Q. What do I have in common with a Superhero? Ans. We get to do things only in the last minute. ;) As soon as I called up Kate’s dad, John, that I would be arriving at a certain time, the hands of my watch were on steroids. Counting out everything else, I had planned a quick packing in the last minute. Beep! Big Mistake. It was time for Murphy, not Santa to peek into my home at this Christmas Eve. I opened my apartment to find pitch darkness. Yes, we had forgotten to recharge our electricity. I knew I had to pack quickly as I was running out of time and luck. My bag nearly exploded with my (well, that’s what I thought) essential belongings.

I’m blazing into the Euston Station as my predetermined train mercilessly chugs away. Ah! I’m so relaxed. All I have to do now is to inform them that I’m late. I call up Kate’s Mom, Penny, to tell her that and also give a rough description of myself. She kindly accepted my apologies and said Kate might be as well do a bit more shopping meanwhile. As I sit in my first long distance train (in UK), I notice it looks slightly more homely than the underground (local) trains. I guess it must be due to the general Christmas attire and heavy bags overflowing with cakes and presents of my co-passengers. Fifty minutes later at Milton Keynes station, Kate and John were right at the entrance. John while driving through the countryside gave me an impressive historical background of the area. I remember wondering that he must be wonderfully well read. My doubts were soon to be confirmed.

Once home, I met Penny, Kate’s younger sister, Rebecca and her cousin Shelly. I also met Doe and Ben, their mom’s elderly relatives, whom they affectionately call Granny and Grandpa. Their immense warmth of reception put me at ease. Now with my adrenalin at normal levels, I proceeded to join the family in the Christmas preparations. I joined in the tradition of decorating holly leaves (the ones I remember seeing only in Christmas cards) all over the interiors. My height came in handy here (I knew it would, some day). It’s a bit bristly but beautiful especially with cherries.

As I look around I realize that I had underestimated John, finding shelves of books neatly stacked to their capacities in almost every room. Soon enough the other members of the household started coyly appearing and nearly taking away my breath. We are talking about the light brown tomcat, Oliver and his dark female counterpart, Buttons. These cats had a personality of their own. They would ignore a stranger like me and yet love to be cuddled by family members.

Its dinnertime and a wonderful fish-in-vegetable delicacy is wafting its aroma in the air. Like most cusines. English cusine is quite suitable for the cold weather and quite healthy too. Jane, Kate’s aunt, joined us soon after. Professionally a psychologist, she visits India frequently. After a fair bit of chitchat, I proceeded to sleep. Tomorrow definitely looks promising!

Friday, our project manager sent a congratulatory mail describing everyone in our project to very Important ™ people. I suggested the subject line, it was ‘We Made it Happen!’ It will be an ego-boosting exercise to describe what was written about others or myself and hence I shall resist the temptation. It led me to think a few things about projects done using offshoring. I shall return to the topic a bit later.

Srini, one of the key members in our project was leaving, so we thought we would plan a night out and see ‘Swades’. In short, it is one Hindi movie I would be proud of showing off to the rest of the world. Every scene shines through with an ‘Ashutosh Gowariker’’ touch that those who watch Lagaan would be able to relate to. Unlike being an idealistic story about an NRI’s nostalgia, it brought out several complex and interconnected issues connected with it. Yet it had a simple and down to earth message. Shah Rukh Khan has been, thankfully, considerably mellowed down for this role and the lead actress Gayatri Joshi delivers a tad stoic yet commendable performance. It doesn’t end there. Every single person in the cast gives you a thoroughly impressive performance.

One cannot help but compare Swades to the social awareness movies of the past. But there is a silent, subtle and yet moving characteristic of the movie that makes it contemporary. The harsh Indian landscape never looked more beautiful when captured by the wide angled lenses of Mahesh Aney. It sometimes reminded you of the Vande Mataram videos by Bharatbala productions commemorating 50 years of independence. The shallow depth of focus in the living room scenes was very dramatic but annoying as well. A R Rehman’s music complements the film very well and is an aural treat.

Certain scenes and dialogues are very quite engaging and memorable. While certain others tend to be more like a sermon. Well, in conclusion, the movie does make its point. Unfortunately, it doesn’t climax in the epic proportions as Lagaan does, but it is a different movie isn’t it?

I’ve shifted to a new apartment in Ilford. The owner, Manjeet, is an interesting guy. He is a lawyer with a Punjabi accent peppered with British intonations. Today I will give a long and hard look to the empty kitchen stove because we have to know each other rather well in the future. This is how I intend to start my tryst with cooking. I expect it to look burnt, tattered and spilt over in the future but now its all clean and shiny. Ilford has a tremendous influx of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent. As a result rows and rows of shops selling Indian merchandise. This comes as a mixed blessing, the downside being a lot of cultural inbreeded, which I strongly despise.

Ok time to talk about Offshoring. Everywhere one comes across this is new four-letter word that has about 6 extra letters. Now that I’ve seen an entire project end-to-end, I feel it’s a good time to sit down and analyse. Offshoring is like a reality show based pop band having a lot of talented people but doing mediocre stuff and making a big hit out of it. Offshoring is like a radio DJ who has a peppy and colourful audio personality but might be a complete shocker in appearance. But seriously, offshoring a trade-off between actual work and constant communication. I feel at the end of the day, software development is not like manufacturing. You cannot clearly delineate roles or exactly estimate processes. Offshoring needs to come out of its manufacturing world past in to this intellectual domain. Time has come that we (as in, Indian software industry as a whole) consider improving the offshoring techniques and infrastructure rather than assuming that all is well and run after the next big thing. We cannot afford to loose what has come to become our USP.

