My encounter with a star!!!

The below pictures might give you a bit of a surprise and makes you raise your brows asking "How!!?" :P
Read on to know how and where I met him..

Your friends and team mates would be as much happy as you are on your birthday only for one reason- Treat! Treating someone on his/her special occasion has become a custom now. My team had asked for a combined treat from everyone who had their birthdays last month. And also during the recent appraisal process, people who have been promoted were on the list as well. So all together, there were 11 victims for the day!

After intense research, we decided on Aloft, Sholinganallur. The hotel was really good with its ambiance and atmosphere so pleasing (It had to be! cuz its a 4 star hotel!!). While we were scoffing with our complete concentration on the food, there were commotion and camera flashes all of a sudden. As we were lost in gulping down scrumptious food, we took our eyes off the plate wanting to know who it was. To our surprise, its one of the leading actors in Bollywood Mr. Amir Khan with his family and two bodyguards. As i went forward to take few snaps, his bodyguards stopped me asking me to give him some privacy take pics after he dines.

As people started to throng towards Amir wanting to take a snap with him, the hotel officials moved him to another private spot which was on the other side of where we were dining. Though we were able to see him we couldn't go near him as his bodyguards stood there as barricades. I think some girl from my team spoke with one of the bodyguards and expressed her wish to take a snap with him and she was asked to wait till he dines.

After all it wasn't an excuse he gave to dine peacefully but he did spend some time to take few pics with him though he had to go for a shoot that night. Everyone who came there for dinner got something to put up/brag about on Facebook- "Me with Amir Khan!!" My intention of taking a pic with him was for the same reason as I'm not a big fan of his but like him as an amazing actor.

There would've been a fight between me and the bodyguards if it was A.R.Rahman instead of Amir. I'm pretty sure I would've done anything to have a chat with him, take a pic with him and to get an autograph from him. And that not for showing it off to friends but as a simple wish of a big big fan of his. I wish i get an opportunity like this with superstar Rahman next time. ;-)
 
In the pic: That's me and my team mates with Bollywood star Amir.

Tick tock on the clock!

It seems like just a couple of months since i joined Cognizant but the reality surprises me- Its been almost a year and a half. Time seems to fly in the blink of eye that most of the beautiful things in life have the air of being missed. The run of time is descried at some instances in life like when you skim through a marriage album your work didn't allow you to attend, looking at some of it you exclaim "He's grown up so fast! He was just a kid when I last saw him;" "Oh, She is no more? When did she pass away?;" "What? He is married now?" "Who is she? Wasn't he married to another............. so on.


I've been always curious to know the reason why time runs so fast. I rescheduled my calender and gave priority to "analysis of the run of time" over "day dreaming." To understand it better, I'd broken down the analysis into smaller parts- from hours to years. (Disclosure: I'm not so good at math. If the figures are wrong........ Well...... huh.... don't mind. Just read on!!)


24 hours makes a day in which I work for 9 hours. It takes 4 hours for traverse, to and fro. Which is 9+4=13 beautiful hours is eaten up every single day. The rest 11 hours is further eaten up in 7 hours of sleeping. That give out a residue of just 4 hours everyday and that is been used to gear up to another day of oblivion.

7 days makes a week and the above said routine goes on for another 5 days that leaves 2 days in a week- weekends. (Wow! Just getting my tongue around the word "weekend" gives me all smiles.) Now after going through 4 hours-left-over-fun shitty routine, weekend appears longer. But not long enough to enjoy. Saturdays and Sundays appear just to let me know that I'm still alive. It makes me wanna earnestly beseech God to make weekends have 42 hours each. Life seems like a drag when you were asked to slog even on Saturdays!! Weekends run like a flow of water. So fast, so quick!!

