This has taken a long time coming, but I hope - at least for me - that its worth the wait. The delay cannot be put down to sloth or laziness on my part, as all things usually are by some people. Quite the opposite actually. I used to write, when in college. I had written on quite a few subjects, trivial as well as consequential. Their not reaching the print is, however, another story. They resided silently and uncomplainingly on my com.
I wish "All things bright and beautiful" could go on for eternity. Though there wouldn't be any charm left then. One fine day (a very beautiful cloudy day it was), disaster struck !!! My hard disk, though being detected by my ever-hard-working com, suddenly refused to load the OS. I thought it was just another instance of XP going berserk and a few boots(literally !!) and a few pushes to the slightly battered restart button would do the trick. But when a couple of pushes didn't quite do the "trick", I surmised that it required an expert's hand. Now, Arora was as usual busy and so was IV (busy doing nothing, really). And it was an uncirculated rumour(wonder how) that G-Man was something of a virtuoso in hard-disk-crashes-recovery. I think desperation leads one to follow his most banal instincts. As they say, Hope, along with a number of other things, is the opium of life. Not that the blog address has much to do with this. But I've digressed. To cut a long story short, I petitioned to G-Man's benevolent instincts and he agreed to look at it, though with much reluctance. He worked on it for a week and eventually told me to go buy a new one. Curse him, calling himself an expert, rather a virtuoso. Anyway, it wasn't the hard disk that I was concerned about. My ramblings were the only things that mattered.
G-Man disappointed me and I turned to my last resort. And what a blind fool I was. Of all the sane people in the campus, I went to - guess who - the server room idiots. Promises to do to the best of capabilities followed soon after and I went back to my room, contented to see a faint glimmer of hope. A day later(he was prompt, I 'll have to give him that), he told me that he couldn't do anything much with it. What a lie !!! Actually he had done more than my very imagination, on its wildest voyage, could have ever conspired to do. I should have known that he knew as much about HDs as much as I knew about rocket science. It was a moment of helplessness that compelled me to take drastic measures. How was I to know that this would result in the sad, painful demise of my HD. And all that resided on it.
Poor HD, which,at least, was being detected, decided to spurn all advances. The famed Red light district of OBH-1 had lost its resplendence. To top it all, G-Man comes to me, after the cows have grazed and dropped dung all over the place, to tell me that he can recover the data. I almost strangled him to death.
Corporate life sucked out all my motivation to write. Reminds me of the "MTV-It Sucks" ad. But, I've found it again. A lot has happened in the last few weeks, good as well as bad. Plan to learn from the bad ones and cherish the good ones. And I think I'll do all those things that I wouldn't/couldn't/didn't/haven't done in these past few months.
And I'm sorry if the title of the blog has been a little misleading :)
~anirudh