Dear Diary....

Usually my diary would begin with "Dear Diary".... and I remember that I had managed to attach to each page something which belonged to that day. The result was that my diary was bulging at the spine with chits of paper stapled (the chits which had been passing around during class hours that day) , or little ribbons (our hastily made friendship bands) peeping out with their tassels, some bus tickets (all the kolkata buses from prince anwar shah mini to 234s which were part of my to and fro bus routes)......
I knew a blog would/could never take the place of those childhood fantasies.
Amazingly I had built up all these resistances (inherent tendency)...to ever writing a blog.......
firstly, it is so mechanical like everything associated with the computer (this coming from a software engineer)...
secondly it doesn't have the charm of the hand-written words in my chinese-fountain-pen violet ink..
thirdly it may and does cease to be a private emotion repository, unlike the lock and key you can have on your diary.
But all in all, its new, its exciting and no .. i am not marketing it :)...........its almost like a captain's log book, so if its "All Ahoy!!" that I hear...lets start because I am dying to write about me .....

Hyderabad is where I am currently located at but only for exactly three more days....I leave for calcutta (and no, I am not resisting using kolkata) on saturday..... I guess forever.
Senti ? Yes very ... and if you were to ask right now , I would probably make you sit and listen to the why and wherefore. And since I have all this space and time and my own blog......I think I am going to do just that.
I reached Hyderabad on 25th May, utterly resistant (this R word keeps dominating somehow) ...bcoz my company had preponed the joining date. I had only had a week at home after college, and worst I had to have my college friends scattered all over the country ........I probably was(am) stupid but I had these three postulates in my mind, I don't like the company (bcoz they preponed the joining), you cannot make friends in a professional place and I will stay here only as long as required.
I don't think it was a freak of nature.... but I do believe god was having fun putting in surprises in my life ....so that none of the above postulates held true......except probably the last one.
I joined Oracle on 27th May, and later in July got a beautiful apartment in Kavuri hills and shifted in with Vishnupriya (henceforth will call her vishnu). My room had a beautiful view of hi-tech city and all the cyber pearl, cyber-towers, vanenburg it park kanbay software company buildings.....and it was a dream to go to sleep in, with the windows open on a night of the twinkling never-sleeping lights of hi-tech city.
My team in Oracle was HRMS-PQP, PQP = public sector payroll. (don't ask me about the q...none of us could figure out how it appeared). My project lead was Chandra and my manager was later assigned as Ram Razdan (in UK). My idc team (India Dev Center) then was Chandra, Ghattu, Rajesh, Dwarkesh, Vibhor, Tulasi, Ramesh, Vinayak and Sadag. By august end it also included, Deependra, Saurabh, Nanda, Anirban, Anshuman and Krishna (by January). But by Feb end, Vinayak and Dwarkesh had left the team. Chandra, Vibhor, myself and Rajesh (in that order) would be leaving my june end. So from 9... to 16...to 10...... was how the count went.

The first time I saw the Cyber Gateway building I hated it. It was so ...mechanical, so lifeless. It looked like a spaceship or a giant cockroach with sprouted legs. (Later this feature was what made it stand out for everybody and I can recall quite a few friends who were bowled over by this L&T brainstorm.) Needless to say, I hated the city with more vigour (if that is correct english) and I was more decided on holding out......(as if it ever tried to empower me).
The first thing I liked about the city was...... Charminar. Yes, people do tell me that charminar is something you visit so that you don't have to tell people at home that you were in Hyderabad and did not see charminar...but for me it ceased to be just four pillars in the middle of a road.
I went there with my dad during the first week of my stay. It was dusk..... fading into night and charminar was slowly being illuminated by green lights. Standing there was the first time, I actually smiled at Hyderabad ... smiled at the thought that I was actually standing on the same ground where nawabs would have trodden centuries ago... and to say the least :) I felt royal . That is how hyderabad tricks you...it manages to take you into its fold so unassumingly and so suddenly that you fall in love with it. And it is strange to think about it now ... that I standing there could have felt at one with royalties of the past ... what with all the autos, pedlars, rickshaws, pedestrians streaming all around me......but it felt like only me and charminar and a great city in between...:)

