A Rant On Stupidity and WTFNess

This rant is going to be about the recent tragedy wherein six firemen suffocated to death in a lift. If you have already had too much of it on our ubiquitous 24-hour news channels, feel free to leave. Also, I’m going to call the dead firemen bleeding idiots, so if that offends you in any way, please leave forthright. With that disclaimer in place lets get on to the rant.

Here’s what really pisses me off: Six fire-fighters, who have had years of training, which by the way is funded by the taxpayers’ money, died of suffocation in a lift!!. Further, their decision to use the lift was defended by one of the chiefs (forget his name, and can’t track it down now) as a decision “made in a fraction of a second”.

Which idiot uses the lift when the building is on fire?? This is a basic safety precaution that is drilled into us at home and school. Never use the lift in case of any emergency! (least of all fire) And these people are our “trained” fire-fighters!

This fire was on the 14th floor of the building, and I guess our tragi-heroes were just too lazy to climb all the way up. I’m calling them lazy on the assumption that they were fit enough to climb up 14 floors. Firemen, after all, are supposed to be very fit people. Which brings us to our second point: Why would you take the lift all the way to the floor which is on fire?? Would it not have been smarter to take the lift to say the 10th floor and climb the rest of the way up? How did none of our 6 firemen feel uncomfortable about taking the lift all the way to the 14th floor?

My next question is to said chief who defended his men. What were these men going to do with the little time they were saving? – plus I truly doubt that any significant amount of time would have been saved by using the lift, but that’s another matter. Were these men carrying buckets of water in the lift? How can you say that it was okay for them to use the lift? What you are doing here is setting a very dangerous precedent – Act as irresponsibly as you want, we’ll still take care of you and your family. Because undoubtedly our government is going to provide for the families of the deceased firemen.

Everyone and their uncle knows that this was stupidity on the part of the firemen. And this will translate into an inquiry in the fire department. Senior officers responsible for the squad will probably face a suspension, for no fault of theirs. This is the really unfortunate bit in this incident. Because said firemen were probably just lazy, not uninformed.

There is one final piece of WTFNess that I’d like to mention. In recent times, press reporting and journalism has gone to the dogs, especially with the advent of “24-Hour News”. Any Tom, Dick or Harry can be a bona-fide reporter now. Here’s what one reporter had to say: “Why were they not given oxygen masks to protect against suffocation?”. You effing idiot. Have you ever seen anyone carry a tank of oxygen into a fire??

Yellow Songs

It all started with Coldplay’s “Yellow”. I was coding along peacefully and my playlist randomly picked Yellow in the background. It is one of my favorite songs and I guess I listen to it on a near daily basis. Getting back to the story, I must have completed whatever it was that I was doing because I celebrated rather vigorously by jumping out of the chair and raising both hands heavenward. Said chair toppled back in surprise, and muttered curses under it’s breath. I remember being very happy all the way to the canteen. Somewhere along the way though, my brain split into two (it does that quite often) and had a conversation with itself.

Look at the Stars,
Look how they shine for you!
And everything you do…

Vedang’s Brain 1: Hmm, we’re humming Yellow aren’t we?
Vedang’s Brain 2: Yup, Yup! So Awesome! (author’s note: This guy is pretty much spaced out all the time)
VB1: Yellow is such a strange name!
VB2: Yup, Yup!
VB1: How many songs must there be with Yellow in the name? Not many I bet!
VB2: Yup, Yup… Hmm… *changes tune* We All Live In The Yellow Submarine..
VB1: ahhhh…
VB2: Yellow Submarine, Yellow Submarine, We All Live In The…
VB1: Any other song?
VB2: We All… Hmm…
VB1: Hmm..

I snapped out of my reverie as my brain decided to merge together again and concentrate on the problem of The Yellow Song. It came to me like a bolt out of the blue, I snapped my fingers together, pointed my hand to the thin air around me and burst into song:

Yellow main hari piya,
Hui teri jeet re!
Kahe ka jhagada baalam,
Nai Nai preet re!
Yellow main hari piyaaa!

