Them Bloody Lawyers

Recently, a doting father bought his son, an unusual present. Though nowadays, when unborn babies get their own blogs or Twitter feeds, this gift may not be so unusual soon.

Dad bought darling beta a domain name on the web: Narnia.mobi.^*

The son was a huge fan of the Narnia books and movies, and instead of being the run-of-the-mill dad, buying action figures, or quilts, or suchlike things, he decided he would notch up a few points on the cool-dad scale, and buy him a domain for the mobile version of the Narnia site.

Enter villain: The Estate of C. S. Lewis, who controls the rights to the intellectual property of Narnia. And like all villains in movies are wont to do, they did the stupidest thing possible: Sue the father.

The father claims that he is legally permitted to own the domain since there is some sort of window that is given to all owners of trademarks to book sites that would be pertinent to their trademark, and somehow the Estate of C.S. Lewis overlooked this one. Now since the domain name was bought after the window was closed, the father claims that he is legally in the right.

And obviously he would fight to keep it, seeing how difficult it is to get just the right domain name, unless you are looking for something nonsensical like, ummmm, Yahoo or Google . (put links)

Whatever; I am not going to argue about who is right.

But look at this: however the situation ends, whether the creative father or the lumbering C. S. Lewis Estate wins, the C. S. Lewis is going to get oodles of bad press, especially in the target market it’s trying to sell its merchandise, for example, young boys like the darling beta in this story.

Instead, what they should have done, to become heroes in this story, is to have gone and told the father and son that: “Look, we know you are huge fans, otherwise you wouldn’t have bought the domain. But let us make the site that goes on the domain in the Narnia fashion, or at the very least, do let us link up your site with our main site, and let us sell cute little Lion, Cupboard and Witch dolls on your site. Hell, you can even keep 10% of the revenues we make on your site.

That, my dear friends, is an offer, you can’t refuse.

And, this is not because there aren’t any clever guys who are advising the C. S. Lewis Estate. Mind you, they are too clever by half. It’s those lawyers who know that litigation will rake in more money than their hefty retainers, who said, let’s sue their puny little mobile domain asses.

Incentives, I tell you, make the world go round.

~

Any consulting company who still wants to hire me, can do so. Surprisingly for the amount of brain power I come with (I am selling myself here:P), I am willing to be paid salaries you pay your analysts.

I may not be that cheap much longer, if I keep coming up with such award-winning cost-cutting ideas. (“Fire them bloody lawyers!”)

Oh, and here is my resume.

^* Interestingly WHOIS, a tool which tells you who owns the domain, shows that C. S. Lewis estate owns the domain now. Must have been quite the letdown for the poor boy. ^^

Happy New Year

Happy New Year!

Annual fireworks at New Year’s in London

Most people would be happy to see 2008 go by. But even in a year that deserves to be called annus horribilis, there were some things from the past year, that still brings a smile to one’s face.

One of those was the first Diwali, co-incidentally the new year in the Hindu calendar, we had in London. Here is the list of things we did in random order to mark Diwali in London:

1. Went to Trafalgar Square to see London get together for the thoroughly Indian occasion, that is Diwali. Made mental note of not to do that again. Reasons include:
   • having to watch fat aunties dancing on stage to ancient/local Ballywood music, half-scared that the stage might collapse, leading to a catastrophic avalanche of aunties into the crowd.
   • having to watch n falana renowned gurus of Indian Jazz dance (WTH is Indian Jazz?) perform the Mexican wave with 30 kids on stage, call that amazing stuff, and make the kids clap for themselves.
   • Bloody desis, who act normal when caught one at a time, but when in congregation of 10,000 upwards (not joking), become extremely messy, noisy, exuberant, and prone to doing the bhangra even when you don’t have standing space, causing extreme discomfort to other people. Also, prone to trample upon people to get in front of TV camera. (Extreme right-wingers, please to be noting, Diwali at Trafalgar is a very soft-target for you. Go for it next time)
   • No fireworks.
   • No mithai
   • Prams, with steel bumpers. Which parents insist on taking right into the middle of the crowd, while carrying the babies for whom they are intended. Of whom you are not aware of, until the said vehicle takes a good portion of your shin/calf with it.
   • Shitty music, crappy compere, sound system a la merde, scheiss programme. There, that should be clear enough to most people in the world.
2. Went to the Diwali Party at a prominent business school. Note to self: Free drinks are not always a good thing, when combined with free food. Especially, when you are the sober one, and have to take glares from cleaning staff all the way home.

