were approaching and because I’d carried 10kgs of terra incognita from Pune to Jaipur I’ll at least pretend to read some stuff. But alas, reality dawned and I realized that I should rather utilize my time gorging on moong-ki-daal-ka-halwa and gulab-jamuns than doing an unsuccessful play of futile effort to show how taxing my exams were gonna be. So basically I did stuff I was mighty good at – did nothing. This trip also gyrated circularly around our old monuments in similar fashion (for my jaipurwallahs to understand) Ghar-Beans-Rock-Vandana’s-Kooba-Ghar-Beans-…

· If there was something else I ate apart from the above mentioned delicacies, it was Crocin tablets. Did a fair job in making my room mates life hell with the sneezing-wheezing-coughing fits which blessed me more than twice every hour. Finished half of my doctorate in medicine with gulping everything ranging from tabs for fever to stomach ache to intestines to teeth to hair-fall to cough to vitamins to calcium……

· Last month I was fairly under the ‘Kapil-Quotient’. Took part in two competitions with him out of which one got disqualified due to late submission (each time I raised my doubts, I got a couple of zillion assurances) and the other one where we didn’t qualify for the top six. But all in all loved working with the dude. One chap who knows how much effort to put where ;).

· My roomies and batch mates took my semester III exams seriously with my roommates waking me up exactly half—hour before the brand management exam and Banit and Yagga getting me coffee to make sure I stay awake. Thanks to Dhanya and Pritam for taking me to the doc that day…and thanks to me for making her birthday night eventful ;)

· Last month I also did my first appointment for transcend 2007. Missed Sanjib, Ashish, Dushyant and DP….I even wrote a mail to them but never bothered to send it.

And after all the above, got some good news from Cadbury, had an awesome Mumbai quick-trip with old buddies in their sexy new flat, Monde’s and Umrao Jaan ( I got to write a whole new blog to tell you how sad the movie is), I’m back home again. Jaipur. Living it n’ loving it.

Mom-isms

“Don’t ask me why the answer is NO”. I got this one some ten minutes back.

Man, I don’t believe it, I’m gonna be 23 next year and I still call her up for the chindiest of things in my life. The one above is one of my favorite mom-isms….cuz I know when she says this she means that I’ve irritated her to a level where she’s pretending to be radical, rational and show that she can handle one more idiotic-n-whimsical fancies of her daughters by sheer pressure with a very motherly do-this-or-you-are-gone stare and I also know that if raise my voice by 0.5 decibel, I’m dead meat.

Some more favorites of mine in the same category that I’ve been hearing since I realized I could listen:

1. You're the oldest. You should know better.
2. Your father is going to hear about this when HE gets home!
3. You just ate an hour ago!
4. Why? Because I SAID so, that's why!
5. Now, say you're sorry...and MEAN it!
6. Go to your room and think about what you did!
7. Going to a party? Leave a phone number in case I need to call.
8. How do you know you don't like it if you haven't tasted it?
9. I don't care what "everyone" is doing. I care what YOU are doing!
10. You won't be happy until you break that, will you?
11. Enough is enough!
12. When I was your age...

This is to all my friends below the age 12..my little brother Manu, cousins Nehal, Devan, Mansi, Raghav, Aryan, Keshav, Gaurish, Ravish……. Next time your mom uses some of the above, ask her to be original.

With love,

Parul Jiji.

“Silly shrewd pointless nothings”

That’s what Gaurav called us, MBAs. Understood. When you are in your final year of engineering, you tend to say such things to your friends in final year of management education. He wasn’t entirely wrong.

Last night I was up till three for some stupid report because I was busy all week. Busy in trying to take away the priceless movie marathon crown from the fierce violently aggressive competitors called roommates.

So, coming back to the report… Did I say I was working?

Dhanya would say, ‘Yeah…right’

I was netWorking! And multitasking too!! Networking on G-talk contemporaneous with networking on orkut! But I needn’t renounce G-talk, curtail my visits or orkut or abnegate myself from reading and writing blogs so soon….specially after asking a friend, working for a bank who is also a product of management education about his dormant blog. His reply was, “all you wanna do is bitch about bosses and sick sales target-obsessed attitudes whereas we are kids of faff-rich wombs…. So it is better to nurture a dead blog rather than pouring your heart out on it and get kicked out the next day!”

Hence, celibacy for me shall start when I’m earning …Money you see is like exam forms….you need them but don’t wanna work for them.

I have this silly habit of digressing from the topic. Where was I? Yeah, Gaurav.

“Gaurav, what else do you do apart from scoffing derisively at managers, ridiculing management institutions and ludicrously jeer at MBAs?”

“I prepare for CAT”.

Well well my love, come along, we are waiting.

It's OK, It's Life!

Often in books and magazines that I borrow from libraries, I find some paragraphs, some pieces underlined or highlighted with fluorescent pens…and I never skip a chance to make fun of such morons who take all the effort for the book which isn’t gonna stay with them anyway.

But this one about life is a good one.

“Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?”

“I do” says Dunbar.

“Why?” Clevinger asked.

“What else is there?”

