Dear Mr.Boring Pompous Lecturer!

Warning: This is a rant post. I couldn't rant about this one on Facebook or Orkut or Gtalk or any of the hundred and one social networks out there for fear of hurting someone or something. I ranted about it to one of my closest buds and that helped but lets just say I'm still simmering! Since my blog is also my space to rant out, here you go to get the full flow of it. If you are not interested, please stop at this point and check the next post. I might be in a better mood then!

P.S to the warning: If you know me in person, please please do me a favor and not ask anything about this post!! Atleast to save your head and our friendship... Rest assured that the person in this post doesn't know about my blog at all... (one of the saving graces!)

In person, I'm a very friendly person who loves doing things with friends all the time. By 'all the time', I literally mean all the time. I'd be happiest if I can be with friends and have fun 24x7x365. My weekends are busier than weekdays and every weekday has something new at the end of it to spend with friends. So, I have a large social circle with myriad intertwinings in it. I try my best to keep the circle good and happy (being the Libran I am, I want everyone around me to be happy! It might sound silly to some... but then that is what I aim for, every single day. I would go out of my way to really make someone atleast temporarily happy. In that process, I've caused some permanent damage and felt bad for it later but that is a story for another day). I try and share my time and resources with everyone in it sometimes giving up what I want out of it all.

Now, there is a certain person in my circle who is neither a friend nor an acquaintance. I don't even want to hint about that person. So lets go with the generalized he. If you want, you are totally welcome to think the person is a she. But I digress...
Going back to the story, for lack of any other word, our relationship can be termed as friendship. And that is a rare one for I welcome and love making and maintaining friends (look at the looonnnnggg intro at the top). I think he is a scum rat but civility demands I be nice and friendly to him. So, going with civility, I'm civil with him but barely so...

I've known him since college but met him a few weeks ago at a party hosted by a common friend and he started jabbering away to nonsense. I couldn't even feign interest in whatever he said. Finally, a friend rescued me and we left the place. Then I met him again in some mall and had to bear some really boring lecture on women's bill. Please, Mr.Boring Pompous Lecturer! I don't care even an iota about the bill for it is not going to affect me in any way. I know I'm not being the best of citizens by saying this but I personally DON'T CARE about this one. I think its a total sham and that people are politicizing the entire issue. If everyone can make sure that they treat the women they meet in daily life with respect and love and help develop confidence, then that is the path for true liberation. I think everything else is a coverup for getting more votes. Do you know that I realized that you had spoken the same thing to me in the party only when you asked me questions on it in the mall?? Sheesh! You are even worse than my eighth standard Geography teacher, who asked questions without teaching anything! Atleast then I knew she was asking something from the book!

The main reason why I didn't even tell you my views on it was because I wasn't even that interested enough in you or your thoughts on it. I didn't even want an argument, for argument's sake(that, from a person who loves debates! Sigh! See how bad you are... ). I thought that if I just nod and say yeah right for everything, you'll lose steam and run out of things to say. But how am I to know that you considered that as the major motivation to continue??? Please understand that if someone keeps looking at her watch, makes her friends call her just to rescue her from your aruvai, says she has some work to do at home, etc etc, she is just itching to get away from you, even if you are the world's last remaining person!!

Then, as my bad luck will have it, I met him in the Indian grocery store with a long queue in front. It took all my patience to not drop my basket and run from there as if a hundred hyenas were after me. I had to stand and grin and bear the lecture again. Dude!! did you forget that I told you that I don't give a sh!t about the bill? Why bore me with the one topic you know on earth? And, how exactly did you manage to subvert my attempts to change the topic and get back to this one? What exactly is the connection between our company's tech fest and women's bill? I have to give it to you on this one! You are one of the very few that I've met who doggedly refused to change topics even when it was glaringly obvious that the other person wanted it. And that is not a proud thing, you dumbo! It is something you lack; To top it all, you managed to stand near my car driver door for half an hour preventing me from getting into my car and escaping from your clutches! I had to stand in the cold and listen to your whines! As a result, I missed spending more time with my roomies and S and A. You totally suck!!

