Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head

I guess I must be growing up. Lately I have started reading books which otherwise I used to just flip through quickly and put back on the shelf.

During my last visit to Crossword, I decided to pick up “The God of Small Things”. I have read its first few pages in the past and also some pages from in between. I have always admired the narrative for being different from others, but have never found the courage to read it completely. But now I have decided to do it. In the process, I spent a part of my budgeted outlay for books for September even before the beginning of the month. I then moved on to the shelf that had titles from Salman Rushdie. I was considering if I should pick one of the titles from Rushdie too, when I saw a few titles from Harlod Robbins in the shelf just above Rushdie’s. And that reminded me about adolescence and growing up. The age when Harold Robbins and Alberto Moravia were hidden away behind the boring Math and Physics books, only to be read after dinner when Ma thought I was asleep.

Nostalgia is a funny feeling. So I chucked Rushdie and picked up a Harold Robbins.

Yesterday I realized I have changed from a slightly extraverted personality to a introverted personality and I am as much thinking now as I was feeling earlier. Yes, I am referring to Myers-Briggs Type Indicators.

On Friday about ten of us, me and my colleagues, gathered at a nice hotel near the Powai lake to figure out what kinda personality we were and then get some tips on how to handle different types of personalities in the organization, up, down and across. Sounds slightly manipulative? Should not. Success, among other things, depends on how well you understand the people who have a stake in your success and how you deal with them. The day long session was fun and the food was even better. Amitabh, who was also attending the session, has something in common with me. He tells a restaurant from the Daal they prepare. The Daal was good and so we agreed that the food was great. By the way, I also extend the Daal test to the lady of the house. If the Daal is good, the lady has to be good. In one of the ice-breakers, Meenakshi, the facilitator, listed down our years of experience at managing and summed them up to conclude that among us we had close to 110 years of management experience. With just 2.5 years against my name, it felt like a kid compared to some others who had 30 years to flaunt. But then I did not count the years I spent mismanaging :-)

At the end of the test I scored equal on the thinking and the feeling scale. So I was placed in two boxes, INFP and INTP. And I was left to decide if I would think of myself as a feeling person or would feel that I was the thinking type. Pun apart, the T and the F in MBTI are a little more than what they seem. But I have always been inclined to think of myself as a feeling type.

So finally I am INFP.

Our parliamentarians gave themselves a raise this week and the President giving his assent to the Office Of Profit bill was a double whammy. I spent my evenings this week in front of the idiot box, fretting over the developments and thinking of the guy whose job offer I had decided to revoke after I learnt that he had lied about his professional experience. Vinod, a colleague of mine and managing another team, had also once decided to ask a team member to leave after he learnt that she had lied about her work experience. Maybe integrity was never a prerequisite for some of the most responsible jobs in the nation.

I was thinking of investing in a good music system over the weekend as TV was no longer very entertaining. And then all major channels flashed this piece about the water near the Mahim beach turning sweet. Now that was entertaining. Thousands gathered on the Mahim beach to fill containers of sweet water from parts of the sea which are known to accept this city's refuse. Theory of the divine had gone the rounds in the city while I was working on the theory of the darling. Yes, I have recently managed to befriend a sweet lady who is capable of having this effect on the sea. But I am not sure if she was wandering by the beach lately !

The divine or the darling? Does it really matter? Did Shah Baba, the mystic to whom this miracle is attributed, or any Sufi saint ever differentiate between the two?

I would like to write more about 'Brown n Brown', the salon I mentioned in the previous post.

First week of this month was a milestone for the lady who runs the place and her employees. They moved from a small shop that could seat four to a chic salon crafted from four shops in a row. The new salon can seat more than 11 customers at a time. And I suspect it is the largest in Hiranandani Gardens. The pride on their faces betrayed their sense of achievement. Their enthusiasm was arguably more infectious than that of employee owners collecting their dollar bonus on the occasion of reaching the billion dollar revenue milestone.

Being an employee owner myself, having had colleagues who stayed in their shitty jobs only till their stock options vested and having talked to prospective bosses who claimed that their firm was more than 60 percent owned by the employees, I have always wondered if ownership was a vital ingredient in the potion of employee satisfaction!

Seems Ms. Suraiya Brown has the answer !

This Friday I walked into the salon opposite my apartments to get my whiskers shaved. It becomes a pain to do it myself whenever I skip the routine for a couple of days.

Perched there on one of the chairs was a tot getting his hair done in some funky style of the 80s. Mushroom cut looks good on tots, I must admit. And supervising the entire operation was mom dearest. She was trying to instruct the stylist at times, but the trickiest part of her job was to get junior to behave and sit steady. And her tools?

Mom : Now be a good boy, will you?

Junior : But Ma, I wanted to tell you something...

Mom : Later, not now.

[Junior turns towards my chair, seems he was more interested in a shave !]

Mom : Be a good boy and I will buy you a new set of crayons after you get your haircut.

[A couple of minutes later, the tot turns to look at me again. I must admit, I have always been a big hit with the kids, esp. after a shave !]

Mom : Bad boy. Can you not sit steady for a few minutes? If you move now, uncle is going to cut your ears off !

Uncle (the stylist, not me) was visibly amused with the new item on his job description and I was about to make a move as I was done with the shave. The kid was not too happy with the discipline expected of him. Only if someone would tell him that things are not going to change much as he grows. There will be good boys and bad boys, always. And there will always be crayons for the good boys. And there will always be uncles waiting to chop his ears off if he decides to be a bad boy.

The movie was too good and "kathor". But that is how it has to be when you deal with the kind of emotions that The Bard has packed in Othello !

Strange that Langda was killed by his wife unlike in the original play where Iago kills Emilia. But overall it was great performance from Saif, Kareena and Ajay in that order. What made this movie special was its music and lyrics. Only Gulzar could have done such a wonderful job.

bin baadal barsaaye saawan naina baanwara kar denge
naina thag lenge

We have booked ourselves seats on an evening show of Omkara for this weekend, me and a few colleagues. I will be stepping into a movie hall for a Hindi movie after a longish break. The last I did that in early 2001, very reluctantly and only to get up and leave midway through the movie.

I am told by different people that this adaptation of Othello is good. And I personally belive that both Saif and Ajay have come a long way from the days of "Ole Ole Ole" and "Laal laal hothon pe..."

Let me go and find out for myself how much justice has this Bhardwaj guy done to The Bard and The Moor of Venice.