...shoOOonya...

2009 has been a personal roller coaster ride for me ... A year ago i had posted about how 2008 had been a horrible terrible year ... and how I hoped 2009 to be better ... Well .. 2009 was definately better then 2008 in overall terms but by no means was it a good year ... The roller coaster ride of 2008 simply continued in 2009 ... with a couple of more shocks and sufferings ... the only consolation being it slowed down to a crawled in second half of the year and things started to look up towards the end of the year … But … during the first half of the year, things simply refused to look up… infact they simply continued the downward spiral journey I felt as if my life was responding to the global financial crisis in equal measures with a personal emotional crisis of my own :P The second half of the year was slightly better ... and i hope 2010 becomes a much better year as compared to last two ... keeping up with the upward trending wave that I am currently riding … With these hopes and ...

I spent about 10 days in Mumbai last week. As always, being home is a wonderful feeling. Home cooked mom-ke-haath-ka-khana is a treat unto itself. Its also a vacation for me where I don't really have to worry about office. I get to spend some time with my family once in a quarter for about a week.   During the weeklong trip … I attended 2 weddings. One wedding was in my family so I was there practically from 10 am to 10 pm meeting the entire extended family on my maternal side (metting several members after a long gap). It was actually nice meeting all people and yes, food was excellent. The second one was a Punjabi family wedding reception … wedding of the daughter of one of my Dad's business associate. I just went along since dad did not want to go alone. It was interesting to attend the wedding. Food was good J rounding off with dessert of Jalebi, Kulfi and Rabdi J     One of the things I do when in Mumbai is to watch movies J the economics and the logistics are s...

  Weight check … I began the diet with 82.9 Kg and ended up with 78.9 Kg. Accounting for the variable weight of the various external elements like clothes, shoes, mobile, change in the pocket and money in the purse J , the GM diet enabled me to lose approx. 3.5 to 4 KG. So I can conclude that the diet experiment was pretty successful.   Diet Discounts ... it was fun to take them but maybe not taking them would have resulted in greater weight loss by at least a kg or two – I had taken diet discounts in the form of chocolate bites, dry fruit sweets, tea with milk and sugar, salt and spices etc. Learning Curve … Also, now I feel packaged coconut drink was not a good idea. I was probably supposed to have fresh coconut milk/drink and fresh juice. Also, I read somewhere that Rice is a not an effective substitute for beef in the veggie version and it reduces the extent of weight loss. Work-Out - Yet another key thing was that I did not visit the gym even once during the diet w...

I woke up in the morning with the pleasant realization the diet period was over and I could eat all tasty spicy stuff without worrying about any restriction !! YAY !! Stated the day with 2 khakhras with ghee and pudina chatni / singhdana chatni ! WOW !! In office I grabbed a pack of Potato stic (Hot Chilli flavor) and also took a Tiffany creamy wafer biscuit. Lunch was the pulav and vegetable I prepared yesterday evening. .... I am off-diet now and I am going to take full advantage of it. Will go out McDonalds and grab a Pizza McPuff and a Aloo Tikki (called Veggie Surpise here), have an ice cream and even a Do-nut before I go to India by weekend … that will be FEAST Time !! My birthday also coming during the home stay ... sooooo .... cakes and ice creams and pizza and all .... .... And yes .. just FYI … I weighed myself yesterday and the pointr crossed 79 KG on the downward journey.    

Weekend time  !! Woke up only at 11 AM on both days :P Day 6 At 12 Noon, I had some salad of chopped carrot, cucumber and tomato ! About 3.30 PM came the lunch … Rice with peas, corn, cabbage and tomato !! Kinda fried rice or Pulav. This was practically the first time i had tried experimenting with making Pulav ... I made a call home and asked Mom how to go about it. She guided me and the result was not bad at all :) Nimboo paani in the evening at about 6 pm before going out for grocery to stock up again for the last day of the diet and the few days left before my Mumbai trip to home. Late evening, I had the dinner of the Pulav I made in the afternoon. It was kinda nice. Now one more thing gets added to the (short) list of things I can cook :P Since its weekend, no preparations for tomorrow to be made in advance. Day 7 – Woke up at 11 AM again ... and last day of the diet !! Started the day with the two tomatoes and then lazed around watching TV and thinking :P Late...

