A Touch of Odium

TCS Bashings: Part 1

By virtue of my completing my MBA, I can claim to have acquired knowledge of a few B-School jargons, that have stuck to me ever since and which now and then I keep using in everyday contexts, sometimes even without my knowing. It may seem like a humble brag, I admit. You know what I mean. Think of these – Return on Investment, Disruptive Innovation, Paradigm Shift, Core Competencies etc. etc. etc. You get the refrain. It can be rather disquieting for a non MBA chap to hear such words from the lips of an MBA, but unfortunately these have involuntarily slithered into our daily lingo. One of these buzzwords which became etched onto my vocabulary ever since I sat in the first marketing management class in my first year of MBA is First Mover’s Advantage. 

The life of any writer is quite complicated, especially for the one who has a penchant for stirring up controversial and sensitive themes. Rather than write something which would kick up a storm calculated to bleach his hair, the sensible writer prepares the audience for the ordeal by giving a cue and tendering a disclaimer bordering on the lines of an advanced apology just in case certain sections of the targeted populace start gathering up in hordes outside his door with axes. Once the preliminary spade work has been done he unleashes himself without restraint. Circling back to a few lines above, this is what I meant by First Mover’s advantage. The proactive approach is always the best, instead of the reactive one where apologies, clarifications and all that rot take center stage which subsumes the substance of the literary piece.

The clichéd disclaimer which I propose to dole out in question is as follows:

This piece is not meant to disrespect or demean the IT industry or the nature of its business, any of its employees or coding as a profession. As an ex-employee of the IT industry myself, I know of the pain and frustration certain individuals face when they step into the world of programming. This piece is written purely an attempt to bring out certain real life incidents and experiences to paper with a touch of humour.

It was roundabout Mid-August in the year 2013. The climate was humid and sunny but my social weather was as dark and gloom as ever. I vividly remember, my disposition that entire year was entirely devoid of any cheeriness. I had already experienced my 3^rd consecutive failure in CAT examination further compounded by dismal rejections in IIFT, SNAP and NMAT examinations. I solemnly swear that my performance in all my previous attempts at CAT were nothing short of magnificent. But like many a great cricketer who couldn’t become even greater on account of notching up fewer centuries against his name than he should ideally have, I with unbelievable consistency managed to peak only the early numbers of the nervous nineties in my trio of CAT attempts. What added to my despondence in plentiful measure was the knowledge of the fact that I had been repeatedly screwed by the reservation system. Had I been born in a lower caste, I pondered every instant, I would have got interview calls from the premier IIMs which are considered the Meccas of business management education in India. I remember cursing myself for my various sins I might have committed in my previous births to have been born in a higher caste in a country that thoroughly lacked in meritocracy. With every failure my overall scenario had increasingly begun to assume proportions of Don Quixote tilting at the windmills. Every attempt to scratch at the prized top tiered MBA seat seemed to only throw me back into an abyss of nothingness where I played into an almost meaningless oblivion. Hence it was no surprise that I had lost all sense of hope. Even the most panglossian of souls in my position would have pursed his lips and felt that he had expended the last ounce of optimism left in him. I had virtually resigned to my fate of being labelled as a techie for the rest of my life. 

It was at this time that I was dumped into a Java project in a retail client in TCS, Siruseri – The biggest IT Park in Asia. This building resembles a butterfly when looked from above and houses 25000 of the brightest geek-brained, code crazy chaps of Chennai’s populace.
 

Now coming to the more lurid portion where I expound my abhorrence on being labelled a techie.

I am warning my public I am going to be bloody brutally frank here. To me there are 2 types of people in the world. People who take to programming languages like fish to water and reel out reams after reams of java code and people who simply can’t. Mind you it is not the attitude I am talking about here, nor is it the lack of willingness to learn. It is simply a handicap or a disability. Of this latter category of human species I belong to, I admit quite unashamedly. 

Try as I might I couldn’t infuse technical stuff such as servers, queries, ODBC and all that crap into my pea-sized brain. My colleagues mostly Tamils and Gults (an epithet for Telugus most often than not taken in the friendly and not the derogatory sense) could talk for hours on these topics while I could simply not fathom why I was unable to get a grasp on these concepts. When it came to discussions on coding, what a great display of fraternity it was! They just loved talking about servlets and codebases. One of the technical jargon which was quite prominent at that point of time was ‘Service Call’ for which I developed a life-long loathing. In case you wondered what on earth was this only an Aamir Khanesque response similar to the one in the 3 Idiots Movie would suffice and it would probably go something like – 

‘A collection of open protocols and standards used in software applications written in various programming languages and running on various platforms using the components SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol), UDDI (Universal Description, Discovery and Integration) and WSDL (Web Services Description Language) which facilitate the exchange of data over computer networks like the Internet in a manner similar to inter-process communication on a single computer thereby also functioning as a request/ response mechanism allowing a client to remotely access/ modify data.’  

