I request you to take these in light humorous sense otherwise if you are a hot-blooded Indian (no matter which region you belong to), don’t read ahead.

What it means to have a TAMIL GIRL friend -

• Her mother looks down at you because you didn’t study in IIT or Madras /Anna University.
  
• Her father starts every conversation with ” I say…”
  
• She shudders if you use four letter words.
  
• She shudders when you eat eggs.
  
• She has long hair, neatly oiled and braided.
  
• She uses the word ‘Super’ as her only superlative.
  
• Her name is another name for a Goddess or a flower.
  
• Her first name is longer than your first name, middle name and surname combined.
  
• When she mixes milk and rice you are never sure whether it is for the Dog or for herself. (That is baaad!)
  
• For weddings, she sports a mini jasmine garden on her head and wears silk saris in the Madras heat without looking too uncomfortable while you are melting in your singlet.
  
• She thinks Arvind Swami is the sexiest man alive.
  
• Her favorite cricketer is Kris Srikanth.
  
• Her favorite food is dosa though she has tried North Indian snack like Chat (pronounced like the slang for ‘conversation’)
  
• She bursts into songs with her cousins in every movie.
  
• She bores you by telling you which raaga each song you hear is based on.
  
• You have to give her jewels, though she has already got plenty of it.
  
• She is more educated than you.
  
• Her father thinks she is much smarter than you.
  
• And he is probably right.

Note: Sorry Tamil friends

What it means to have a TELGU GIRL friend

• Her mother looks down at you because you didn’t study Engineering or for not having a fake certificate which others can easily identify…
  
• Her father starts every conversation with Dowry??… Is he a Brinjal vendor..?
  
• She shudders if you use FIVE (DOWRY) letter words.
  
• She hates you when you don’t eat GONGURA…and all pickles her mom has given from a 3 yrs back India trip…
  
• She has a capability of turning anything into a pickle…even paper… Andhra style… Your fate to eat it…
  
• She has long hair, neatly oiled and braided not to make, feel her husband admire…but to offer to Tirupathi god.
  
• She uses the word ‘Bagundhi’ as a standard adjective for anything even to praise you… so no value.
  
• She breaks her first name and keeps a nick name; her last name is usually being horrible to pronounce…everyone confuses which one to use.
  
• When she mixes milk and rice you don’t realize that it would also be like a fire hot…so spicy…Unless you taste it and go to hospital she might have used white chillis. (That is chaala baaad!).
  
• For weddings, she doesn’t sport a mini jasmine garden on her head because she knows well that her hair is going to TIRUPATHI so why jasmine flowers wastely? Correct na…?? and wears basic cotton sari in the
• Guntur and save something to her dad because of dowry expenses.
  
• She thinks Chiranjeevi and Venkatesh are the sexiest men alive. Otherwise, she knows only about Tamil heroes and movies because approx…200% Tamil movies are dubbed or remade in Telugu right?
  
• Her favorite cricketer is Tendulkar…because there is no one from Guntur.
  
• She bores you by telling you how to save $… while sleeping…too… trying to save snore? Lol.
  
• You have to give her American life, Lexus, Acura MDX, Blackberry & always update with…Luxury stuff…so that she will balance the jewels and houses her father gave you..
  
• But she rarely likes to buy those cars…and owns an obsolete Corolla…for her entire US life…
  
• She is rarely educated…knows how to be a best kanjoo in the world…
  
• Her father thinks she is much smarter than You( my telugu friend)…and he is correct…

I remember the days at Infy when people especially used to get the chairs with straight back so that they can sit at 90 degrees while staring at their PCs. Some people used to go to extent of even customizing those chairs. People went for such chairs because they already suffered from back problems. One of my college mates was one of them. I used to feel better on the other usual chairs which weren’t specifically made for right-angled sitting positions and I never had any back or that kind of problems. Therefore, I used to wonder that even getting such chairs, their problem used to get worse instead of relieving them. But it seems that I got the reason…

According to the recent survey reported in an online news journal,

The stick-straight posture is bad for your back. The best posture is actually a 135-degree angle, which would mean one would sit at their desk leaning backwards slightly. This position takes the pressure off the spinal disks in the lower back.