Day began with some rice which I prepared early morning. I packed my lunch box with the tomatoes and the rice and the soup for the day. I had prepared the soup on previous night itself. cant do eveything in the morning. I had the 2 chopped tomatoes at about 10.30 in office … Lunch was the time when I had Rice along with the Soup. It was not exactly tasty but definitely better than having the plain rice alone. I guess the difficult part of GM Diet is that u get 'taste deprived'. Eating plain rice is very difficult for the simple lack of taste. Late Afternoon I had the two chopped tomatoes again. As mentioned earlier, plain rice is hardly consumable so while returning home in the evening, I picked up some Fried Rice from the super market. I guess this will qualify as a diet disount of the day (fried food). Had a little of the fried rice in the evening and the remaining in the night for dinner. It was indeed tasty J BTW … I weighed myself yesterday and found that...

One Litre Low Fat Milk and about 9 bananas - ready for the day. Began the day with a singular Banana and a glass of milk. Poured a glass of milk in a small bottle and a kept it the refrigerator, carried the rest of the milk in the original carton to office along with about 6 bananas. Anyone coming to my desk will be wierdly surprised to fidn the milk carton on my desk today. Day was not bad in the sense that there were no serious cravings or hunger pangs. I had One Banana and a gulp of milk at about 11 and then 2 Bananas for lunch at 1 and one banana again at 3.30 and finally one before leaving office by 6. Milk also consumed through the day in occasional gulps. And yes, how can I forget. The sweets from day 1 (Extremely delicious Dry Fruit Barfi) appeared on the scene again and I took my pick. That was today's Diet Discount for me !! I had some concerns for the next day though ... Day 5 is only Rice and Tomato. Plain rice without anything else is virtually impossible f...

having only fruits on day 1 and only vegetables on day 2 .. i felt a day of both combined would be better. Atleast, no monotony. Started the day with a carrot at 7 am. Packed my lunch box with salads and fruits (apples and pears). I had to come to office for a conference call which eventually did not happen for me since I was unable to connect and log-in into the web conference portal. :( Unlike yesterday, i had a proper tea today although with very less milk. GM Diet recommends only Black Tea or Coffee and no milk consumption allowed. So this became my Second Diet Discount !! Day was fine with the salads and fruits consumption. I was not really bored of them. Late afternoon I attended a meeting with Senior Management members of the organization (including CIO & CFO etc). Nice cookies were served at each seat and during the course of the presentation; I nicely and quite absent mindedly munched on a couple of them. I relaised what i had done only at the end of the session...

The day began with the recommended boiled Potato and the 'suggested' pat of butter on it. I took the suggestion J . It was absolutely AWESOME and while I was enjoying the Buttered Potato, I realized that I hadn't had a slice of raw boiled potato with 'maska' in ages. I had woken up early today to prepare the vegetable salad (washing, peeling, slicing, chopping, shredding) the carrots & cabbage and added corn, cucumber etc. Lunch Box packed for the day :) Day went off fine with the salads ... although it became actually boring to eat raw stuff with no spices etc. I added some salt though or else the veggies might have jumped back into the plate from my throat. Made it a point to have my usual tea in office in the mornign and evening tea while returning home At home, had the evening glass of tomato juice and then prepared for the dinner. Lauki/Doodhi/Bottle Goard or whatever it is called in other languages. I am no fan of this long vegetable and have n...

First Day of the GM Diet ... mind filled with some doubts and some apprehensions and a tad bit of excitement too (at the prospecti fo losing a few kilos before my Mumbai visit) I started off with one sweet lime and the mandatory glass of water. I had cut musk melon and water melon the previous night and packed them in lunch boxes (large ones) and stored them in refrigerator. Along with them, also took apples and pears to office; not forgetting the Knife J . My Lunch Box for office was ready :) The water melon turned out to be disaster. After a few bites I realized that the taste was not right and the smell was not right either. Dumped the entire load into the dustbin and relied on the musk melon ! A colleague got some sweets from India. Ordinarily I would have resisted the temptation but it was an awesome "dry fruits barfi" which has an out of this world taste. Everyone was going ga-ga over it. So took a piece and then another. That was the 'diet discount' I ...