So, here you go! Here is what I wanted to say on my Facebook status, my Gtalk status and even my office communicator: To save everyone's sanity, please GET LOST!!! Please please don't get anywhere near to me till I get myself back to normal. I know that losing sleep for a stupid like you is totally unnecessary. But then, your lectures and encounters get me to such a worked up state that I'm typing this away at 2 am in the night. I couldn't even update my Gtalk status or Google buzz since you have the indecency to ask me if I blocked you if you don't see me online for a few days. Yes! I blocked you and yes, I've had to unblock you again just to escape that yucky question everytime! This time though, I'm blocking you permanently... I've reached the ends this time. Mind you, this is not something you should be proud about. I did the unblocking only because I didn't want any kind of conflict with you. Its more because of my nature rather than you...

I realized how bad GTalk invisible status is today. I didn't know if that guy was truly online or not. I couldn't even rant peacefully! For all the people out there who are on invisible mode on Gtalk, please please be online (for its only your friends who know you are online) or please sign out!! Being invisible and pinging only when you want to is plain high-handedness.... do you think you are so busy that the world can't ping you when it needs but you can ping others when you want help? Please!! Everyone is as busy as you are.. just because someone is on GTalk and in available mode doesn't mean they have nothing at all to do. It just means that they don't mind spending a few minutes talking to friends. And the fact that you can ping me since you see me online, but I can't ping you since I think you are offline??? That falls in "Yuck!!" category!

When I type into someone's chat window that shows they are offline(when they are invisible), I trust that the person is actually offline. Please don't kill the trust I place in you. If you are busy, please change to busy status and tell your friends that you shouldn't be disturbed when you are busy or have a particular status message on it. And process the messages you get when you are on busy status once you are done with work. Being invisible is so damn sheesh!! Be courageous enough to say that you are somewhere when you ARE actually there. Please be grown up about it.

If you think there are morons who expect immediate response from you even when you put a busy status, then its high time you start thinking about your GTalk friends list. And please please don't be on busy status ALL THE TIME. Social networking is fun as well! So give some of your time (time that you spend facebooking or playing with new stuff or reading on google reader) to be on green and available, atleast once a month!! If you are on red all the time, there is no meaning for that status after that. People would surely disrespect that message. Its all in your hands buddy!

Though this rant hasn't cooled me down, I'm happy to have vented it somewhere! Oh, I think I should have asked that guy to just shut up instead of torturing mankind! Now, how good it would be if I can really tell a person that in real life situations... Sometimes, being a Libran is a bother! I guess I better learn how to tune out such morons when they blah blah blah!

PS - for the 0.001% probability case: Moron! If you are actually reading this blog post and know that I meant you, you'll know who I am as well. In that case, please don't come and ask me if I meant all this. Yes! I mean every word of it. Though I doubt if you will listen to it. I can already imagine you standing in my way and boring me with one of your endless lectures... Yikes!

Try it out!

Recently, I was talking to a friend of mine over phone. We caught up with each other and discussed plans after graduation. He asked me mine and discussed as to why some of it was wrong and what I should do about it. Then, I asked him about his plans. There was a freeze. He didn't talk for a few minutes. Then, he said, "I want to do another MS". Now, I know this guy from my school age. I know that he is not the studious kinds nor is he really interested in engineering. I for one, thought that he was wasting time in graduate school and instead should be trying to figure out his passions. So, imagine my shock when he said he wanted to do another MS!

After a bit of probing, he came out with the real reasons. He didn't want to search for a job here (his exact words, "Jobs are too hard to get now. So, why bother to search? I'm happy in grad school. Let me be here!"), he didn't want to go back to India and take up a job and he didn't even want to think of doing an internship or part-time gig. So, I said that he should atleast give some thought to a PhD in his field for once he has decided to study more, why not do a doctorate? That would in fact help him get deeper into whatever he is doing right now. For it, his answer was "But research is too hard!". That, in one word, sums up to not wanting to take up responsibility. 

