Weekend Blues...

All I remember now of weekends in Trivandrum were waking up late...breakfast having to be forced down my throat, sumpuous lunches and dinners at home, friends inviting me to films or trips to the beach or play cricket or the other activity and me plotting the best way to make my escape, evenings glued to the tv, sunday mornings in church...wow now I feel I lived a life of idyllic bliss those days . The weekend was typically laidback...watched dvd's on Friday, woke up in the morning to a stomach craving for malayali food and headed in the direction of Coconut Grove, the only Kerala restaurant in Southern California where I treated myself to a Lunch Buffet. There was rice, chicken biriyani, 2-3 chicken items, aviyal(which tasted more like potato stew), pappadam and potato fry. i was so hungry i attacked the food first before I realized I hadnt fulfilled another major requirement...indian beer.My usual Haywards 5000 was soldout and I had to be satiated with Golden Eagle which wasnt all that good in taste but made up for that in the kick. Anyways the beer filled up my stomach and messed up my appetite. I just wanted to go back home and have a good sleep now but the owner, a young guy kathivekkufied me for a whole hour.

After putting it off for quite a long time I decided to splurge some money in shopping for clothes. Unfortunately the days of outlet shopping are still not over for me...the Nortdstroms' and Macys' are still a class above my finances.So finally on Sunday my roomie, Sunil and I went to the outlet mall on the US-Mexico border at San Ysidro. But before that he wanted to go to the temple were I was surprised to get some really good free desi food. I hate shopping for clothes bcoz of havin to try on every piece that catches my fancy...my lean frame ensures that I dont fit into most clothes...t-shirts are a total no-no for me and so are shorts and bermudas...I guess until I put on some weight, the image of the ice-cool, casual American and me will never go hand in hand!!! I hate myself for my shirt tucked into jeans or pants dressing with sandals(which I call Kerala casuals) but who the heck bothers abt other ppl here!!! Nevertheless I comfort myself about the amount of money I have saved in the process. Anyways hunted at the usual stores...Gap, Old Navy and Haggar b4 stepping out with 3 shirts and a khaki and corduroy. After getting back it was Pizza for dinner and we watched the critical hit, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Besides the casting of Jim Carrey and Kate Winslett and the editing (Memento will always remain the hallmark), I found little in the film to do justice to a good storyline. Well I kissed goodnight to a another uneventful weekend and as always overslept and reached late for work on monday.

A poem...

Well I wrote a poem after a long long time...almost four years now! I tried to post it on poetry.com but the fools have a 20 line limit now.Well I dont want to butcher my poem...will leave it here for the time-being!

D-Day!!!

When the winding maze gets hazy
And I feel I will go crazy
A light always shines, leading me on
Even in the most blinding Darkness,
Giving me direction and reason,
To fight one more day without giving up.

That Light which shines on is my parents love,
The score and five years of my existence,
I have given them cause for shame and pride,
Happiness and sorrow, frustration and Hope.
Through it all they persisted, I am but the mould
They crafted. In their shade I grew into Man.

Thousands of miles, land and sea
Forest and desert, lies between them and me
But our minds unfailingly meet, parents of today
Lucky are those near your kids. As for mine
I see they are oddly smiling or in silent sobs, living
With the memories distance couldnt take away.

Will all the heartaches I caused,
Will all the bonds that bind us, Be strong
Give me the strength, that I break
All that fetters me to this foreign shore.
On that day, Oh peace of mind, you will forever be mine.

Copyright 2005 - Jiby Kattakayam

The Simple Joys of Programming...

I have just finished a small project but in terms of its relevance I believe I crossed another huge mental roadblock. This was my first web application I built in ASP.Net and it will be a major addition to my resume. There was a time I was unsure of my abilities as a programmer and cried about six years of my life all going down the drain. Those days are well past me but I still have miles to go before I work the dream job. Like the Chinese proverb which says a journey of a thousand miles begins in a single step I got to this point because I dared to venture out of my comfort zone. Every new project I get into I have treaded with trepidation initially but what I have learnt over the last one year is that God always rewards me if I work hard. Drawing a pale comparison to Edison who said he succesfully discovered six thousand ways not to light a bulb through each project I have coded away in the wrong directions, retraced my path, begun afresh and achieved results. That then is the essence of this blog...not the praise of some project manager but the jubiliation from your inner self you feel when all your hard work has materialised and the pride you feel in having accomplished the task. In these days programming has become an easy but still arduous task ...easy because of the volume of information you have at your fingertips from just a simple search on google and arduous because of the huge variety and diversity in selecting a particular language for coding and the jungle of literature available on each each aspect of programming. In the last 6 months stuff I have built has been used by ppl to chat, play quiz, automate some of the daily tasks they did and view and build reports for their work. I am still nowhere near feeling accomplished...I still fail in wht a programmer has to be good at... voluntarily learning new technologies, a solid technical mind and vision of the system to built and many more shortcomings. We are termed nerds by our peers for spending hours staring at a computer screen, we give yogis and new-age guru's a complex by how much of our mind we can train into focussing on the problem at hand...the world is today at our fingertip...Programmers of the World....Rise and Ye be Proud...What we do echoes in other people's lives and in eternity (a lift from gladiator).