   Must not act surprised when people call you bhaiyya, and curse under your breath. Even when said people are good-looking women. I am that old now.

3. Went to the Neasden temple and back on Sunday. Prudent decision to not attempt it on Diwali itself. Mental note to self, to check where places actually are on Google Maps, before rushing out to go there and getting lost and walking upto 3 miles to get there. Also, whack those idiots who had been showing off their Google Maps/GPS features on their mobile phones.

   Also, either have lunch, or not take whining, starving friends to tag along, unless you have cotton to stuff in your ears.

   Should definitely not take junta who are obsessed with the answer to the Life, Universe and Everything. Atleast not to a temple. Unless you are bored enough to watch a priest and said junta spar on the theological truths of existence.

   Should definitely take note of Anwar’s, a delightful homely Pakistani restaurant near Warren St. Tube station, and thank Ali (the guy who runs the show) personally, with a discreet tenner, for saving my tummy from self-digesting itself in intestinal acid, and shutting up my whining friends. Still dreams about the lovely 6-quid all-day all-you-can-eat buffet.(Suggestion: if you ever pop in there, do take a cup of masala chai)

4. Went to Southall. The home to the pukka desh da puttar in London. Mental note to self: Stop acting surprised, when you see Sardars walking around with swords longer than your leg, Punjabi only-signs or a Mahindra tractor with a huge load of sugarcane in Southall. Must put idea in somebody’s head that Southall must be the new capital of Punjab (tee hee). Must take English-Punjabi dictionary.

   Not ask junta in these parts for directions on the bus, just when they are about to get out. Said junta will stop back for you, make you memorise the latitude, longitude coordinates of where you want to go, with precise directions (like It’s either the 3rd or the 5th turn, beta, I am sure of that. Or it could be straight ahead. ), get off 2 bus stops from where they are supposed to get off from, and make you feel horrible as hell for making them miss their stop.

   Taste mithai before buying them. Yes, mithai can be horrible, sugar doesn’t cover everything. Also, not to be buying sweets from chap who looks blank when we ask for stuff like boondi de laddu. Also, not to be buying more than 5 kgs of sweets at a time.

   Encourage friends enthusiastic for fireworks to just watch them, and steer them away from shops where they were selling local replicas of Stinger missiles. Information to general public: You need a license to burst crackers in London. Just so that you aren’t saddled with firecrackers going for at a 70% discount which you can’t burst. Should try whacking people as a good tool to encourage and making them understand, and justify with an ominous laaton ke bhoot baaton se nahi samajhtein.

   And last but not the least, take your umbrella always, in London. Or else, you could be cursing a very very enjoyable White Diwali. That’s right It snowed that day. And God saw it was good.

Being Home

I am back home in Delhi, but I am not exactly on holiday.

But I went to London to work, didn’t I? So if I am back home, I should be on holiday right?

Let’s get something straight. I graduated in March, after which I joined late July at my company (well-known ex-bank) and was thrown out a mere 3 months later, during which I was prepared, wound up, geared ready for the my job.

Which, if I haven’t made it already abundantly clear, was never told to me. Or another 149 of us who were waiting for summons.

~

So I got tired of this waiting and watching, and more waiting and watching, and I decided to take a vacation from this enforced vacation. Which, some of you would know, is not really a vacation, because this vacation is all about how to get out of the first vacation mentioned thereof.

Moral of the story: I am not on holiday. I am looking for a job. (Which again is a full-time job in itself. Aargh. How do I get caught in these recursive loops? Maybe it’s something to do with me being a computer engineer.)