They say morning shows the day... then I should have known that life in hyderabad would be one great party. Ayan was my tour-guide for the better part of the first three months before he left for his phd in University of Maryland. The amount of book discussions, feasting on the best foods (chinese from "I forgot the name" place in paradise).. trooping through salarjung museum and watching Troy in Sangeet...made me realise I had tried everything in three months.
I was wrong.
There were seven BTech rectians ( we are the first proud batch of btechs from nit trichy though we have not got our degree certficates yet) who joined Oracle together on 27th may. Chidambaram, Divakar, Bushan, Kulasekharan and me (cse), Vishnu (ece) and Giridhar (eee). Weekends found us at Olive Gardens (to celebrate a birthday and loot the birthday boy/girl) or at Golconda and the tombs (sight-seeing) or at imax ... watching movies. We grew close fast ..through rickety auto drives, melting moment ice-creams constant bickerings between chidu and me, perennial boys vs girls fights, and golconda stories and sound and light shows. Then there came office pressure, the guys got a house much closer to office ...whether for this or otherwise the getting togethers decreased. We got occupied in our own lives........Then came Jan, Giri left. Came May and Kula left, came June, Diva and I are leaving.
Soon after Ayan left, Shobana and Shalini were transferred from Pune Kanbay to Hyderabad. Suparna got posted in CSC here. Resmi and Lakshmi joined Infosys in Hyderabad for training. And life again became college... work the week out and party the weekend out. We became gold customers at imax, lumbini park and ntr gardens...we had been there, done that, exhausted smoothies in Ohris', tried out chocolate delights :) ........
and then suparna left for philips in bangalore, resmi got a great project (finacle) in bangalore. Hyderabad started becoming empty.
My office was...... working in pl/sql, understand the fte module for new enhancements, design docs , word documents.... it was something you got over with and got home and never carried along home. It just happened that Saurabh, Anshuman, Nanda, Deepu and me started going for lunch together to the sixth floor cafeteria.
I don't know what it was that broke the ice.... probably everyone of us started racking our brains on solving puzzles posed by Anshuman. And before we knew it , there were heated discussions, movie reviews and career forums ...all on a very small lunch table which could barely seat the five of us. Then came Saurabh's birthday 19th december, and he being the guy who would be the target of most of our jokes and teasers... we all demanded a treat from him. That was how on his birthday we landed up at his house with a cake and a big card ... ended up feasting on dhokla, more cakes and pastries, home-made didi-cooked gajar kaa halwa and chops ..... from there we went to imax to catch the movie "The Incredibles". It was an animation picture but we enjoyed it to the core....
That was the beginning ...
Next came Deepu and Nanda, both with birthdays coinciding with India becoming a republic. We didn't meet up that day but the weekend found us in Angeethi's with its out of the world dhaba ambience. Chicken, and more chicken and prawns , and I remember being stuck on lassi or halwa for dessert until I finally decided on lassi. And it was the thickest I had had in a long time.
Anshuman's birthday ....8th March....I joined the rest of the team after they had watched Aviator (I had already seen it and would not have been able to sit thru another 3 hours of it). By my suggestion and sadly anshuman's fate, we ended up having a lavish dinner at ITC kakatiya sheraton. It left us a lot heavier(by kgs) and anshuman's purse a lot lighter (by INR) at the end. But yes the unforgettable memories in Hyderabad got pages added to it.
And oh yes, by then we were already the top coder team.

I'll talk about my birthday in a later post... the itinery for the treat being runway9 and dhola re dhani. Shalu, Lakshmi and Vishnu were also there ... and go-karting was heaven in speed :)...............
Have not introduced someone important yet .....Vishnu was my room-mate. I had just known her in college as the pretty girl with beautiful green eyes who tops her dept. She was the one with always a lot of work in office and I would marvel at the way she would handle both ...the pressure at work and our fun at outings. We together frequented a lot of non-frequented places....we discovered Odyssey. She introduced me to Round-the-corner which again became a favourite, and Explorers......Among chat sessions in the night , watching movies together, having fun eating non-veg (sundays to wednesdays were the days she would eat non-veg) and cooking....she was the one who taught me cooking .....(and by her words I cook great sambar) and also the reason why I only know to cook south indian dishes (being an east indian), ganging up on injustices and fights with other room-mate ....I discovered a cool room-mate and a great friend. (this parah is not because she is going to read this up later but also because it deserved a place here...... :) vishnu, i had to put this note in). ...
and all this and more comes to an end. Looking back I can see why I fell in love with the place... friends, fun and more fun ......getting to know people and learning from them...new friendships and relations... great work culture (though I would have enjoyed working on things more challenging)......waiting for the last day of the month to see bank balances get creditted with your salary.... becoming independent....saving and spending and saving ..long winding road drives ... up and down banjara hills ....stormy nights with doors and windows nearly blown off their hinges... unbearble temperatures and sleepless nights without coolers......a city of royal blood ......

......and it becomes hard to say goodbye!!