Total 22 patients were studied for this survey. According to study, sitting straight puts extra pressure on your spine and hence causes the disks to relocate more than the relaxed position i.e. 135 degrees. I am surprised that the posture we and even our parents used to think as the best posture isn’t actually the right posture.

Here is the excerpt from article -

Aching back? Don’t sit up straight, study says

 

A new study is making it easier to ignore your mother’s sage advice on sitting up straight.

 

In fact, the stick-straight posture is bad for your back, researchers say.

 

The best posture is actually a 135-degree angle, which would mean one would sit at their desk leaning backwards slightly, according to new research presented Monday at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

 

This position takes the pressure off the spinal disks in the lower back, researchers say.

 

“A 135-degree body-thigh sitting posture was demonstrated to be the best biomechanical sitting position, as opposed to a 90-degree posture, which most people consider normal,” said Waseem Amir Bashir, author and clinical fellow in the Department of Radiology and Diagnostic Imaging at the University of Alberta Hospital.

 

“Sitting in a sound anatomic position is essential, since the strain put on the spine and its associated ligaments over time can lead to pain, deformity and chronic illness,” he said in a written statement.

 

Researchers used a positional MRI scanner to collect images from 22 healthy volunteers with no history of back pain or surgery.

 

The 22 patients studied at Woodend Hospital in Aberdeen, Scotland assumed three different sitting positions.

 

One included a slouching posture in which the body is hunched forward; while the second was an upright 90-degree sitting position; and the third was the relaxed position where the patient reclined backward 135 degrees while the feet remained on the floor.

 

The researchers used the MRI images to determine which sitting position put the least stress on the back.

 

Spinal disk movement occurs when weight-bearing strain is placed on the spine, causing the internal disk material to misalign.

“You can see the disc has gone backwards,” said Bashir as he showed an MRI image of a patient’s back. “If you stand up after long periods (of sitting), and you’ve got weak back muscles, you can potentially pop the disc out.”

Disk movement was most pronounced with a 90-degree upright sitting posture but it was least pronounced with the 135-degree position, indicating that less strain is placed on the spinal disks and associated muscles and tendons in this position.

 

“Employers could also reduce problems by providing their staff with more appropriate seating, thereby saving on the cost of lost work hours.”

 

But one Canadian specialist suggested a far more simple solution: less sitting and more movement.

 

“The most practical solution is to get people to move,” said Prof. Jack Callaghan of the University of Waterloo in Ontario.

I had talk about a personality long back ago and now, I am enjoying his company. He is here at CE with me. He is no one else but Vivek Maurya. He was my ML at Infy. We were together only for three months and then he shifted to other org. Now after about 2 years, we are together again.

I am happy to be with him as he was the one of the MLs I liked because he is more concerned about quality than quantity of work. I liked that attitude of this guy. And other thing which I like about him is that he likes to play Quake III – just the way I like!!!

Welcome to CE, Vivek. We will have great time together here – that’s for sure .

I have been reading and thinking about some recent BIG headlines and here they are -

India is world’s No. 1 bribe payer

There was a list published few weeks back about most corrupted nations and India was somewhere around 50th position and I was a bit surprized but it was listed after PAK and China, so that looked a bit justified at that point .

I wonder, how come, still the financial giants of world trust India for outsourcing services, specially for BPO services!

India doesn’t just have loads of corruption at home, it is also the world leader in exporting graft.

Months after Transparency International ranked India as among the more corrupt societies in the world, the NGO’s Bribe Payer’s Index 2006 shows that Indian exporters are more willing than their counterparts from other countries to pay overseas bribes to secure business, clinch contracts, do deals and generally get on in the world.

Of the 30 countries surveyed by the index, India was the worst — or most willing to give — followed by China and Russia.

