Words are Weariness

. ......................But its strange; As oftentimes to win us to our harm. The Instruments of Darkness tell us truth; Win us with honest trifles, to betray's In deepest consequence.-- --Banquo in 'Macbeth'. There is some turbulence in India's IT sector. The management of all the giant IT companies are in an unenviable position of having to make their employees face the facts. If you are discerning, you can read the tea leaves. One big IT Company did announce to the media that it is targeting about 25000 associates and that it will be less than 10% of its overall strength. Since there is no advantage in removing juniors who , as new entrants into the work force, still provide the edge in labour arbitrage, this 25000 will have to come from middle to senior levels. If seen in this light, the reduction is not 10%; it may as well be 25% to 30%! However, it is another matter that the management has now retracted much of what it said ...

Parallelism We are coming with more checks, more fines, more often                 __ Tagline of Yarra Trams’ (Melbourne) drive against ticket-less travel. Is this catchy l tag line is grammatically wrong ?  Hard to believe.  Grammarians say  it is parallelism ;  you should not mix adjectives and nouns  in a sequence.  Faulty parallelism is when the different elements, though grammatically correct by themselves, do not mesh properly in one sentence. While some parallelism is barely noticeable, others can be quite jarring.  Examples of fault parallelism could be:           Including gerunds and infinitives in a list           Adjectives and nouns in a list           Changing from passive voice to active voice or vice versa .           Changing from second pers...

My Organization has a mentor-ship program. Senior consultants are encouraged to take under their wings one or two juniors and engage them in conversation about what they look for in their career and how they see themselves in the organization in the next few years.   I take to this activity enthusiastically.  Like the proverbial 7-year itch, many young people working in IT services, start worrying about where their career is headed after the initial euphoria of landing on the job is over. It happens anywhere during the first 3 to 7 years. Some are assailed by self-doubt while some others feel let down after having cultivated too high an expectation about what they could achieve.  Some are insecure that they are working on Technology platforms that are outdated and some others simply do not fancy themselves in a technical role and yearn for roles as Analysts and rue their lack of ‘domain experience’ that it entails. Almost invariably everybody yearns fo...

How could you call a house without a chair a home? So it struck all of us in the house the same time. This issue was immediately placed on the agenda for family discussion. Just the day before we had a family friend visiting us. He was a sub-judge and as our luck would he have it, he came not dressed in Veshti and Shirt but fully suited and booted. All we had in our house was a three-legged stool, which was itself just three-fourth of a foot high. Our grandmother used to sit on it when she whipped curd. Since our grandmother was a little 'broad at the bottom' our grandfather had asked the carpenter to make it a little broader than usual. For want of any alternative we had requested his good self to take his seat on this three-legged affair. The sub-judge himself was a little thick-set; that caused him to place one hand on the edge of the stool before setting himself down on it . The problem with the stool was that if the weight fell on it not in line with...

Exora  Asokamitran recently passed away. He chose writing for a living and suffered the economic consequences of it.  Have you seen the Exora flower ?  When I was young , we had an Exora plant ( or bush ?)  near the steps at the front of the house.  If you pluck a few flowers with their long stems in tact from a bunch and reverse them and put the stems in the mouth and gently suck them by pressing your lip to the palate, you will get a fleeting taste of sweetness, of its nectar. .  Asokamitran handles subjects the same way.  His approach to the subject and writing style is as gentle as  the butterfly settling on a flower and the effect on the reader is just as subtle.  Not for him the the heavy handed stuff, not for him the harangue  Nobody captured  the ordinariness of life  like him. Nobody understood the mental make up of middle-lower middle class urban dweller like him.  He saw life as a progression of ...

CRIKEY “England and United States are two countries separated by the same language”, this wisecrack is credited to George Bernard Shaw. Now with English as the language of Global business, IT, Science  & Technology , Air Traffic Control and many other things where people across countries have to collaborate to deliver , more countries are separated by the same English than ever before! I clearly remember my time as an offshore Lead  for a support project for a client based in USA. We used to have our routine weekly status updates over the phone with the client’s Project Manager on site. Even if his American drawl was tolerable, he always had me scratching my head with his slang. One favorite exclamation of his  used to be “it’s a curved ball !”.  Exasperated, I called up an Indian in his team to ask what this darned  ‘curved ball’ was.  I was told that this was akin to our “googly” or the “wrong’ un” and is drawn from baseball lingo!!. Hand...

My niece wanted me to write/translate a story for her 4-year old daughter; the little one whose voracious appetite for reading and stories should be daunting for her mother. Immediately I remembered one of the Russian tales of Arkady Gaidar whose story of ‘Chuck and Geck’ I had read some 40+ years back in Tamil. Those days, the soviet communist propaganda was allowed free reign in India under the Indo-Soviet co-operation, Our CPI cadres were running a publishing house ( I think the name was NCBH)   where they printed translations of Russian publications from Progress Publishers or Mir Publishers, Moscow.   While a good deal of them were pure propaganda with titles like “How Socialism settled the question of sub-nationalism in USSR” ( the fact was that they only exacerbated and never settled them)   or “Scientific Socialism – Empirical criticism” , there were also excellent children’s literature in the form of folk tales and songs all rendered in highly readable Tamil. ...