Right! So you get it why even as I typed the above gobbledegook, my face broke into a hundred scornful wrinkles. What irked me to no end was the fact that my fellow coding brethren were not only so adept at it but just to rub salt on my wounds spoke incessantly about them like it was the talk of the town. I simply couldn’t comprehend what was the happiness and satisfaction, which was so evident on the faces of these chappies, which they derived out of talking about service calls. It was as simple as this. You could ask a random geek, a couple of salient points on the Finance Budget which was of more significance in life or invite him to a debate on the merits of the GST bill, which was far more impactful on his daily life and in general much more worldly stuff one ought to know and which he would shirk away with horror as if he had been offered a cup of Hemlock. But just mention the word service call and he would start like a horse at the sound of a bugle and initiate a discourse on it!

One more thing I vehemently despised was the patronizing tone with which fellow colleagues corrected and advised me whenever I made some mistake in a godforsaken piece of code. I vividly remember one particular incident, where I was coding a functionality for an android application. A SEV-2 defect had been raised by some bird in the Testing team the previous night, and my project manager, an absolute specimen and a pain in the ass, was behind my back the entire next day, infesting my work station like the dickens and polluting my peace of mind. I tried hard to debug the lines, but couldn’t delve into the root cause of the defect. After multiple fruitless attempts I went to a girl in my team who was working on a different functionality. I don’t know how she pulled a rabbit out of the hat, but within 2 minutes cracked it. It was apparently the placement of a service call that did the trick! The look she gave me though was one of sheer disapproval, as though she was wondering how I ever managed to get this job when I couldn’t understand something as plain and simple as a service call. In chaste Madurai slang, with a tone that biteth like a serpetnt and stingeth like an adder (All copyright credits to PGW for that gag) she said “Service call ah inguttu kudungana neenga anguttu kuduthu vechurukkurengya! Pinna error adikama ennavaam??” (If you place the service call there instead of here where it rightfully should be how the hell do you expect it to not throw an error). 

Off the computer screen, the techies got along with each other with perfect bonhomie and could chew the fat incessantly for hours on just 2 topics of all the universe had to offer – Cricket and Movies. I don’t remember ever other than work any other worthwhile topic to have ever discussed within the four walls of my office.

It was a common sight for a Senthil Kumar from Pollachi to passionately essay the story line of the latest Vijay grosser in which was beating all opening records in Kollywood, with a Ramesh Gaddala of Kurnool approvingly nodding and recollecting how the storyline resembled Chiranjeevi’s super hit which raked in the entire box office moolah in AP in the spring of 2006. And mind you! These above 2 gentlemen wouldn’t be new kids on the block straight out of engineering rather they would typically be pot-bellied project managers who had worked their way up the TCS corporate ladder in the last 15 years, with a single minded ambition of sticking on to the company like a leech irrespective of whether they were viewed as an asset or a liability! 

Over cricket the younger generation bonded with immaculate aplomb, and could remember every single statistic in IPL history, and would often Alt-tab back and forth with lightning speed between their black coding screens and cricinfo.com to keep tab on even the most insipid matches for example lets say the fifth and final ODI, a dead rubber between New Zealand and Zimbabwe at Bulawayo – one of the most lifeless cricket grounds in the world. 

Boredom personified!

More rants to follow....as and when I feel like it :-)

Trisecting the Desi Cop

Every writer who sets out into the great field of literature with the hope of making it big needs to remember a sacred principle before starting a story. Grip the audience by the collarbone within a few lines, and provide fodder for thought at the very inception. It is in this quest, that I endeavour to put forth an incident.

Folks, I urge you to close your eyes and visualize it as I narrate. You are driving in one of the arterial roads of a metropolitan city. You are proceeding to catch a movie in a theater that is located on the opposite side of the road, so you approach the next major gap on the divider to take a U-turn and thanks to lesser traffic on the other side you seamlessly mingle into the stream of cars and motorcycles and start weaning towards the side as the theater is approximately 200 meters away on the left. 