Since a long-time the idea of having a good time at home for me was sitting and sulking and sniveling about something or someone with roomies. Not that I didn’t enjoy it but each passing second felt like ‘eleven times seventeen years’ as Dunbar says....

I couldn’t stop thanking whoever used his fluorescence on this dialogue in Catch 22.

No matter how unfair, crazy, lopsided, cussed, messy, turbid and sad life is…..it is coz it is. And as it is what else is there to ask if not for these ups and downs?

When I look back at my twenty-two years and try bringing back all those moments in which I was embarrassed, tired, ashamed, mistaken, failed, beaten and mocked at, I can’t stop feeling lucky as maybe all these incidences in life have made me the person I am. Now, this doesn’t mean that I’m super successful and everyone’s envy or anything….just that I’m happy the way I am and hopefully will always stay so.

And after thanking all my friends in my last blog entry, I now wanna thank all those people who lied, hurt, made things difficult, wished bad luck, cheated and sneered at me at some or the other point in my life…. for the most valuable learnings in life have come through them.

F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

I have weird friends.

They’ll get pissed with me when I’m in a bad mood so that instead of sulking I divert all my energies to get them back on talking terms with me.

One will write a mail apologizing for ditching me in a research paper competition and if I throw attitude he’ll not take even one second in throwing it back to me with a ‘balls to you’ look.

One’ll start telling me about the great moments he shares with his better half and takes pride in the understanding they have right after I tell him about my break-up.

One of them will ask me to join the gym as she’s getting butter cookies home and the other will take me to the gym even without asking me (straight after the SCM class and that too in formals!!).

There is one who blasts me for not keeping in touch and says we should split and there’s another one who messages me one night to remind that I have to write a testimonial for him the next day.

One of them will give me an eGonomics (read ego) lesson over the phone and sermonize ‘what losers men are’ and the other’ll message me saying, ‘I know he’s a bastard but a cute one’.

Man!

No matter how crazily unreasonable and indecisively dominating these berserks are…. they are my friends and I totally love them. They are the ones who come up running when I have ants in my cupboard and ask me over the phone if I was crying ten minutes back. They just know it.

Today I’d like to thank all my friends for being there and not being there (at certain times – it really helped), for letting me cry and sulk for hours together (I can imagine how boring it could have been), for cleaning the bathroom after I’ve puked, for apologizing to others when I fall below my decencies, for calling me back after getting missed calls, for telling me that I’ve a sad sense of humor and shouldn’t crack jokes in public, for bearing with me all these years and years to come. Thanks!

Marketing Myopia

After Summit ended on Sunday I realized what joy vellagiri is. Life is so much fun without sponsors, banners, delegates, alti..,speakers and scanners...

With the 50% attendance that I have (or don't have) attending classes is a compulsion.
I decided to attend all classes Tuesday onwards as Monday mornings are meant to be spent in slumber koochikooing with pillows:(
And then Mr. Mayur Jain calls up..."Avalon Exec Summary.Deadline 2.30".
"Yeah right...now that you don't have any deadlines to give to the I - team... i'm the scapegoat"

Reached college at 1 pm only to realize the deadline was 2.30pm,the next day...Ghhh...mayur...ghhh...

Next morning CRM class.
PPT ready...cases read...i was never so prepared for a class..
Mr. Joyanto Sengupta, " what are you selling if you are the CEO of Kingfisher airline?"
My marketing class at its best....

" experience"

" the brand "

" beer through the airline"

" the airhostesses "

" No. No.No. Please think simple.."

" sex "

"NO! You are trying to sell a seat in an airplane!!"

Ha.This is what one year in marketing does to you.Sex instead of airplane seats.
Thankgod i wan never regular in classes.

Thinking Munnabhai

I saw Munnabhai a couple of days back. Great movie! Kudos to Vinod Chopra…To make a hit you don’t need maple leaves rustling in New York, you don’t need stars in designer suits. All you need is a genuine thought.

This movie made me wonder why can’t we be direct. Why do we have to roll over the same story a hundred time to make others (and more importantly ourselves) believe it.

I need to share this with you. Though I hate Nikhil for the pain he is but I adore his frank, straightforward, candid style of speech. This morning he made me think of Munnabhai, once again.

We were all seated in Mr. Panda’s retail management class (even I was there!!) but Nikhil wasn’t. The late-comers came prepared with their stories and were seated after a sardonic reprimand.

I was hoping he comes soon and has a strong alibi.

Knock Knock

“Sir may I enter?”

“What do you want?”

“Sorry, I’m late”

“Sit”

Period

No justifications, no long stories, just a plain truthful answer. The whole episode made me wonder if I learnt anything at all from the movie. Before Nikhil entered the classroom why did I hope he has a good excuse and why didn’t I wish he says the truth.

I think it will take some time for me to start thinking Munnabhai.

one thing

Hi all,
Its a new blog..and i don't know how to start.
Zillions of things to write down but not too sure if i should share them all.
Last night sitting at the terrace with Div all i could think of was this song..

Restless tonight
Cause I wasted the light
Between both these times
I drew a really thin line
It’s nothing I planned
And not that I can
But you should be mine
Across that line