A techie’s symphony!

Walking out of my world which was turning dangerously bland,

I chanced upon a desert in a faraway land,

Where the velvet sand was kissed by the sun’s amber rays so bright,

And for miles around, there was not a soul in sight.

Then, in a pleasant paradox to the arid heat,

Lay a large oasis at some hundred feet,

I strode a little closer, and couldn’t believe my eyes,
Sprawled across was a green paradise.

Surrounding a gentle brook that made music so fine,
Stood scores of trees, of fir and pine,
Around which little elves and fairies trotted along,
Humming “My smile is my sunshine, my life is a song”.

I went to them and asked if they were aware,
Of the loveliest place on earth that ever was there,
They motioned towards the mountain at the aft of the stream,

Said, the view from there was a surreal dream.

I scaled up to the peak where the earth met the sky,

Ecstatic, I prayed for wings so I could fly,

Sheets of white were spread all over,

And I wished to freeze, right there, forever!

A resounding thwack shook me up from my daze,

I turned to see the boss offer a petulant gaze,

He said, “Of daisies and damsels you dream all day,

But if you don’t spruce up now, you’ll jolly well have to pay!”

Ah, so for the money and the status, I’ll reconcile,

I’ll clear up my work that’s gathered in a pile,

Won’t fuss today that my life is a whole lot of crap,

For I saw the beauty of the world in a short little nap.

Sorbet On IceI woke in a cringe to a

mangy little …

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sensation that gri…

Champions turned Louts For almost a

decade, the A…

As the ball soared up in the air,

punched off the …

Alvida For Good As the curtains rise,

you see the…

One Hell Of An Over-rated Word! (Presented to a college magazine)

Dear Students,

My first indulgence in the word ‘love’ had resulted in a rather demoralizing catastrophe. I was eight, and I told little Florence sitting next to me in class that I loved her. God knows why – maybe it was a fallout of the boring math class that needed a pleasant digression. She told on me, and I got smacked on the knuckles by the teacher, who glared at me like I had engaged in the biggest profanity there ever was. A day later, my mother was summoned, and I was given another sermon at home the memories of which are not endearing either.
In the days that ensued, my frail sensibilities gawked at the ruckus created over a word that, we were taught, was but a simple expression. Years later, I realized that the moral lessons on love missed an important caveat – that the word had indefinite prerequisites associated with it. Today, in order that I can love, I should be a) wealthy, b) well qualified, c) sensitive (whatever that means), and preferably d) a well chiseled body that can pass off as a wax statue. Just for the record, Florence finally chose Francis over me because he was a product that fulfilled all the aforementioned criteria (and he also gifted her a soft toy).
In hindsight, the entire concept of love has become so complicated that we humans have become compelled to treat it rather frivolously. We revel in our cash registers, wine & cheese, and even in massaging our boss’ ego at work. With so much to do, there is little time for love. Add to that the technology we so insanely make love to, and we are left with nothing but an i-Pod in our hands and greed in our hearts. What the heck, our i-Phones today can even sing lullabies for our babies – why do we need worry about true love and compassion?
Let’s step out of the parochial view of love now. Our school textbooks had a pledge printed on the front cover that taught us to love our fellow global citizens. The global love is about as real as a hologram, but we are presently in a situation where we find it hard to love even our own countrymen, or our statesmen, or even our neighbours in the society. It is probably high time we bring down the standards of a good citizen then to the quality of ‘tolerance’, rather than ‘love’. Let us first set up a pledge to be able to tolerate people around us, to not give in to social, regional and religious misgivings, and to build a peaceful world. You never know, a miracle called love might just follow.
Even as I write, I get a call from my parents. And I realize, some relations make you realize that the world is indeed a nice place, and people are nice too if you look at them the right way. Thank God for the seldom felt unspoken love!

Working with the SLUT

Are you bored in office today? Do you have absolutely no productive work to do? Do you need to kill time with meaningless pretence? Take out an excel sheet and start filling in crap. And call it a tracker. Preferably, tag the word ‘strategic’ somewhere in the file name.

This morning, my team was summoned for, as usual, a P1-critical meeting. No, Bytesphere is not on the verge of bankruptcy, nor are we being bought out. It’s just that the boss was bugged to death, and he felt a dire urge to show us his importance. So he prepared a tracker and called it the ‘Strategic Labour Utilization Tracker’. Believe it or not – it also has an abbreviated name – SLUT. Unlike the other types, this SLUT is not even half as exciting. It’s just a dumb tracker that requires us to fill out details of our daily project activities – probably a fallout of the senior management finding most of the team goofing off for a good part of everyday. Needless to say, my boss Cheapo doesn’t have to fill this tracker, for his row will be largely empty anyway.

Even as I write this post, Cheapo is busy preparing other equally stupid trackers. There’s going to be a tracker to track our leaves, another one to track late arrivals in office, and for all I know, one tracker also to track if employees are filling up the various trackers on time. Good for him if this keeps him busy. I just hope he doesn’t give them funny acronyms now.