You are all set now! A movie with your close buddies on this breezy Sunday October evening is the perfect way to relax after a brutally exhausting week at work. And just as you start to contemplate where you could head for dinner to cap off the week on a memorable note, spanners are suddenly flung into the works and you are brutally shaken up from your reverie. A pot-bellied creature in a white shirt and Khakhi coloured trousers which was lurking somewhere on the side of the road has metamorphosized from a stupefied form into a living image of a serotonin induced athlete who is about to break an unbelievable world record defying all laws of physics. The creature jumps onto the middle of the road in front of your car in a rather simian fashion thus throwing the traffic out of gear for the nonce and forcing you to bring the car to a screeching halt. An auto driver tailing just behind comes within a toucher of banging against your car, but skillfully evades just in the nick of time. In a cathartic release of emotions, a moment of lalochezia for which he has been waiting all day, he spews forth a venomous stream of the choicest Chennai Tamil abuse words, as he passes by. Before you even know what’s happening and attempt a recovery from this rattling set of disruptions, you are pulled over to the side of the road.

Yes I had just been caught by the Chennai Traffic Police for what was deemed as an offence of taking a U-turn at point where I was not supposed to. I tried arguing that I have come to Devi theater (my venue for the movie) in Anna Salai, perhaps a 127 times in my life and I have always taken the U-turn mentioned aforesaid and even if there was purportedly a change in traffic rules (which the Chennai Traffic Police keeps changing as frequently as RBI changes its policies on demonetization that was recently instituted), there ought to have been a board or some sort of ruddy signage clearly stating that taking a U-turn is not allowed. The cop saw a point in my arguments, but with his keen observation skills, honed by years of experience, gauged from my countenance that I was in a hurry, which was true for the movie was slated to start in 5 minutes. And he also sensed, by my attire that here is a boy who is from a well off family and would certainly go the extra mile to oblige a couple of quid to let him go. After all in India, bribery is a tool the rich use so efficiently to get away with any mistake (or no mistake in my case). And true to his predicament partly and partly me being not one who likes to fritter away eloquence at such a frantic juncture, I asked him ‘Now what is it that you want’. I am sure the words would have trickled like music into his hairy ears, for I had said the thing which he exactly wanted to hear. Sporting a mischevious grin he said ‘Paathu edhavadhu pannu ba’ which literally translates to ‘Please see if you can do something’, however metaphorically indicates ‘You are in deep shit if you don’t give me money’. I disgustingly took out my wallet, whipped out a hundred rupee note and thrust it into his palm. What followed was a picture of pathetic servility that is not uncommon to be taken to the lowest common denominator in Tamilnadu. In short – ‘A salute’. The hand movement that has become almost a voluntary limb action, commanded by the grey cells of his medulla oblongata to move to the forehead to execute a salute followed by the words ‘Rombha Nandri baa’.

I nestled back into my seat once again and proceeded to the theater, cursing the cop, and thinking that it was no wonder due to such obnoxious behaviour that cops in Tamilnadu have been bestowed upon them the epithet ‘Mama’ which translates to Pimp in colloquial jargon. The cop on his part in all probability trotted away happily to the nearest TASMAC (The Government run enterprise that supplies the Tamil millions with the daily joy of life), with perfect satisfaction that his Quarter and Biriyani for the night had been taken care of.

This is just one such tryst I have had with the cops, and I am pretty sure all of us would have had in our lifetime dealt with situations involving the gendarmerie in varying degrees of severity. After undergoing experiences and hearing stories from others, ranging from downright hilarious incidents to nightmarish and torrid tales, I think I am qualified enough to declare that every cop in our country will broadly fall into one of these 3 categories – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

 

The good cop is essentially the one who deserves to be called a cop. Typically policemen who have come into the position by sheer virtue of their hard work, either having cleared IPS examination or having scaled arduously through the ranks, with the single notion of serving the society. He/She would go to all lengths to ensure that law and order is maintained, ensure his subordinates are sincere and non-corrupt and typically commands respect and by word of mouth a sincere police officer who is powerful but at the same time ensures that this power is not abused.

The bad cop is one whom the typical Indian laments about but doesn’t have the power to stand up against. The average citizen know that for their entire lifetime, cringing and lamenting is all they can do but are hopelessly aware of the fact that they can’t do much against this wicked hand of law and order. This is the type of cop who you almost see in every 2 out of 3 Indian action movies – The ACP who is hands in glove with the top politician of the city in all the murky business dealings, the Inspector who through his criminal connections will finish off a honest citizen who gets on his bad books, the DSP who will in the name of police interrogation carry out a shockingly inhumane and brutal treatment of suspects and probably kill them if he smells an monetary opportunity and book it as an encounter killing, as we saw in the critically acclaimed award winning movie ‘Visaranai’. This is the kind of police who will probably rape a woman who has come to the station to lodge a complaint of rape. To sum it up, one loses hope for humanity when one comes across in such incidents either on the newspaper, television or social media.

