and it continues...

I'd written about the tussle amongst two of our canteen suppliers to capture the cold coffee market. Well summer's long gone and after a little cooling off the competition has been upped with the addition of an Amul counter!
My story starts with the team realizing one day that it's the boss's birthday and we don't have a cake. Our only option is to order it at least 4 hours in advance from the Coffee Day counter in the other building and we were about 2 hours too late for that. So we dragged ourselves to the nearest bakery to pick up a cake and whined about it all the way. And what do we see when we go upto the canteen to store it safely in the fridge - Amul has a humungous board proclaiming - ORDER CAKES HERE! which appeared just that day.
Now the juice counter guy got beaten in the cold coffee wars but you have to admire his spirit because next day an A4 (almost as if he's scared the Amul guy will see it!) size poster is stuck on his counter proclaiming 'Birthday cakes available'. Of course in all probability the same supplier supplies to both counters!
I'm now trying to decipher what is the next trend they'll clash on... black coffee?

ecoliving..

I've been thinking what to do about the upcoming long weekend and while sitting at my favourite sandwich place in Pune - Skips - heard the owner speak about this http://theecogrid.blogspot.com/
might give it a try if I convince enough people to join!

melting pot?

In my earlier post I'd spoken about the global family. I was reminded, again, of the melting pot that the world is becoming, by someone I met today. This person is of Chinese origin, is French by nationality and works for an Indian software company!
Again, nothing unusual I'm sure... but I still found it interesting

Barin damage of a different kind

Unexplicably, I have spent the last 45 minutes reading brain numbing bollywood gossip from some random tabloid-like website. Its similar to the experience I had when, again inexplicably, I ended up reading a mills & boon. I could almost feel my limited quantity of grey cells gasping for breath and eventually some of them did fizzle out.
From all these little snippets about almost every aspect of celebrity life, I conclude that there must be people employed in the task of just collecting these from whatever fleeting source they can. This essentially would involve continuously stalking celebrities, hanging around places where you can possibly hear some news about them, hunting down their friends-relatives-neighbours-doodhwaala-dog-whatever. Ming boggling.

is it true...

That the people with the guiltiest conscience feel the need to claim their innocence the loudest?
http://www.barbaraknott.net/Ravihome.html

But why....

In spite of growing up in a city that was plagued by communal riots I never really felt the effects of it or saw the horrors of it, let's just call it being fortunate enough to live in an area where the riots didn't cause the havoc they did in the main city. They were always stories you heard or saw in news.

Today terrorism has the same 'distant' effect but that I guess is because of luck or good chance. But today it struck a little closer home to shake me up a bit - I was reading where all the Delhi blasts occurred and one of the areas was the McDonald's and Prince Pan corner in GK market, where I happened to hang out numerous times while studying in Delhi. Just like how today there must have been a regular crowd of college students just out enjoying a weekend. Only I was lucky enough to be not one of them. But what about the ones that weren't? People like me, unaware and happy go lucky, just out with friends for a good weekend. It gives me goosebumps to think of it.

But that starts another train of thought....
Have we become so indifferent that only when something affects us directly do we realize the seriousness of it? And do we do anything about it except shake our heads and 'strongly condemn' such actions like our politician do? Will it take something worse than this to stir us out of our stupor? And more frighteningly, is it just a matter of time before that 'something worse' happens?

Globalization...

Working in the IT industry that's one word I get to hear as many times as I breathe in a day. But right now I refer to the fact that everyone in my family is in a different part of the world - Meerut, Pune, Connecticut, Geneva - yet emails, phones, chats have really rendered the distance redundant. Of course it will be true globalization when teleportation becomes a reality!
But for now the globally spread family, I'm sure, will also become as common a trend as Globalization has become in the IT world, if it hasn't already.