The GM Diet is not an easy one to execute. Not only one need to be restrictive in what one is eating but accordingly one has to prepare and stock up in advance. A person like me who is living alone, away from home has a refrigerator which has pretty limited items based on the very limited cooking abilities. So stocking up the refrigerator for the week long ordeal was the first task. So I went through the entire GM Diet plan (vegetarian version of course) and prepared a detailed list of things I would need for the week. For this reason, I decided to stock up during the weekend and start the diet on the first working day of the week and finish off in the next weekend. The list was pretty long and impressive too: lots of tomatoes, cucumber & carrots, a nice large cabbage, potatoes (only 2), one lauki/dhoodhi, about 8-10 bananas, musk melon, watermelon, apples, sweet lime, lemon, packaged coconut water, peach and tomato juice pack and Milk. For the first time, my refrigerator was...

After spending 6 months in Dubai from Sept'08 to Mar'09, I suddenly realized that my weight had not only crossed 80 but reached an alarming 85. BMI says my weight should be about 67-70. Being Indian with a slightly built body, I thought 10-15% over the BMI is OK. I have never really thought of myself being over weight or worried about the extra weight ever. But 85 was different. I realised that although 80 was OK; 85 wasn't. So I consulted my dear friends and created a diet plan for myself. A strict control on things I consumed and a daily 30 min walk on the treadmill ensured that I was able to cross 80 on the downward journey within one month. i blogged about those 'glorious' days and experiences. Alas… I could not maintain the same tempo further. Post April, I was not able to do it again and my weight rose steadily although not at an alarming rate.  Tried to follow some of my diet plan parts but eventually did not happen. The cranky poffice timings due to p...

NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month is a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to novel writing.   Participants begin writing November 1. The goal is to write a 175-page (50,000-word) novel by midnight, November 30. SIMPLE !!! NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved. In 2008, we had over 120,000 participants. More than 20,000 of them crossed the 50k finish line by the midnight deadline, entering into the annals of NaNoWriMo superstardom forever. They started the month as auto mechanics, out-of-work actors, and middle school English teachers. They walked away novelists. So, to recap: What: Writing one 50,000-word novel from scratch in a month's time. Who: You! We can't do this unless we have some other people trying it as well. Let's write laughably awful yet lengthy prose together. Why: The reasons are endless! To actively participate in one of ...

I made a 2 day trip to Alibaug in mid June ... Blogged about it in early September ... and now finally uploaded the pics of the trip in late October   I even uploaded pictures of my Metro ride and Ibn Batuta Mall visits during Diwali   All albums in my Picasa account ...  http://picasaweb.google.com/hemantkumarjain  

Yesterday I was sooo bored that I changed my gtalk status message to "Hemantkumar: is bored !   Cant work , cant write, cant blog, cant think ! Complete Blank ! Bored !" A good friend of mine saw that and sent this friendly piece of advice to me : Don't get Bored, I will give u WORK Watch Out - Wake Up Sid    - If only                  - You have got mail          - Little Manhattan Take a stroll to archies galary & pick up the cards u wud like to receive.......buy 1 or 2 Pamper urself Then go n have a FEAST - eat what u feel like eating most and then buy some Garbara bunch of yellow -pink-orange & white keep it in a vase if u dont have that dont give me an excuse and put it in a water bottle and then take ur laptop Blog on this exercise   and come back to office tomorrow and change this STATUS message   Well … here is how my evening actually turned out … nothing too dramatic like the above suggestions but nevertheless enjoyable ...

I saw "Wake up Sid" yesterday … Nice Movie. Konkana was as usual superb and Ranbir was not bad at all. The character of Sid by Ranbir… well played! Some of the (very small) things about the movie set of some memory sparks in my head J College – The shooting of Sid's college took place in HR College which has KC College as its neighbor, the place where I studied during my 2 years of junior college. Those few shots of the path between HR & KC (the steps over which the friends jump during the song and where Sid walks away after the results) made me nostalgic ... thinking about college days. Some of the best days of my life ..when I met my best friends. Office - The office of Anupam Kher (Sid's Father) was in Boston House in Andheri J That was where my Satyam office was from 2005 to 2008. We were the first occupants of the office structure after it was constructed in 2005. For almost a year, we enjoyed near monopoly of the elevators before the other tenants m...

