~Side Effects Of Freeeee Pool~

It was 10.30 Monday morning and I was still sleeping in my bed. I got no mood to get up and was thinking how I was till last Friday. As employee of an IT company my day starts with the status call at early morning and ends with the status call -midnight, where we will be giving the same status in different tone and modulation, but that's another story. Today, suddenly I got a feeling that I got cut off from the entire world, where no one to call me or at least to care about my bare existence in the company - I AM IN FREE POOL - BENCH

                                                       My Initial thought about bench!!!!!!!

 When I stepped into the company in the mid afternoon suddenly I got a feeling as though I am the one who has got no work to perform, but soon my thought changed when I stepped inside Library. I felt like the whole company is inside the tiny space where third generation computers were given to employees to check the mails and to browse, and to my surprise majority of people were freshers who were poking their managers through mail for the desired project.

Clearing this crowd I stepped inside book section where I was planning to read a book for a long time. The book was Guns,germs and steel by Jared Diamond, The book was all about the colonial mind set and how small number of people managed to control large Asian continent. But to my surprise I found the book in the hands of a girl who was eagerly staring at the cover along with his boy friend and he in turn was interested in some other thing which is not important here. Initially I thought of asking her for the book but later I don't want to disturb them either. I was roaming my campus aimlessly and hopelessly, just thinking how long I have to be like this and below are some of my weird observation

* You may desisted from entering the ODC, and your friends may suddenly see you as hacker and consider malevolence

* Your friends think that you are extremely free and they used to mention in their conversation often. I don’t know whether they are jealous of your status but sure the starting of the conversation will be as "Any how you are free Wright....". All your act will be considered futile

* Your friend task become your task. From collecting the courier to dispatching their bench items, you will treated as though you are born for it and have the ultimate desire to do it

* You will come to know about many good/bad pairs exists in your building and your floor. As I was in the bench, many of the time I prefer the stairs instead of Lifts and you can come across many embarrassing situation( and sure the embarrassing situation is for you and not for them- mind it ). And some days you can find the same pair altered and floors changed.

* Frequency of sending forward mails will be high from your end, and people may say upto your face that they will delete the mail without reading it, considering that mails send by the guy in the free pool will be junk and can be read and understood only by the person who is in free pool.

* Whatever the call you get, whether it may be the airtel or HDFC customer care, you will think the call is from the resource allocation team and may feel jittery. If your friends are crazy enough they may call you as HR and ask you to come to a certain place to get a Ice cream for them. Those were Imponderable moments.

* You will have the up to date knowledge to appear for IAS exam ,as you will be reading all news papers in your Library with utmost sincerity and commitment. And you will find the 40+ guys having all the important papers and refusing to give even classifieds paper also.

* You will have a special circle of people who in turn will be in bench for 1+ years and your gang will be easily conspicuous 

* Since you will be gem packed with your project work and will be missing most of the birthday parties, suddenly when you happen to meet your friend after long time, he will map your tummy with the free pool.


I am sure any IT engineer would have gone through these phase of being in bench and enjoyed their life to the fullest. But according to me those are reminiscent days and anybody should have these kind of relaxing period. But at the same time I cannot  Ignore my manager warning of recession, or the saying 'calm before the storm", but when we are underpaid for our job there is no wrong in enjoying your small gap to fullest.

Do all you wish in this period. Take a book of the pillow size and complete it, go to the place you have never been in your campus ( with a girl, if your company is a boy stay where you are) , call all your batch mate and see how they are now, take up a short duration course on any humanities studies.

Live it - Love it

~~~~ Scribbling Continues~~~

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

I am giving you the best article I have read in the recent time. Though some of the comments are not agreeably, its worth publishing....Happy Reading :) :)

Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Rockefeller to Mandela, Vedanta to Anna Hazare.... How long can the cardinals of corporate gospel buy up our protests?

Is it a house or a home? A temple to the new India, or a warehouse for its ghosts? Ever since Antilla arrived on Altamont Road in Mumbai, exuding mystery and quiet menace, things have not been the same. “Here we are,” the friend who took me there said, “Pay your respects to our new Ruler.”

Antilla belongs to India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani. I had read about this most expensive dwelling ever built, the twenty-seven floors, three helipads, nine lifts, hanging gardens, ballrooms, weather rooms, gymnasiums, six floors of parking, and the six hundred servants. Nothing had prepared me for the vertical lawn—a soaring, 27-storey-high wall of grass attached to a vast metal grid. The grass was dry in patches; bits had fallen off in neat rectangles. Clearly, Trickledown hadn’t worked.

But Gush-Up certainly has. That’s why in a nation of 1.2 billion, India’s 100 richest people own assets equivalent to one-fourth of the GDP.

The word on the street (and in the New York Times) is, or at least was, that after all that effort and gardening, the Ambanis don’t live in Antilla. No one knows for sure. People still whisper about ghosts and bad luck, Vaastu and Feng Shui. Maybe it’s all Karl Marx’s fault. (All that cussing.) Capitalism, he said, “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, that it is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells”.

In India, the 300 million of us who belong to the new, post-IMF “reforms” middle class—the market—live side by side with spirits of the nether world, the poltergeists of dead rivers, dry wells, bald mountains and denuded forests; the ghosts of 2,50,000 debt-ridden farmers who have killed themselves, and of the 800 million who have been impoverished and dispossessed to make way for us. And who survive on less than twenty rupees a day.

Mukesh Ambani is personally worth $20 billion. He holds a majority controlling share in Reliance Industries Limited (RIL), a company with a market capitalisation of $47 billion and global business interests that include petrochemicals, oil, natural gas, polyester fibre, Special Economic Zones, fresh food retail, high schools, life sciences research and stem cell storage services. RIL recently bought 95 per cent shares in Infotel, a TV consortium that controls 27 TV news and entertainment channels, including CNN-IBN, IBN Live, CNBC, IBN Lokmat, and ETV in almost every regional language. Infotel owns the only nationwide licence for 4G Broadband, a high-speed “information pipeline” which, if the technology works, could be the future of information exchange. Mr Ambani also owns a cricket team.

RIL is one of a handful of corporations that run India. Some of the others are the Tatas, Jindals, Vedanta, Mittals, Infosys, Essar and the other Reliance (ADAG), owned by Mukesh’s brother Anil. Their race for growth has spilled across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. Their nets are cast wide; they are visible and invisible, over-ground as well as underground. The Tatas, for example, run more than 100 companies in 80 countries. They are one of India’s oldest and largest private sector power companies. They own mines, gas fields, steel plants, telephone, cable TV and broadband networks, and run whole townships. They manufacture cars and trucks, own the Taj Hotel chain, Jaguar, Land Rover, Daewoo, Tetley Tea, a publishing company, a chain of bookstores, a major brand of iodised salt and the cosmetics giant Lakme. Their advertising tagline could easily be: You Can’t Live Without Us.

According to the rules of the Gush-Up Gospel, the more you have, the more you can have.

The era of the Privatisation of Everything has made the Indian economy one of the fastest growing in the world. However, like any good old-fashioned colony, one of its main exports is its minerals. India’s new mega-corporations—Tatas, Jindals, Essar, Reliance, Sterlite—are those who have managed to muscle their way to the head of the spigot that is spewing money extracted from deep inside the earth. It’s a dream come true for businessmen—to be able to sell what they don’t have to buy.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                ……TO BE CONTINUED….