People frequently think I’m crazy.
Till next time,
Ciao!

Pst.. Any other Yellow Songs? Mention them in the comments!

/me gets pwned by a spamming website.

Yash,

I’m guessing you know by now that the link in your mail (from a e-diagnostics.com) is a mass spamming link (and a particularly smart one at that). Unfortunately for me, I clicked on the link, signed in using my gmail account, and by the time I realized what had happened all of my contacts had been spammed. My online reputation just got blown to hell as I’ll now be blocked from every dev mailing list in the world because I spammed them all. What has this taught me? Don’t click on a link simply because it happens to be from someone you trust very much. I’m writing this mail to you because you should warn your other friends about this.

Vedang.

*

UPDATE:
I’m trying to warn everyone on my contact list about this, but I have over a thousand contacts and google only allows you to mail 500 in one day or some crap like that. The link actually redirects you to a (seemingly) valid IQ test, and innocently asks you to sign in to your google account somewhere in between. I feel particularly bad because I have held out against taking any form of quiz/survey etc for so long and still I fell into this trap to massage my ego by seeing how smart I am. Kudos to you e-diagnostics.com, you filthy little piece of shit.

Mulay’s Two

Recently Shantanu, Kunal, PJ and I had a great night out at Kunal’s place. We talked about completely _random_ things, most of which are a haze now, but this is something I promised to write about so here goes:

A few days before this party night, Kunal and I were chilling out at Not Just Coffee, which is a hookah place in Baner. We got talking with the owner about buying some flavor for personal use. The enterprising owner tells us, “Don’t worry Saar, I have _200 Kg_ flavor stocked up, I’ll sell anytime you want to buy.” The very next instant, Kunal comes up with this genius idea,

“Dude, f**k it! This guy just told us he has 200 kg kept here. Lets rob this place Oceans Eleven style!”
“You mean Mulay’s Two style!”
“Totally! Check it, we can grapple-hook our way from that building across the street…”

This was followed by us showing off our ’super-spy-sneaky’ moves with background music from either Pink Panther (Ta-dum Ta-dum Ta-dum-ta-dum-ta-dum Ta-dadadaaaaa Ta-dadada! – Kunal) or Kaminey (Dhan TaNaaaaa Tananana – Vedang) and goofing off in general.

So at the night out, we told Shantanu and PJ about our ‘Mulay’s Two’ plan.

“Wow, 200 kg will last us a lifetime man!”
“Purely sliding down a rope into Not Juss isn’t going to work! What about the security systems?”
“200 kg isn’t going to last us a lifetime! We’ll need to rob him again a year later.”
“Hey, it’ll last a pretty long time.”
“Lets say each chillum is 25 grams flavor,” This information had been supplied by the helpful shop owner during our original discussion. “And we smoke 4 chillums a day – “
“We’re going to smoke 4 chillums every day? Wow.”
“Arre assume! So 200 Kg will only last us 200 days! Like I said, not even a ye-”
“_2000_ days dumbass! How many years is that? 2000/365 roughly 6 years! We don’t need to rob him every year.”
“We’re going to smoke 4 chillums every day? Wow.”
“The security systems…”
*snigger* *snigger* “Chu saala, 200 days it seems!”

So it was decided, starting some time in the future, we would be robbing Not Juss every 6 years. As these things often do, conversation moved on to other things. The math had been taken care of (at least on a rudimentary basis) and all was peaceful again.

“Dude, while we are there, we should also pick up one of those hookah machines. All of them will be too difficult to carry out of there, but we should be able to swing one back out.”
“Not withstanding the fact that we’ll be carrying 200 kg of flavor with us!”