A forward ... putting it on my blog for some future amusing reading for myself :)   --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------   Team comprising of a Writer, a Producer, a Director, etc applied to the Government of India with a Script to produce a Movie on Mahabarath. They received reply to their application after 14 months. All of them committed suicide later and the reason is very obvious as you may see from the following letter received by them. Subject: Mahabharata To: The Writer, Film Director & Film Producer, Mumbai Ref: Film story submitted by you, regarding financing of films by Government of India, Your letter dt. ............ ......... . The undersigned is directed to refer the above letter and state that the Government has examined your proposal for financing a film called ''Mahabharat'. The Very High Level Committee constituted for this purpose has been in consultation with t...

It seems i lost her recently ...   then again .. something tells me i lost her a long time ago ...   Never realised when i lost her ... i still kept hanging on to it ...   the hopelessly hopeful optimist person i am ...   wish somethings in life were a lot more clearer than they are !

I had gone to India in June and within a few hour of landing at Mumbai airport, I was on my way to Nikhil's residence where Shubham and Arijit. I was joining them for a 2 day trip to Alibaug! It had been a long time since I had gone out with friends …. A very very long time … The key highlights of the trip were the Alibaug Beach and the Fort, beside the overnight stay at a guest house and the long drive from Mumbai to Alibaug in Nikhil's car and back. Long time since I had soaked myself up in sea water, otherwise it has been Mumbai rains all the time soaking me up at the most unexpected of times ... (And I always loved it) It was nice to be back to the sea after my 'walk in the water' a several months ago in Dubai … The only dampener was the 'apparent pollution' of the sea water at Alibaug. Something which seemed like oil (brown in color) was gradually creeping up the shore. All the sea water was brown and looked awfully dirty. We walked up to a distant ...

I have got a lot of thoughts and things to be penned down as blog posts ...   all i need is some time for doing it !   And some peace of mind to get that time ...

I am feeling Lucky !! Naah … Not the google way ! It's the twitter way !! My friend Afreen introduced me to twitter a few months ... something I wasn't really interested in Well, over the past few months, I have become what can be called an "early-stage twitter addict":D The last one week has been particularly "rewarding" since twitter helped me get on TV as well as win a merchandised Mug :D and hence the title 'I am feeling Lucky' … I was on TV .. well not really … but I was !! Barkha Dutt from NDTV 24X7 hosts the show 'We the People' which is a sort of an open discussion on latest hot issues which directly impact the common man, the 'aam junta'. She takes inputs from the readers/viewers through various channels, one of which is twitter. On one of the recent episodes where the discussion topic was the Paranoia and over-reaction by Maharashtra Govt / India on Swine Flu, I sent her my comments / tweets and forgot all about it. In t...

The online world is my refuge ... My escape from the real world ...     The real world where i feel lonely ... the loneliness .. which i hate .. which i fear ...   the online world helps me escape all that ...   the blog, the random web surfing ... the emails (including so many forwards and subscriptions) ... twitter ... all of it ..   they are my sanctuary of peace ... of escape ... an attempt to forget ther reality !   but every now and then .. i am pulled back into reality ... !!

After the Slue Screen of Death event with my laptop last month ... it recovered and was running fine.   Till today morning that is.   Today morning it gave me an "operating System could not start" eror or soemthing like that ..   And I have no clue what to do ....  

Saw in the news yesterday that NRI'S (mostly from from US / Canada) are wary of visiting India due to the Swine Flue scare ... And I am wondering what the heck ... its a nice little case of the Pot calling the Kettle black. India got the swine flue from people travelling from US/canada to India ... it came to India from the west with the NRI & foren return crowd that aside, the stats have got more to tell ... Global figures - 89,921 cases with 382 deaths as of 3rd July (more than a month ago) US Stats - 33,902 cases with 170 deaths as of 3rd July (more than a month ago) India Stats - We had no deaths and about 100 cases a month ago ... around 3rd July Even current status is that we have about 8-10 deaths and less than 1000 cases Source : http://www.disabled-world.com/health/influenza/swine-flu/cases-statistics.php     Who should be afraid of travelling to whihc country ... You decide !!