The 3^rd type who I brand as ugly is the one interests me the most - The ugly cop, who is always a symbol of mystery and puzzlement. This is where I would focus majority of my attention upon because he/she is the cop you come across in daily life. Just like we say boy-next-door it would be not be a mistake in assuming this one is the cop-next-street. The cop in the incident I narrated above at the start of my narrative would probably fall in this category. He or she is the daily cop you meet on the road, who relies on petty bribes and kickbacks from local shop owners, establishments, hapless drivers on the road, etc. to supplement his meagre income, but in most cases has a heart of gold. He is the kind of cop, who might for no virtual reason stop an unsuspecting motorist at a traffic signal towards the fag end of the month when he realizes he is at the end of his shoe string budget and converts him into a Bakra who will provide his fodder for a couple of days before the monthly salary is credited. 

But at the same time he is the sleepless guardian of peace. The very same familiar face in the same ugly looking uniform who stands on the road 365 days a year rain, shine or snow to direct the traffic, who sacrifices his own safety during the floods and storms to ensure that things are brought under control and who by and large believes in the goodness of humanity and tries his level best to live a life to exemplify the same. But at the same time is well aware of the fact that he is destined to be an average earning government servant all his life. So he consoles himself that now and then bending the rules to oblige a favour is well within his right, as Indians are used to this.

One more amusing anecdote to regale you. Pardon me for again involving the traffic constabulary, but since I have more or less been a law abiding chap, there have not been many other situations where the strong arm of law has had the opportunity to clasp me within its fold and exclaim with glee 'So who do we got here today!'. But on the road, every, and mark the word every, single person, male/female, student/employee, married/unmarried, is vulnerable to the putrid behavior of cops on the prowl and yours truly is no exception to that.

Recently I was hauled up in Hyderabad by a traffic cop for not having my sunscreen removed from the window pane, which as per a recent law by the Supreme Court had to be removed from all car windows. As such I have no objection with the new law for it is indeed a matter of fact that nowadays cars in their opaqueness have become rather convenient platforms to conduct with ease, crimes carnal in nature. But casting one look at the cop’s dial I knew his brain was already working overtime to spin a money churning scheme. To my surprise at first, he started preaching how it was extremely important for men like me who are the next face of shining India to follow the traffic law and set an example to the younger generation. The statement partly irked me as it indirectly meant I was already over the bar and had long expired my membership to the younger generation’s club, me being one who doesn’t wake up a single day not wishing I could reverse the clock to going and becoming younger! But I let it pass, because I was mighty impressed to see here was a principled cop who instead of straight away getting into brass tacks, took the more unconventional approach of donning the garb of a preacher to share a few pearls of wisdom. He spoke impressively on responsibilities as dutiful citizens, especially on the road and all that rot. But it was his gag on why it was youth like me on whom the onus lied upon to fulfill Abdul Kalam’s dream of making India a developed nation by 2020 that made me his fan immediately. I was stirred to the depths. Moved. Never before in my 20 years of Student life had I listened to any teacher with such rapt attention like the way I was drinking it all in from this horse’s mouth!!

It was indeed a thousand pities that what followed a few sentences later made me want to kick him even harder in the solar plexus. We were making pretty decent progress in the Teacher-Disciple session and I was nearly on the verge of accepting him as my philosopher and Guru when the cop pulled me suddenly over aside and told me that we could stop all this unnecessary discussion and easily settle the matter between ourselves. The simple arrangement was to just give him 200 bucks and he would leave me alone. The glass of respect fell down and broke into a thousand shattered pieces.

Phew... I mean I knew it was bound to happen and where it would all eventually lead to. But I dint expect it to happen without a flow or class! I mean consider this, when the clergyman is preaching his head off from the Book of Psalms and how prayer to Christ alone and nothing else is the way to attain salvation, with the mesmerized church-going audience nearly in his pocket, he simply doesn’t call it quits suddenly and the next second stripping the contents of their wallets for the church donations! There is simply no segue in the proceedings. But that’s India. At the end of the day it all boils down to MONEY, which like it or not undoubtedly proves itself time and again as the ultimate remedy for all troubles.