Adapting to Western lifestyle is something I’m having to do consciously these days. From using the toilets to eating food the so-called unnatural way of doing such simple chores is surprising. On the one hand London is a multicultural city with almost everyone continuing to follow their customs and wear their ethnic attire. I’m sure it hardly stands out anymore to see an Sardarji or an Afro-American. But there is somewhat a default environment around you which you must remould to make your own. For eg: Indian food here is slightly expensive than fast food. Surprisingly though the premium is not quite high. In other instances it is a minor irritant, like the UK keyboard which seems to have mixed up the punctuations and other symbols horribly. Having been used to the US keyboard, this takes a lot of unlearning. The office vending machines are a treat (rather feast). From the basic tea/coffee in a variety of flavours, you get to have different juices and flavoured milk for free. Commercial vending machines are omnipresent and multipurpose. There seems to be one for newspapers, chocolates, chips, train tickets, parking tickets, condoms and what have you. Hardly surprising as the basic wages are quite high here. I’ve also noticed that the weather here is very erratic. It was the coldest weather (2-3 degrees) in several months when I landed here this Sunday. But the temperatures are steadily dipping and it sometimes drizzles. The cloud cover is present throughout and even noontime looks like a typical evening. Vapour clouds come out sometimes as you breathe. I need to wear four layers of clothing everyday. Talking about clothing, an average Englishman wears a choice of colours - ranging from black to white :). There are occasions while in the train when I would be the only person wearing a jacket with a faint hint of blue while everyone else is wearing black. It must a reflection of the weather I presume, but its quite opposite in India. For eg: people from Rajasthan desert wear colourful clothes and vice versa in vividly coloured Kerala. There are good discussions which happen in routine meetings in the office. Perhaps my timing was good (we are now in Knowledge Transfer stage), I get to learn a lot everyday. Its amazing that such a complicated software solution becomes clearer and clearer with each passing day. Now I appreciate it much better. Television channels over here seem to be fairly well regulated. Adult programmes appear only after ten and only in certain channels. Contrast this to the present Indian channels wherein potentially suggestive ads or movie scenes could be spotted in any channel. The news is very localized and from the UK point of view. Hence I have to depend on websites. Interestingly there is a free tabloid newspaper in the underground railways i.e. the Tube. It is reasonably good.

Most Amazing Discovery of the day is Arun is a district in UK! Sounds Interesting ;)

There seems to be quite a few Indian bloggers abroad on ecelectic collection of topics from Bhopal to Indiatimes or egocentric.

“I’m sprouting wings”, that’s how I described my onsite opportunity to UK to my friends in my mail yesterday. There were a hundred forms to fill, a million tiny things to buy (gloves?) and a gazillion things to remember before I could say “I’m done!”. When nearly (95%) of my 6 page checklist was crossed off that I wore my jacket and boarded my taxi.

The taxi driver was a spiritual seeker in disguise. When our discussion meandered into yoga, he knew even the Sanskrit terms for every chakra in the body (there are seven for those who don’t know). No amount of information provided by the ‘Travel Kit' prepared me for the labyrinth called the Airport. Of course the old trick of “Uncle, uncle can you tell me…” works. But the simplicity of the answer dumbs you down at each attempt.

It’s actually simple. You reach the airport and wait for Check in. Check in is necessary for the non-cabin luggage (usu. 2 pieces) but starts 3 hours before departure (a term not very confusing till you meet its alter-ego ‘Arrival'!) Check in is the first time you would see your luggage being X-ray screened. Then a tag is bound around each piece. Then you move towards your airline’s boarding counter. A female wearing heavy makeup (ok a PYT) gives you a plastic card called boarding pass and a boarding pass by the Indian govt. at this point your luggage is weighted and your check-in luggage crawls out of your view into a cave curtained by leather strips.

Whew! No more luggages to trolley around. The next counter you’ll see is the immigration. Produce your Work Permit, Boarding Pass & Passport. Now begins your long wait for the security check because it’s done only half an hour from departure. Don’t fret, what I did was use up all my remaining coins (you don’t need them anymore) in the Local call and STD booths. Securities check does a body scan and cabin luggage scan. I realized quite late that you cannot carry scissors or knifes in your cabin luggage. Sadly, I surrendered two shaving scissors at this stage. Finally you get to board the aircraft.

My co-passenger was another guy from Infy called Sameer. The Swiss airhostesses are as expected - stunners. I greeted one of them in German, which really struck a cord. Next time she conversed in German and with a bit of struggle I replied. The window seat afforded a absolutely stunning aerial view of Bombay. Trust me with all those yellow streetlights and buildings at night, Bombay looks scintillating. I was quite impressed by the in-flight entertainment system, and finally got to see the flick “Cat Woman”. It was not very impressive or gripping. But somehow I like the anime-like qualities in such movies and hence enjoy them. As a result, I slept very little.

It has been a long, long time since I coded anything in C++. It was bound to happen, I kept telling myself. For one I was building Agony, a multiplayer game with 3D graphics. Like the slog overs in a cricket match, my project was also crawling. So today morning when my fingers started itching, I knew that time is ripe for… Agony. Here are the (low-coloured) screenshots for your amusement:

An army of stationary bots with sphere-like weapon (aka a pointed triangle ;)) [1 hrs]

Bots are scattered, but turning and moving! [3 hrs]

The hero has arrived! Arrow keys work [5 hrs]

Well, incase you would like to play this incomplete game you can download it from this link

Agony.zip [137 Kb] (link disabled)

Regarding life, I’m moving out of my guest house tomorrow. It has been 3 months so far. The longest stint in any transfer I’ve ever had in any place. A huge vaccum is being felt. A window of this screen is the most special place in my world, now. I see few words of taunts or liberating rants which my near and dear have to tell me in a box within this 14 inch frame.

No I’m not missing home, but something more. I need to feel achievement pulsing in my blood stream again. I guess I’m addicted to it. :(