Cheapo Does the Salsa!

Nakul Kapoor

There are few occasions when you can feel grateful to your boss. Picture this: on a dull Thursday, when you are convinced that the week is going to take about a year more to end, your dork of a boss gives you comical respite. Today, I owe Cheapo Chaudhary one.

I walked into his cabin this afternoon and was subjected to a view that was hilarious and horrifying all at once. His expansive posterior was protruded outwards, swaying from left to right like the biggest yoyo there may have ever been.

“Salsa!” He said excitedly on seeing me.

“That’s wonderful!” I feigned admiration. Inwardly, of course, I winced. Cheapo’s moves are certainly not the most graceful in business.

But that’s not all. The joke, really, is that Cheapo learns Salsa on his way to office, in his chauffer-driven car. His Salsa instructor (presumably hot) is paid extra so that she can accompany him on the two-hour drive to office and ‘teach him Salsa’. That’s quite a convenient luxury I’d say, in the name of time optimization. It sure is an unfair world. I get his share of the work, but I don’t get a Salsa instructor. I will live with it anyway. Looking at it positively, my colleagues and I at least have something to keep the gossip mill running while the orangutan does the tango!

Three reasons why I joined Twitter

Three reasons why I joined Twitter:-

1. I am really bored in office these days
2. My office has a mandatory policy of spending nine hours in office and I had no better way of whiling away time
3. Twitter is blocked in our office – and I love flouting office rules – and have hence explored a proxy URL to access it. Eat that, admin!

Twitter is fun, really. The brief minutes I spend on it secretly, I feel better about life. I can tweet out all my pent up frustrations and the occasional moments of joy I experience in this cramped cubicle. But the best thing about Twitter is that Cheapo has not signed up on it yet, and hence its sanctity is maintained. For a change, I can say what I want without being monitored by one dork of a boss.

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/nakul_in_chaos and I promise you to deliver the latest scoops from some of the most interesting people in this so very interesting office! (And I continue to pray that this proxy URL I am accessing is not detected, lest the sadistic admin teams blocks it too.)

Another brick in the wall

No, this article has nothing to do with Pink Floyd, good music, or anything remotely as cool as that. Coming from a working executive more boring than the guy playing Solitaire next to your cubicle, you can’t expect better.

Hi. I am Nakul Kapoor. I’m twenty-five, fair, tall, handsome, well-settled with a plush job in Bytesphere, and arguably the most eligible bachelor in my neighbourhood. Just to clarify – this is what Mom describes me as on all the matrimonial sites of the world. She is not entirely wrong though – I am indeed twenty-five, and I’m indeed employed with Bytesphere. But besides that, the two most interesting aspects of my personality can only be that I bathe on alternate days of the week, and that I’ve never dated a hot girl (now the second one obviously follows the first).

My trusted friend Aryan, whose sorry state of affairs always peps up my spirits in consolation, told me that I’m not the only guy lost in this maze of a boring job and zero recognition. We are all small bricks in a large wall, with pretty much the same issues to cry over. So I’ve decided to share my concerns with you, and I invoke your empathy on them. And better still, if you have some suggestions to help my life get any better. Feel free to share your woes with me too, by replying to my posts. Not only that it will make me feel less miserable, but I might just be able to dole out some free advice per my experience. So watch this space for more…

A Romance with Chaos

Welcome to my blog zone. If you have visited this site intentionally, I am glad you’ve shown interest in knowing about my novel. If you have chanced upon it by accident, well, I am going to make you know about my novel anyway.

Nishant Kaushik - Author of A Romance With Chaos

A Romance With Chaos takes you through the journey through the coveted yet cursed, glamorous yet gloomy path of the corporate world. It’s a light-hearted dig at the mundane lives we all lead every day, much to our despair. So we have a young professional whose identity in the giant organization can be defined only by the colour of the shirt he wears to work every day. Around him exist people and situations you are exposed to every now and then – a contagious depression on account of unfulfilled aspirations, a girlfriend whose definition of a good boyfriend is the one who can buy her Gucci and Prada every weekend, and an easily hateable boss, just like yours – who in all likelihood is going to catch you from nowhere reading my blog during office hours before handing you some more clerical work to last you through the night.

A Romance With Chaos

The story teaches us that chaos and unrest are inevitable components of our lives. But more importantly, it teaches us that it is quite in our hands to wring chaos by its neck and twist it in our favour. It is in our hands to find time for ourselves, to find time for things that bring us some contentment, beyond wrenching our lives out in devotion to our careers and our bank balance. So if your guitar is rusting away in the attic for years because you have not got the time to strum it, or if your family vacation is in abeyance because your company can’t grant you leave, or in short – if you are just too apprehensive to break away from the protocol, ‘A Romance With Chaos’ probably serves as your guide that will help you find a solution. And if it can’t, it will at least get you to be able to smile at your own duress.