~

Anyway, now that I am home, I think to myself, let’s make the best of it: Let’s dust up my poor-neglected and bit-cobwebby blog, and become a world-class Twitterer, in the free time I have, apart from, of course, sharpening my waiting-to-be-used bleeding edge financial acumen.

I have promised many people (and a dish) a post, and I intend to make good my promises in this long season of hibernation.

I shall also be posting regularly about my job hunt efforts, taking inspiration from this guy. Who knows, maybe I’ll get a job this way too!

If anybody is interested in giving me a job, have a look at my LinkedIn profile.

Sorry

Sorry.

This is generally how the Brits start a conversation: they first apologise for trespassing the airspace around your ears, and proceed to do it anyway. I don’t get it, why are you sorry, if you are going to inflict yourself on somebody anyway? And it’s supposed to be done thing, be polite for being polite’s sake. Which reminds me of an expression that a friend told me about, “All fart, no shit.”

But I digress.

Sorry for procrastinating on my blog. I didn’t realise that my blog was the high point of some people’s humdrum lives. Maybe I am being pretentious, but the dirty messages I saw left on my messenger, because I was taking this procrastination too far, from die-hard fans, whenever I got back from the loo, is testament to this fact.

~

Anyway, some of the readers would know what has been going on in my professional life in the past few weeks. To cut a long story short, I and my friends was caught on the wrong side of the entire financial crisis on the other side of the pond.

This suddenly meant that we had a lot more time on our hands than we are used to usually. We, the creme de la creme of the nation, trained to burn the midnight oil 365×24x7, have nothing better to do except maybe swat those non-existent flies.

Overnight, the time we spent on Orkut and Facebook reached an all-time high, we have almost memorised the sequence of songs that comes on 9XM, the only Indian music channel that we get on our TV, and we are slowly becoming, … wait for it…, typical Indian housewives.

~

Of course, the first week was kind of hectic, frantically calling whoever we knew whether they had any openings at their place, flooding the market with our CVs (Oh yeah, you heard something like 10,000 CVs in the market right? A few hundred can be attributed to the 5 guys in our house.)

Soon, all the emailing/calling/texting that we had to do, went down to a trickle, and we were had oodles of free time on our hands. If it’s one thing we are not prepared for, it’s a situation like this. It’s like visions of how our retirements are going to be.

Free time enables you to notice things like who left the Coke bottle open letting all the fizz out, or the guy who left a plate under the sofa for 7 days, with the ketchup on it dried on like superglue, or who made how many chappatties for whom yesterday. Believe you me, it sets up for interesting situations.

~

“Who the hell heated the chicken tikka masala in the microwave?”

Silence. Person who did it, trying to imagine what he did wrong.

“Yaar, the entire curry is splattered inside the microwave. Atleast you should clean it!”

Person who did it: “Why don’t you ever clean anything!?”

First person, thinking ‘Aha! Gotcha!’: “Jaa, saaf karke aa jaa!”

PWDI: “Tujhe saaf chahiye, tu saaf kar le! You never clean anything!”

FP, matter of factly: “That’s because, I don’t mess up anything!”

PWDI, thinking of a classy retort, to match the astute observation, glaring.

FP: “Jaa saaf karke aa ja, be!”

PWDI, still frantically to think up of something, finally comes up with “NO! Main nahi kar raha hoon!”

FP: Sigh.

~

And, yes junta, my blog is going to reflect what’s happening in my current life. Till somebody gets me a job in financial services. Resume will be sent on request. So, if you want to make me stop inflicting a housewive tales on the world, kind readers, get me employed. Quick.

Missed the bloody deadline again

If things were hunky dory, you would have been reading a proper blog-post, and I wouldn’t be boring you with this dime-a-dozen apology post, for missing my weekly deadline.

Well, the good news, (or bad news ) is that I will be getting my internet in a few days. By which point I will be ready with something more substantial. Till then toodles!