From College...to the Corporate World...

Its been around 4 months in the Corporate World, and i cant help thinking of how much i miss college life. Nostalgic feelings fill my dreamy head as i wake up every day to reach the save point at the end of the monotonous mission thrown right at my face. Its a difficult transition, from freedom to responsibility, from to sophistication, from whole-hearted laughs to artificial smirks, a transition that I am still a part of, a change that I am accepting.

The funniest thing at work is the IDCard.It is supposed to be worn around our neck, like the tag on clothing apparel in a shopping mall.I'm not sure how you guys take it but it feels very awkward to have it hanging around your neck.I simply prefer to tucking it away in my pocket. The ID card I had at college was used only for cutting my birthday cake once a year, and for exams, just in case the profs wanted to make sure that we did exist on campus, and not figments of imagination developed as a byproduct of their brain storming sessions with the late Fouriers and Laplaces. The IDcard at work must be produced everywhere you go, swiped everytime you enter and exit and if you are lucky enough, u can have privilege to swipe it before and after a pee too!

The next thing that comes to mid at work are status updates. You are given assignments on campus and given a deadline. You submit the assignment, you get marks, and there you go away with a happy A or a comforting B or a sac C. At work, you have stand-up meetings everyday for an hour, a weekly meeting summarizing the daily updates of the entire week and finally a monthly team meeting to summarize the weekly updates. And to be a part of this whole "updating the updated updates" is worse than writing all my CDC compres on the same day.

And once you get started with whatever you are doing, you always have the arduous task of socializing with your surrounding people. There is something wonderful called ragging (or "was" rather). Guess ur too old for that once you start working. People are uptight, every request is prefixed with a please and every conversation is suffixed with a thanks, followed by an aritificially induced smile implying "please get lost". I perfected my prefixes and suffixes, but still working on that smile. Its just that cracking too many PJs with other lazy people over a fried maggi and coffee in ANC has affected my way of smiling. Its not cool to make fun of people, or have saracastic remarks made on others anymore.Your best jokes often go by unnoticed. And sadly, a brave and self-sacrificing effort to make yourself a complete idiot and have a heart laugh over it is never appreciated. So, instead of dreaming to bask in the glory of a joke at yourself, keep your mouth shut the next time you've got your id card around your neck.

I will never know if those 4 years at college will be the best years of my life, but I am sure I will remember them for a long time to come.

Name Blame

I hate my name. Yes i really do! The whole story is hilarious. For those of you who still don't know, here goes. It was supposed to be Ashwini Chandra, named after the first star in the sky (don't know how it gets to be the first). Not that this name is any better, its worse.
Its two girl names combined to a boy name. I still remember, there was a girl named Ashwini in the same class during my UKG. Every time during attendance, both of us used to stand up for the same name. Trust me, its humiliating. Luckily i got to go to another school where there were no Ashwini's in my class (girls and boys), which made it a lot easier. Things were fine until i received my 10th class hall ticket, where it was printed Ashwani. I went to the principal for a request to change my name...and there comes in the irony. I was shown my birth certificate which i gave them at the time of joining, and it was actually Ashwani Chandra.......
That is when i knew my name...amazed at this discovery, i told my parents and all my friends, started changing my name on the labels of my books.

I guess I'm the only idiot alive who got to know his name at 15 years. This name was worse. No one could ever pronounce it properly. People start making a "Ashh...Ashh...Ashh..." sound and i answer to that to go collect my answer sheets. I still wonder how i got that name.

I still can recollect the incident, after my 1st year 1st sem 1st tutorial in thermodynamics. He was distributing papers when he called out my name and placed it in the middle of the 4 girls in our class. He was not fully convinced when i told him it was my paper. He was still under the impression that i was collecting the paper for the girl who was absent that day.

Why!!! I always wonder why my parents never thought it would be weird to have a girl name for a guy. I always wonder why I dint have the brains to get it changed when I was young.
I could have been named X, why not. That's what u do in a math problem, the first variable is always an X. I was the eldest among all my cousins, so why don't i deserve to get the X?. The rest of my cousins could be named whatever they want, or just x1, x2, x3 and so on.....
Even variables in java have clearer and meaningful names. Thanks to the coding standards and naming conventions.....Seriously....when was the last time u had "int i" and made it past the code review stage?
I seriously believe they should have a naming convention for humans also.....International Union of Names (IUN) is that so hard???

Thanks to my certificates, I now have it on my ID card, my Access Card, on my nameplate and finally my personal machine at work also has the same name :(.

Well, its good that a lot of people have weird names, but a girl name? both the first and last of it? Every time i introduce myself, i have to say it like three times. Every time i say my name, i have to spell it out to make sure he doesn't make a worse name of my already existing one.
There are 265 members on facebook who hate their name....and I'm in there....
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