The Infernal Diurnal Journal

 On Feb 10th we are planning to have a party at our house. For this I plan to make it a musical party, wherein I will set up my guitar and speaker combo, along with the microphones outside in my backyard. There are electrical points, but will need to test in advance if they function and how it all comes together. This is a milestone, if it works out. I will perform a little more officially, my goal being to do a few songs solo to kick things off and then do some  "standby" material with Tilo. The total length of the program I would like to say should be 1 hour, but maybe that is too much given it is the first time for me to perform for that long. Also, one does not want to lose the attention of the crowd and become background music, which happens all too often when you get a random crooner with a guitar at a house party.  In recent times, over the last 6 to 8 months , I had the good fortune to see three such acts from close quarters. The first was this act on the 50th bir...

 I awoke early today- which is to say Jan 30th- I am now 4 days behind in my journaling. At some point I need to catch up because it is so easy to fall behind. At first I was a day behind, now am 4 days behind. Tomorrow is the last day of the month. I need to try to catch up by then but it is unlikely given my work load. I have a lot to accomplish. The first half of the day I need to play hooky form work. I need to dispose my 10 year old vehicle, by going for a cash sale at Dubizzle. For this I need to drive the car all the way to Al Qusais- at the Sharjah border, first thing in the morning. They will prepare a contract and start to transfer the money. Hopefully the money will show up in a few days in my account because they will have my car. Somehow I am not very comfortable with this process- whenever there is a used car and a salesman involved yp on what you expect some trickery, some form of betrayal lurking in the shadows. We shall see. Thereafter, if all is sorted, I will nee...

 Back to the Test Cricket fold. A lovely tussle between England and India is ongoing at the moment in Hyderabad. India batted first and got a first innings lead of 175. But England fought back brilliantly in the second innings, against all expectations to set India 230 to get in the second innings to win the game. How Test cricket has completely transformed in the last 30 years is something that should be written about. When I was in school , I could not care about watching a Test match even in parts on TV. It was the age of One Day Cricket- with colored clothes and sleek TV cameras and sharp microphones that caught the occasional parley between players on the ground. It came about in 1985 for me, during the benson and hedges series played down under. Ravi Shastri on the title of " champion of champions" amidst a lot of controversy. He did end up getting a lot of runs in that successful championship, but it had been argued that he played too defensively to deserve it. The rew...

 There are a lot of balls in motion since yesterday. I was trying to figure out how to sell my car for cash, and apply for a golden visa-while trying to recover from a cold. In the morning, we had an invite to Radha's for a Hanuman Pooja- something she does once a year since she is a devotee of Hanuman. My wife is too, and so we were all-in. On reaching, it was a familiar mix of bengali families many of whom we had met at their residence a few times before. Some made a special appearance but clearly were not into the rituals. Again, a very familiar bengali phenomenon. The closest to rituals a bengali gets is during Durga Puja- and this is possibly only because the tedium of  rituals are compensated by the binge partying that goes on for 5 days with lots of excellent food and drink. It has always intrigued my how for away Bengalis were from traditional religion. We always have had a contra-line to religion historically.  Raja Ram Mohun Roy and the Brahmo Samaj was founded ...

 It is really frustrating and deeply annoying, not to mention slightly unsettling psychologically. I have soreness returned to my throat again. I met Atul for lunch at Zuma and not he long drive back to work, I felt it coming on. And it got more prominent, as it usually does, in the next 24 hours. No one, least of all me, wants to read about my cold and soreness. I still have to write about it because it seems to be always on my mind .Because it is always in my body. 2 rounds of antibiotics and I thought I had finally wiped off the bastard clean. But it only lasted a few days and now back. What is it going to take to get rid of it and how I do I maintain equanimity. Do I just get used to this as the new normal. A normal which always has physical discomfort which waxes and wanes but always lingers. And so all the activities that I have take myself to accomplish keep getting derailed. I didn't feel like a swim today so I didn't go. I wasn't feeling like writing my entry eithe...

Last evening I showed up at the CIPS Networking event. As the day progressed, I was slipping into my usual self wherein I started looking for excuses not to go. What was the point? What if I bumped into vendors who are currently bidding on live event and would ask me stuff I couldn't  answer or make me uncomfortable? I didn't know anyone- what if I ended up just hanging around while others interacted with known networks? And the traffic- what to speak of traffic to get to DIFC at 6  or 7 in the evening? So,  at some point I called the wife to seek an opinion. An involuntary response if there ever was one. She said the traffic would be really bad- you should skip and let them know. I was happy that my excuses were validated. But something told me that I needed to fight this. Fight the tendency to avoid and shy away. I recorded Take on Me a few days ago - one of the key phrases that keep repeating,  although more in a romantic context, was " You're shying away!". Th...

 Some headwinds at the workplace- and not just for me. Maybe it is the beginning of the year and a lot of people are out to impress at the get go. Salesmen are booking unrealistic orders that simply cannot be produced in time. We are being blamed for not having enough safety stock, not following up on key purchase orders, not monitoring payment schedules- yada yada yada. Then there is one man who is trying to make tremendous changes in the operations and routing of the manufacturing process. Not all the changes are bad, but the manner in which he is going about it is simply bizarre. No discussion, no planning and simply implementing it from the next day. He is of Egyptian origin, but the way he is going about his job, he might well have been Iraqi. Because it reminds me of the angst that I had experienced a few years ago while in Basra, when the Customs Department, which reported to a particular Import/Export Ministry, kept changing the rules of the game on the fly. We had cargo al...