And the laughs continued…

A year down the line…

This post is a translation of a wonderful post my friend Salil Kanitkar wrote on his blog. I’ve translated it because all of us identified completely with it, and I did not want it to be confined to only the Marathi speaking public. I apologize for the mistakes in translation and/or the poor quality of the translation You can find the original post here

“One whole year has gone by!”
Our jobs started before we even had the chance to vacation properly. The stink of beer from all the partying probably stayed with us that first day at work, but time really does fly by. We have been working for an entire year now! That’s four quarters; a performance review; a full twelve months! I’m “officially” old!

Technically speaking, this birthday occurred a few weeks back, but there was no “special feeling” that day. There was no sense of personal growth – there is never any, it seems – and nothing seemed to mark this passage of time. Not that we didn’t party, that would be too uncharacteristic, but this was another group of friends altogether. The two sets – last time, and this time – were almost completely disjoint. It was this realization that truly brought home the enormous change I’ve undergone. Points of concern, daily schedule, body clock, nothing remains untouched!

Change cannot be categorized as good or bad though, it just is. All that we can do is adapt to it. The question is if we’re up for it. I don’t think it’s about being the fittest to survive the change, it’s about surviving the change to be the fittest. It’s like standing still in the waves. We’ll only end up with water in our nostrils, eyes and mouth; certainly not an enjoyable experience. Instead we should be ready to let go of our momentary trappings – the sand at our feet – and float along with the waves. In the end, we’ve never had the option of controlling the waves to our will.

A new job, new people, work – these are tangible things, but what of the new experiences? They were the ‘real blast’ of the past year. It isn’t possible for me to list each and every tiny detail, but here is a high-level view of some deserving ones:

1) “A job in the software industry? Nice!” or “Good for you!”. Typical response from the elders in the family, usually accompanied by raised eyebrows, and a twinkle in the eyes. What they are really thinking is, “Not real work.” or “Secretarial”. This attitude is something we quickly need to get used to. Thankfully, I belong to the second generation of software programmers in our family, so I get less grief about this. The general assumption is that software programmers are over-paid and arrogant, but *whatever*!

2) The name of my company – “Marvell Semicondctors” -
“Which (second-grade) company is this? Did you not get placed in IBM/Infosys?” A little part of me dies inside when I have to answer this. Nobody is to blame really, it’s quite unfortunate that people have never heard of any other software company, but this question is a sure-shot clean bowled question.

3) Hedonism -
We still crib about the fact that the once-upon-a-time 2 Rupees vadapav now costs 20 Rupees, but we don’t eat vadapavs that often anymore. I don’t want to get into the high-earning, high-spending mall culture issue, or rather lets leave that for some other time, but the joy there is in spending self-earned money cannot be described in words. Agreed that most people don’t know how to spend money ‘well’, or even that spending just because you can is quite stupid, but this isn’t really what our hedonism is about.

The hedonism I’m talking about arises out of peer pressure. “I still have no idea what/where Bashos is!” or “I’ve never been to Apache at Chandni Chowk!”. When the mind starts squirming with these sentiments, you’re a victim of hedonism! This is like a social ‘movement’, a joint effort if you will! Anyway, a detailed manifesto of this new addiction is something for another post.

4) Recession -
My batch was the lucky batch. We were the ones who got in just as the doors slammed shut on the job scenario. The recession hit the software industry almost immediately after we joined, and some of us even lost our jobs in the first 3-4 months. All the office freebies were cut off, and there was quite a bit of tension in the air for a while. It proved to be quite a valuable lesson to us. We got to see the ugly side of our profession early on in our careers.

5) Sophistication and cultured behaviour -
Now that we are professionals, we’ve lost the college attitude of cavalier behaviour towards others. Habits like saying “Thank you” and “Sorry” for the least of things crept into our system without us realizing it. The other day, I thanked a friend for letting me copy his (illegally downloaded) movies and serials. He must have felt a little amiss as well!

So the point of the post being, I have successfully survived a year as a professional! God knows what the future holds for us!