After discussing with him for ten more minutes, I found that he felt safer in grad school, he didn't have to face the realities of life(job search, recession, etc.), he preferred to be a college student all his life(not unlike Aamir in RDB), he didn't want to really try out anything at all. But if you look at his activities, he would be the first person, ready to try out all types of activities from camping to football to volunteering. I found a totally disconnected profile of him where he was uber-confident in smaller things in life but not so in the larger things in life. My heart filled with pity for him. He was afraid of his own shadows. No amount of pushing and prodding by others would help him out of his misery.

In fact, what would life do to you? Worst, you'd know that you died trying to reach your dreams. But if you decide not to even step out of your comfort cocoon, then dreams would just be wishful thinking. Heck! You wouldn't even know if there was a BETTER comfort cocoon than the one that you are in right now. And best, you'd have achieved all that you set out to do and would think, "Did I get scared for this simple thing?". So, go ahead, try things out! You have but one life to do it all!

Practice makes perfect

I've seen so many grad students and friends who think that they need to be perfect in everything they do. For some non-understandable reason, this is more apparent in girls than guys. I've known girls who are so much of a "perfect home" freak that I really don't want to go to their houses for partying. We try not to have their houses as party venues simply because those friends(yeah, the neat freaks) would never completely relax and would be surreptitiously glancing at all that the guests do. If someone spills some juice or food, even before the person who split it realizes it and gets a paper towel(most of my friends are humanly clean - and that is a BIG statement for grad students), they'd be there with the paper roll. At best, it doesn't let us relax too. At worst, it creates unnecessary friction. Anyways, there are also others who just don't turn in papers or projects till the last minute simply because they are perfecting the draft. There are some extreme cases where people think about doing something perfectly but are afraid of turning in a good work; they want their work to be perfect with every i dotted and every t crossed. The sad thing is they finally don't get to do even moderate work. Lots of sophomores and juniors would attest to this fact.

I'm not sure if people start becoming complacent once they leave school for I've not heard about many people at work bothering so much about perfection. But one of my friends says that there is a guy in her office who never gives presentations to his group about his work because he wants to give the 'perfect' presentation. His manager is tired of asking him to do the presentation and finally went around to assign him work with another person as a smaller team. My friend says that being in that smaller team is hard because that guy expects perfection in every step and would never let the project complete at the right time. It would inevitably get delayed and they'd rush through in the last minute producing a poorer quality work. But the irony of it all is that the guy would blame the teammate saying that the poor quality work was because they didn't concentrate on perfection in every step. Working with him is a sure stress-inducer! My friend had the misfortune of being his teammate last year for one of the projects and she went from being a calm person finishing work at the correct time to someone highly stressed. Thankfully, she is out of the project now. Her lessons from it were to factor in extra time and to clearly demarcate the responsibilities even inside a two member team. When she recounted this experience, I was reminded of the following story.

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay."

So, practice makes perfect is a true adage. Stop theorizing your ideas and start "doing" it. I recently spoke to a friend and he said that he always want to do something. That is a good attitude. Do well or do moderately ok or even do badly, but do it. Like the tamil adage
"Chithiramum kai pazhakkam,
senthamizhum naapazhakam"
(The picture becomes perfect as you keep drawing it,
your tamil becomes perfect as you keep speaking it),
as you do something, you'll become more confident, you'll know how things are done and finally will achieve that excellence that you are aiming for. Just remember this: no one came into this world knowing everything that they do today. Everyone learned things only after being born. When someone else can do it, you can too! So, why wait? Do that project that you've been procrastinating for the past few months now. As time goes by, you'll see that you do more and more in your life; You'll be more satisfied with the entire outcome. And you'll finally reach that "perfect" thing, presentation, pottery and anything else!