Madras Mail: Part 4

It is easy to forget things, especially when your life depends on it. Calcutta, my Calcutta, you are such a fair city.

None of my friends were given a lot of pocket money in college. But I remember we had a great life. Rarely ever was there an occasion where we felt constrained by money. I mean, yes, we had to think about money. But for God's sake we hung out at Park Street it was perfectly possible to spend an entire day there without spending a hundred bucks. When we did save up, we went to respectable places and had gourmet meals and believe me those were not very infrequent occasions either. We rarely ever took cabs, unless we were in a group, or had a screaming mother/ father at the other end of a phone call. And yet somehow we seemed to stay out late all the time. I returned home at one in the night every once in a while and it would be fast walks followed by shared autos, or buses. I would not have to pay a lot because it was late. The auto driver did not think of hiking the fare just because he could. Even if he did it would be 5 rupee instead of 3 kind of an affair. And oh, the number of options! If you wanted Chinese food, you could go to Chini's where you would be stuffed for 25 rupees. You could go to Tibetan delight if you were in the mood for spending a bit more. If it's a larger group you could go to Tangra- even there you can choose from expensive to backyard restaurants. Still more money? Well, Barbecue, Tung Fong? Still more money? Mainland China. Just look at the options! And the best part - all of them are delicious. Every one of them.

Had I grown up in some other city I would have said- in Calcutta there is something for everyone. But I didn't. In Calcutta I can be all the ''everyone''s. I can share a table with strangers while I hog pan fried mystery-meat momos in the afternoon and go on a fancy date to a fine dining place at night. Why will I be expected to visit a certain kind of a place because I earn a certain amount of money?

Realisations in IT

The Indian software services sector is a wonderland. Everyone bullshits everyone. Your job is to make it look like you have enough work for you to be drawing a salary. You are paid to justify that you should be paid. And how do you justify that you should be paid? By preparing elaborate slide shows and spreadsheets. It is one giant work of fiction in Power Point and Excel.

No one talks about efficient code. Even you wouldn't if your effort were to be measured by the Lines of Code. Just imagine. The more Lines of Code, the better. If you spend five minutes working on something, you put two hours in the tracking software, no kidding. If you spend two hours copying code from various pre-existing programs (which had been copied from other programs - you see forty years of Mainframe does give you a sizable chunk of obsolete code) you put your effort as forty. Yes forty hours. Of course, at regular intervals you need to  send out mails to various people about various things and demand they give you a solution by EOD (End of Day). If you are at the receiving end of such a mail, do not panic. A solution is usually a mail or any other form of engagement. Never mind if your solution is shoddy, just send it back. Or, better still, say that your solution depends on solutions/feedback from other teams and shoot out threatening mails to them CCing it to your sender demanding that the said team sends you back whatever it is that you hope it is going to send you back by - you guessed it - EOD. No body wants you to wade through the marsh of code and come up with an actual solution. You are discouraged to. You see, the idea is to keep the facade of work going on but never really solving the main problem.

No one but the really desperate should join (and continue in) the IT industry. Because getting out is hard and time consuming. Sometimes it is the only way to go - in the beginning. Small product companies are rarely in the mood to take up or train young engineers. But if you love programming, or life in general, know this from now. You must get out.

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Rangiye diye jao jao, jao go ebar jabar age...

Picture Source: South Asia Times.

Talkin' bout a Revolution

Let this be the end of CPM. Of the most cold blooded organized plundering in the history of India. The Socialist Revolution ended the day they came to power. What began was nothing short of a slow transfusion of poison that continues to this day.

They must go. Thankfully, they will. Nothing, nothing can be worse than this. No madness, no chaos, no amount of lack of organization can come close to the planned assault of the educated bhodrolok.

Crimson Chakra- Adyar: Eating well in Madras:

If you are trying to decide whether Crimson Chakra is where you should go for your quiet dinner for two or a boisterous dinner with friends/ colleagues, this post is for you. And I will make it simple for you. Don't go to Crimson Chakra unless, of course, you love pretentious food places or you hate the people you are going out to dine with (and this is your only chance of getting back at them.)

If you understand anything about food, you are unlikely to go back to the place.  I had read somewhere that their table d'hôte sucks. It's true. I was continuously reminded of the opening lines of Annie Hall where Woody Allen talks about two women conversing in a restaurant:


"Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions."


Well that pretty much sums up Crimson Chakra's table d'hôte menu. Armed with this knowledge I decided to give the fixed menu a miss and order from their a la carte menu. The menu is a spectacle of sorts with the first half full of bizarre tamil names and english explanations that made each item sound more suspicious than the previous. I jumped to the second half which proclaimed itself to be the continental menu. I ordered a roasted duck in orange sauce secretly hoping that it would turn out to be better than what the others had ordered (the fixed menu). In the end however, it was difficult to tell which was worse. The duck was doused in a very, very sweet sauce. The vegetables were not blanched properly. And the fixed menu, let's not talk about that. The food is atrociously expensive. The fixed menu which has a soup, a kebab quarter plate (4 chicken, 2 mutton, 2 prawns, a quartered tomato, some bean sprouts), appams/rotis, a choice of identical tasting chicken/mutton or fish curries, curd rice (!) and a scoop of vanilla the size of a 3 rupee Calcutta rosogolla costs 650 rupee plus taxes.

The décor of the place is nice. The ambience is nice too. If you must go you can try the desserts. The menu is clearly made by people who have a limited knowledge of food. But that is not why the place fails. It fails because it seems to be run by people who don't have a genuine love for food and for feeding people. You cannot make a good restaurant by just hiring the best chefs and the best interior decorators. You need love, no matter how cliché that may sound to you.