A Fearsome Ride to Office!

Oct 27th:
The bus I was in was searching for the road in the Medavakkam-Sholinganallur segment while it was pouring down cats and dogs. A mini stream was running down south across the road. Even heavy vehicles could feel the pressure of water pushing the vehicle sideways. If anyone would have driven, or rather had the guts to drive thru the road that day, the driving logic would be simple; Spot for two electric poles, yes u got the road; its inbetween the two poles! Such was the condition of the road.

I was seated right behind the driver and what else I could ask for? It was just fearsome. The bus would tilt about 30-40 degrees when it crosses a pothole. Imagine the driver's mindset with people inside the bus making noises out of fear. Its simply the skill and guts of an unsung hero that carried us thru the stretch not only on that day but for quite sometime after rains battered the road crazy.

Intha mazhaikke Chennai naari pochu. What would have happened had Chennai had a Bombay kinda rain?!?

This is certianly one of the rides of my lifetime, but nothing to match the one downhill in Tirupathi courtesy Girish and co. Man, those guys are crazy. I still feel a bit for having missed the ride uphill though walking uphill to Tirumala was a pleasure and adventure in itself... :-)

Lollu...

Looking back at the week

Monday
Jujupi Remix on Vijay TV: 9.25PM - "Aararai Kodi pergalil oruvan, adiyen tamizhan naan ungal nanban" starring Ramarajan. Song starts... Ramarajan walks out with all the Gambheeram and punches some 10 guys standing in a line (ultimate).

"adiyen tamizhan naan ungal nanban" - A cow slowly emerges out of Ramarajan's heart (classy.. pucca graphics)

"Neengal illamal naan ingu illai" - Ramarajan shown with two cows on either side

This was followed by a mix of scenes from various movies of Ramarajan very appropriate for the lyrics of the song. Some time back, "Kadhal yaanai varugira REMO" was remixed with a MGR hit. It was just fabulous.

Truly, the guys at Vijay TV fill the void left by the absence of Captain and Ramarajan movies and of late Sarath Kumar movies with some well directed jibes. Hats off to Jujupi TV and Lollu Sabha

Wednesday
AIR FM Gold: 9.45PM - Its raining crazy all over the place, no power.

Announcer: Anavasiyamaga yaarum veettai vittu veliye sellatheergal (aamam pozhuthu polanu road la kurukkaiyum nedukkaiyum poittu vandhundrukkom...)

AIR FM Gold: 10.15PM - Same Situation

Announcer: Min saadhanangalai ubayogippathai thavirkkavum (vennai... current-e illai eppdi da min saadhanatha use panna mudiyum?)

Thursday 7.45PM - India has thumped its way past SL. My friend calling...

I : sollu da...

He: Paathiya, thala pinnittaaru

I : samma patta da.. chaancey illa

He: Ganguly veetla ore sandayaam da

I : Enna da achu? endha channel la sonnan?

He: Athellam illa, summa thaan... oru imaginary conversation

       Ganguly (to his family): Naan illama ivlo nalla adaranungale paavinga

       Family (to Ganguly) : Naaye nee illathathu naala thaan da nalla adranunga...Vaaya vecha mavana avlathan

I : Ada paavigala...

Yet another Ganguly joke. People wanting more Ganguly jokes, listen to Hello Chennai during cricket season.

First "Second Show"

Saturday 22nd October, Sathyam, 10.15 PM, Ghajini - Never been to a night show before and it was raining - of course not because I have ventured out to a second show. It was a great evening with my two cousins and my brother-in-law. I thought Sathyam was one place where I did not get any bulbs but one of my cousins ensured I got one there. She made us carry Lays and Apple Juice to the theater while calling my other cousin and myself "Rules Ramanujam" when we said "Outside food not allowed inside" in chorus.

Next...

Car Parking -> Enter Sathyam (I was carrying all that we bought)

One Sathyam Employee : Sir, Cover-la enna? (She took out all that was in) Sir, ithellam eduthuttu pogapdathu (A cold stare down back... adi paavi bulb vaanga vechuttiye!)

No words uttered. We came out, emptied the juice and one packet of Lays, chided my cousin, gave the remaining packets to the counter and went inside for the movie. Audience la lots of thaatha paattis with family and people straight from their offices. I made a frantic lookout for some of my colleagues but yaarum varala. Perhaps they prefer only early morning special shows as it happened to be when I watched Chandramukhi at 8 with Pondy and Gilma - full of IT makkal.

I liked the film. Pradeep Singh Rawat - very villainy, Surya - very good show, Asin - brilliant. But the nemesis apart from Nayanthara were the numerous textile ads that came out in their full lengthy version before the start and during half-time - "Mokkai" at its best

1.45 AM on October 23rd - movie ends. The rain had stopped by then but samma water logging. Collected back the Lays packets and reached home safe at 2. Full of fun, a great evening to remember.

An IT connection to the Ganguly-Chappell Spat

A sudden thought today about the Ganguly - Chappell spat worked upon in my mind into a familiar happening in an IT company - a typical production support call! This is what happens in a support project. A well conceived product with prodigious amount of design and coding effort goes into production. Once there, if there are any issues, there would be a call and a fix is to be put in within the SLA. Depending on the enormity of the problem, a ticket would be raised with appropriate severity (usually 1 through 4, 1 being the highest). The job would be worked upon and restarted and the trail would resume. Something similar happened in this recent ignominy to Indian cricket.

Shastri, Gavaskar and Co. in their endeavor scheduled a very good Batch Trail (that’s basically the system, all jobs, critical in their own respect, were well scheduled – a very good coach in the interest of Indian cricket). The Initiators were all set and it kicked off in the Emerald Isle. Teething problems unmindful, it pulled itself along until a mainline driver program (Ganguly) caused an outage despite a successful, albeit laborious run. The root cause of the malfunction was reported to the System Administrators who in the meantime were busy themselves in finding out who the real administrator was. The admins in the melee got themselves lost and in the meanwhile helped the report programs (Media) scheduled in the trail to be triggered in Express mode (that’s the jobs running with more CPU resources - the leak'o'mania).

A severity 1 ticket was raised amidst fear of losing the project and the programmers had their task cut out (that was the emergency meeting). But the managers simply had the job marked complete and the batch trail resumed. The cause for more CPU utilization after the job failure is not being considered at the moment (:-)). The impact analysis of the problem could be done only in the long run. What could be the result? A system crash?!?