My time with Mumbai Underworld

I have been playing ibibo’s social game Mumbai Underworld for a month now, and it is very addictive. I didn’t start playing this game by choice. One day, I noticed Siddharth Sethi, a colleague of mine, leave this status update: “I own a dance bar, 3 strippers (good earners all) and 3 rifles. Finally life’s starting to look good!” This made me think. “I need to get a good life…I need to be in Mumbai Underworld,” I told myself before starting to play the game. (Play the game here)

Mumbai Underworld is after all only a game. But well before that –when I was young and could jump over walls quick – I was actually a Mumbai Underworld figure. I wouldn’t go to the extent of saying what Amitabh Bachchan said in the Hindi movie Hum, “Mera aur eak naam hai…Tiger!”, but let me tell you that I was once called a ‘Cat’. Back then I was a 24-year-old surviving the streets of Mumbai. Don ishtyle.

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And the rainy season begins

If you are living in Delhi or Gurgaon, my apologies….rain was never meant for you. If you live elsewhere in the country, chances are you have seen rain and understand what it is. Here is an article on the rainy season.

I don’t remember when I first saw rain. Since I don’t remember, why don’t we make up the story. The year was 1977 and I was a 2-year-old lad fed on a high dose of Farex and tea in a Mestin (see pic of the Indian Army issue of Mestin). After a heavy lunch I was relaxing my head on a pillow when there was commotion in the house. “Stupid family!” I muttered under my breath and looked up. My mother was running to pick up the clothes drying outside and my father was running towards me. He was coming too fast for me – I just closed my eyes and said my last prayers. Next minute, I was sitting on his shoulders and he was running outside. (Did you know Aftab Shivdasani was a Farex model when he was just 14 months old. Obviously, he didn’t feature in the Farex containers that I emptied. He was born 3 years after I came into this World)

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Anatomy of a train journey

It isn’t without reason that Railways has a separate budget. No, it isn’t because Mamta Banerjee wanted to have her own purse. It is because Railways is an integral part of the Indian psyche, not to mention the amount of money spent on its daily up keep and the number of passengers it helps move every day.

I have traveled in trains from 1976, when as a chubby one-year old we shifted from Jamshedpur to Jhallandar (father being in the Indian Army), to my recent trip to Kerala which happened like…yesterday. In the earlier days, we used to travel for four days in steam engines, all the while covered in soot, to reach our destination. We would take bath mid-way through our journey (sometimes a quick bath in the second class waiting rooms & sometimes a shaky bath in the train’s washroom) but the pleasure lasted only a few hours for we would be covered in soot again. Being a dark South Indian family, this didn’t affect us much….but I shudder to think of the mental anguish the fair North Indian families had to undergo in such trains. Back in those days it wasn’t hard to spot North Indian families with a bit of sense of humor, ask the kids traveling with them racist questions like: “What? Now, you have become a South Indian?” More often than not, the kid would cry himself to sleep.
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Conversations by Dr Manmohan Singh, Prime Minister of India

Dr Manmohan Singh and I go a long way. If Dr Manmohan Singh hadn’t been named Asia’s best Finance Minister in 1993 (wasn’t it that year?), I wouldn’t have wanted to become a Finance Minister and joined BA Economics at The American College, Madurai. Thanks to him, I had joined the only course in the college which the pretty girls hated. I will never forgive Dr Manmohan Singh for what he did to me – my experience studying BA Economics was so bad that that till date it remains my only exposure to college. By the time I was out (in 1998 A.D.) I had started believing in self-education.

In this post, I try and imagine the various SMS conversations that Dr Manmohan Singh would be having with his friends & colleagues. If you haven’t guessed it yet, this is my revenge on India’s Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh for stealing my childhood away from me.

Here is a SMS conversation that happened between Dr Manmohan Singh and the Head of Black Cats Security the moment Dr Manmohan Singh assumed office and moved into his official 7, Race Course Road residence…..

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Survival tips – both for employee & employer

I know this post is a little late. Scott Adams has been telling people how to survive at their jobs via Dilbert for the last 20 years. I don’t even have 20 years of work experience, leave alone insights that he delivers every day via 2000+ newspapers all over the World. Now, that the disclaimer is over, let me proceed with the most definitive Job survival guide on Mother Earth. My apologies dear Scott Adams. Or should I ask, “Adams, who”?

Before we start the article, let me implement one of my job survival tips – while giving controversial opinions, always start with the line: “These are my personal opinions, and in no way reflect that of my employer.” So here goes: “These are my personal opinions, and in no way reflect that of my employer.”

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Our daughter might marry the ice cream man

Our daughter Rhea has been steadily growing. And why not? She eats as many rotis as her 34 year old father. Though she keeps referring to her strength by saying “I am a strong girl” and her muscles by saying “See my muscles”….we feel she is also developing mentally – a trait rarely seen amongst the elders in our family. She is developing likes & dislikes. So much so, I suspect that if she had a Facebook account she would sue Mark Zuckerberg for NOT having a ‘Dislike’ button on his website.
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