Hotel Hyderabad

My sarcastic take on recession in food loving Hyderabad.

Hope you like it(i mean the poem, not the food ).

My taste buds were already tingling, as I entered the hall
And spotted the Biryani counter next to the kebab stall
As I checked out the tikkas from the corner of my eye
And took in the fragrance of the spicy chicken fry
The counter next to it served sambhar and curd
I moaned and cursed and  said the F-word
I could hear them chew and I could hear them munch
As my eyes fell upon the board “Unlimited buffet lunch”
I reached into my pockets and estimated my wealth
The single torn currency defined my financial health
I called up the waitress and asked for her advice
“What can i get Madam, for a reasonable price?”
She gave me her “Ahh!! You are an engineer” look
I would rather have had the “Ahh! You are a crook”
She called up the manager and what she said is mystery
They pitied me and must have looked into my credit history
I frowned as she pointed me to the counter labeled  “Curd Rice”
And she said “We are all prisoners here, of our own device”

The smart answer that I did not have… (Continued from an older post)

Well, yeah.. I didn’t get fired after all. And that pretty much sums up the annual appraisal process we have in place here. “But, that’s okay”, I said to myself. “What I have learned here in the last one year is so much more valuable than a credit entry in my bank account which would inevitably be eaten up in no time by the numerous useless debit entries above and below it.”
Now, before I could recount the numerous technical addendum to my CV (recursively defined as something you can create by copy pasting from your senior’s CV and changing minor details – The abbr, in urban myths,is believed to be indicative of the fact that copy pasting involves the extensive use of the keys Ctrl C and V), my train of thoughts was interrupted by another irreverent remark by my neighbour (how it pisses me when MS Word underlines my “neighbour” and suggests “neighbor” ).

The smartest answer I had

(This post has been censored to keep myself from getting fired )

I was sitting with my neighbor watching the 9 p.m news about the CERN Big Bang (We are mad losers with big brains, lets see if we can destroy the universe) experiment, and contemplating with relief about my Project Launch which was now possible as “Mommy! Look what I made! Its called a tiny black hole” experiment had been postponed.My thoughts were suddenly interrupted by my neighbor when he suddenly asked me “You really think it could have created a black hole ?”

Ah Ha!! Right question to the right person!! Given my extensive knowledge on the subject and to some extent,the questioner’s apparent lack thereof,I decided to deliver a brief but intriguing “Funda Session” about n-dimensional Riemannian geometry and relativistic effects of alpha-hadron collisions, whilst he listened attentively unawares of the widely held belief that all I know about the Black hole is that ‘It sucks!’.But here I was delivering an unfaltering speech about the technicalities of making a black hole and finally finishing it off with a brief note about the racist implications of the experiment and why it is called the ‘Black’ hole and not the ‘White’ hole,drawing analogies with Blackmail and the Blackberry.

Bravo!! I was pretty sure that the guy was dumbfounded and wouldn’t have noticed a single flaw in my expert analysis of the subject.After all, and most modestly, I did have bigger brains than him.(Incidentally,he was a 10 year old kid.)

Carved You remain deep in my heart

Carved You remain deep in my heart

Carved you remain deep in my heart
As you slip away through my clinched fist
I try to keep awake, to see, to remember
The picture dims in the haze,the mist
The darker it gets, the deeper it cuts
Time slides and days are few
We just arrived, few days ago
Look!!Now its time to bid adieu

Majestic you stood.. mother of many a thinkers
And many a thoughts
As we crawled into the mother’s lap
Innocently like curious tots
We let go of the life before
Ranks and percentages and marks galore
Soon we were one,like the bees of a hive
Each in his own right, no less, no more

Eyes were wide open and dreams were fresh
Faltering feet stumbled through the unexplored
Hands drew lines leading to a new life
Only they were drawn on the ED board
People unheard of (who now are the closest friends)
New nicks were coined(which soon became trends)
Rooms were new, faces were new
the shell had been broken, the world was new

The first day in college
We stormed the gates
The only day when we were on time
To meet new friends, new classmates
Where’s room no. 203?
Who is that girl?
What does GPA mean?
What are divergence and curl?

The questions then changed
The notebooks got clean
First benches were deserted
As we thronged the inner canteen
The games begun and
The homesickness was soon gone
Half the rooms remained locked
while in the other half, 29 was on!!

Cds from CP,mishti doi in coop, NCC boots
raapchandus,rissam,Mishra xerox for tutes,
Hitman,NFS,CS,AOE and GTA vice city,
Cricket in MCG, and playing carrom and TT,
Gupta’s samosa,Bata ka paratha and Gate
Munna, Khalsa and OC’s chicken dehati plate
The river, the woods,the farms, the country,
PMC,the two famous trees and the no entry

Snoozed alarms,the mess food,the bathroom line
Reaching the 8:50 class at ten past nine
The friendship,the love,the warm bonding
The proxies and the 196 mass responding
The bunks we planned but never succeeded
the lab readings that we always cheated
The lab journals with misspellings abound
As mistakes accumulated as they went around

The online DC test and the Mup test programs
The vivas,the midsems and the end sem exams
The one night games-mugging and cramming began
Keiser, Rajput, Grewal, Stallings and Millman
The GPA cards and the registration process
Returning from home,greeted by aloo in the mess
The long nights of bakchodi aka smalltalk
The road behind H6 and the after dinner walk

How we’d remember the phrases forever
“A see the”,”2 ki power”,”Look man”
How the cse classes were always off
How we’d shout for an off when the class began
How the night was too small to watch three movies
How the fifty minutes class seemed like ages
How we asked others how their viva was
And how we filled shit in the 16 exam pages

The day of reckoning now came along
the judgement day for our 3 year toil
The wheels of fortune started to turn
We put our heads down,burned the midnight oil
The first job of our lives
The boys were now men
Congratulations filled in
Parties held, again and again

The days are few and we head for a new life
Where the world is full of agony and strife
As I gaze at this place,I love it even more
value this place like I had never done before
They say you come to know of the true value
Of something when you are about to part
We may remain thousands of miles apart
But carved you will remain deep in my heart

Dedicated to my life and friends at BIT
By Manojit