With Brazil also ranking pretty low as the eighth biggest bribe giver, the BRIC nations — the foursome of Brazil, Russia, India and China — predicted to become among the biggest economies in the world by 2050 — emerge as being prepared to do whatever it takes to enhance their share of the global trade pie.

While this is the third BPI released by Transparency, after the ones in 1999 and 2002, it is the first time India has featured in the index.

It was considered too economically insignificant and lacking global spread and reach in the earlier rounds. Liaoran Liao, Transparency International programme coordinator for South Asia, told TOI on Wednesday that it was definitely bad news for India to make its first outing on the BPI with a most-corrupt ranking for its newly jet-setting companies.

“In 1999 and 2002, India was not listed on the BPI,” said Liaoran, “but now India is considered an emerging economy and an emerging export power, so the CEOs and MDs ranked its companies.”

The newest league table was compiled after asking 11,000 top business executives in 125 countries to rank foreign companies in order of their propensity to bribe in the World Economic Forum’s Executive Opinion Survey.

Transparency said the executives ranked India bottom of the list of 30 countries. The executives suggested Indians seemed ready to do business by paying bribes or making extra payments.

The BPI ranked Swiss companies as least likely to use brown envelopes and backhanders to get the job done. No Asian country figures in the list of the ten cleanest countries. Japan figures eleventh followed by Singapore.

 

Give And Take

THE WORST

1. India
2. China
3. Russia
4. Turkey
5. Taiwan
6. Malaysia
7. South Africa
8. Brazil
9. Saudi Arabia
10. South Korea

27^th September - Today is the day when I joined my first ever job and started my ever-going journey in IT industry, 2 years ago. It was in one of the leading companies of India at their headquarter. The 2 day journey from Jalandhar to to Bangalore is a long story which has lot of ups and downs and if I started writing about that, it wouldn’t be less than a script of a movie which starts and ends in a train. I was there to join Infy on this day alongwith 82 other comp grads. I could easily see so many bright drams in the eyes of every single person who was dreaming of becoming next entrepreneur in this industry.

It was nice induction period for first few weeks during which we came to know about each other. I will always advocate such programme for freshers in any corporate. In these programs only, I met with few people who became my great hubbies for rest of my life. There were some memorable moments when there was a discussion on - Should the cabinet of country be organized in corporate way or the way it is going on? I could hear everyone in support of corporate way but there was a person who opposed it and he opposed with very strong points which made others to think again. Let me recall people from our batch whom I remember…Niranjana, Abhishek, Lenoy, Karthik, Nitin (next to me), Seema, Rishabh, Rajinder, Tejinder, Manuj, Prashant, Prashantha, Geetha, Sabeeha, Tanika, Mithun, Sunil…ok, well the list will continue and I am still missing key names (apologies for discontinuing as list will keep growing). There are other people whom I met in start of my career and whom I still remember…Pavan, Cheeku, Vivek, Lohith, Shashi, Ramesh, Shakeer, Gaurav Wadhwa, Nitin (one with Angei’s sexy wallpaper), Vidya, Anand, Phaneesh & Swapnil Bhatnagar, Amit Agarwal, Abhishek Manocha (again names are making it bigger)…And the journey continued for next 24 months with lot of names adding up. I got into a great project - BIMS, which was having sooo much to learn for me in rest of the period and I learnt the core tech of my career. Went through many ups and downs, acquired knowledge of industrial as well as project processes. Had lot of fun and enjoyed the time in my first ever corp. I was lucky to have great MLs as well as a very nice PM - they always guided me in right direction. Now when I look back at the mentioned names, more than 2/3^rd of them including me have left Infy…All the reasons are different.

In these 2 years, I have seen the life from different angles and have conned the experiences. They keep helping me now and then to sustain in this industry. I have come to know, how does it feel to earn and invest. What to look for and what to overlook. What are the values and what are craps on the name of values. What kind of entities exist around you and how to make what kind of connections with those entities. What does corps state and what does they mean. Then I have list of Golden rules for career success which enlighten my path every time I need any help to sustain in this industry.