After the near failure to follow the diet plan in July, my hopes were pinned onto Aug-Sept period. The first 8 days of my diet plan have been even more disastrous than the entire month of July. I consumed (and of course enjoyed) almost all conceivable things that I was supposed to keep away from. J Pizza, Biscuits, Chocolate, Potato vegetables, ice cream, sweets like Rasmalai and Gulab Jamun, Pastry (black forest .. yummmiiiieeee), Aloo Vada, Samosa, Aloo Parathas .....  !!! So that was a disastrous first week of my 6 weeks of hope. 5 more to go before I go home. (My weight just touched 82 :( something is wrong with the weighing scale ... hopefully )

Bloozle : The Startup that never was … This is the story of a startup that never was. It's a story of the entrepreneurs tryst with destiny, passion, product development, product success/failure, sleepless nights and unfulfilled dreams … This is the story about my Journey with Nikhil (although we are just supporting actors in the star cast dominated by 'bloozle' and market realities) … the Journey which began way back in 2004 and gradually got the name and shape of 'bloozle' … the journey which is now in a paused frozen phase waiting for the stimuli of funding from some VC who can share the vision which we have … the journey of 5 years of thinking, brainstorming, evaluating, refining, dreaming, arguing, designing, changing, letting go … This story is to remind us of the thought, effort, money and passion invested in bloozle in the past 5 years ... to remind us of this bright ray of hope it generated which would give us enough 'escape-velocity' to project us o...

A fwd'ed story below. I am posting it on the blog just so that i can read it every now and then ... as a reminder ..   -------------------------------   Vivek Pradhan was not a happy man. Even the plush comfort of the air-conditioned compartment of the Shatabdi express could not cool his frayed nerves. He was the Project Manager and still not entitled to air travel. It was not the prestige he sought, he had tried to reason with the admin person, it was the savings in time. As PM, he had so many things to do. He opened his case and took out the laptop, determined to put the time to some good use.   Are you from the software industry sir," the man beside him was staring appreciatively at the laptop.   Vivek glanced briefly and mumbled in affirmation, handling the laptop now with exaggerated care and importance as if it were an expensive car.   "You people have brought so much advancement to the country sir. Today everything is getting computerized. "   ...

Well well...   Finished reading "Tell Me Your Dreams" by Sidney Sheldon ... it was a receomendation by my best friend and i enjoyed it ...   Godfather by Puzo is still in progress ... the print is small and i am reading it for loke 10 minutes a day so the progress is slow ...   Nice to be reading 'regularly' again ... i missed it much in past few years when my reading had gone down significantly ...   Purchased 2 more books from a bookstore recently ... they are up next ...

Character 1 – You know I … Character 2 – Yeah … I know … You never want to hurt anybody … (And after a short pause ... adds … ) But you do !   Nothing more said. C2 walks past C1. Eyes wet, almost about to overflow. An intensely emotional scene going on in one Hollywood movie "Alphie"   And I feel the heart wrenching pain inside … as I realize ... I am just like 'Character 1' of the scene !   I don't want to … but I end up doing exactly that ...  

  In his widely accaliamed article, `Behind the Curtain of TV Voyeurism, journalist and author Neal Gabler suggests that at the core of this 'entertainment' is conflict -- whether internal or external -- in the protagonist. If this is not intrinsic to the script or the format, it is provoked because otherwise the show cannot hold viewer interest. This is not so much a function of effective programming as of human nature. The above lines picked up from an article by Ayaz Memon in DNA. You can read the whole article, titled "Is reality TV all that bad?" here Whether it is Rakhi ka Swayamvar or Iss Jungle se Mujhe Bachao or the ones like Big Boss or all those Singing talent shows ... bring in conflict and you have a money spinner !