One thing which buck me up when broadening the analysis on months is for that one day which will make any employee super happy- salary day!! This reminds me of a forward mail in which a picture, relating to the tale of the tortoise and rabbit, depicts how "money comes in like tortoise and goes out like rabbit." That's true in a way. We patiently wait for the end of the month, for that one day which makes us feel that we are rich (as the above quote describes, it doesn't take too long for the money to fritter away!!)


As this sequence of the above said is unvaryingly followed throughout the year, and summing it all up:

24 hours - 9hours slogging - 4 hours travelling - 7hours snoozing = 4hours/day. [4 of 24hours]
4hours x 5days/week = 20 hours/week excl. weekends. [20 of 120 hours]
20hours x 4weeks/month = 80hours/month excl. weekends. [80 of 480hours]
80hours x 12months/year = 960hours/year excl. weekends. [960 of 5760hours]
That means I get only 40/240 days time to rejoice in a year?? What would you practically do with that?

Everyday we wait for the day to end; everyday we wait for the week to end; every week we wait for the month end, for salary; and every month we wait for the year to end, for a hike/promotion/etc. And then i realised that it was i/me/myself who wanted the time to run fast so that i could rejoice my 40/240 days a year!! I would've mentioned in most of my posts that i will have to balance my work life with my personal life and though it sounds easy, there is a minute barrier which stops me and projects out the barrier like a great wall of China! And its pretty obvious that for someone to write a post like this wouldn't have had the ability to balance his work life with his personal. Well, there is time and I'm gonna start utilising my 40/240 days/year to think of how to get things straight and gonna spend as much time as i can, if possible (is this the barrier??)!! ;-)
 
The quote i just came across while writing this post. Sounded apt to this so putting it up:
 
WE ARE NOT HUMAN BEINGS GOING THROUGH A TEMPORARY SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE.
WE ARE SPIRITUAL BEINGS GOING THROUGH A TEMPORARY HUMAN EXPERIENCE.

World Cup 2011- India Vs Pakistan- Magnificent!

Before the match:
The big fuss about the India-Pakistan match seems to be growing every second and the excitement seems to be never ending. Restaurants, lounges, showrooms have all put up LCD displays and projector screens making it possible for everyone to watch the match. Cognizant prevised beforehand that employees will never gonna miss the most significant match of 2011 World Cup and might take an off from work. So they've put up LCD monitors in all cafeterias that telecast Star Sports non stop. Undoubtedly, India-Pakistan match is regarded as the biggest "rivalry" in this World Cup 2011 and is quoted as the "Mother of all matches." The expectancy and eagerness among Indian cricket maniacs and everyone in my company is at its core with everyone checking their watches every 5 minutes wanting it to tick faster. The move was satisfactory as not many in my office took an off because Cognizant has enabled everything to watch the cricket match live. Encouraging the cricket spirit, Indian and Pakistan supporters (there weren't any for Pakistan!) were allowed to wear team jerseys and it was blue everywhere. 1:30pm and the cafeterias were jam packed already. Hope the Men in Blue will not let us down!

During the match:
Even if the building was on fire, people give a damn about it as far as it doesn't interrupt the live telecast. People were glued to their seats; rest were standing and the cafeterias were crammed that for a second it felt like the room was flexible enough to accommodate so many people. Loud hurrahs and roaring was obviously for the Master Blaster whenever he appeared on the screen that could be heard from miles away. I could see people sitting at the edge of their seats watching the match live and parallely praying for India to win. As soon as the match started the excitement meter begins to dance up the scale. People so want Indians to win this match as it was not just a game, it was war! Me thinks that people wont be much gleeful when India wins the World Cup as much as when it defeats Pakistan.

The cheer was loud enough to break the decibel meter when Sehwag comfortably hit each ball across the boundary line. The enthusiasm ceased as soon as Wahab Riaz sent him off the ground. Sachin was lucky enough to hit 85 after four lives until Saeed Ajmal caught the ball. As the match went on, people didn't really like the progression of the game and started to lose hope when Yuvraj Singh went back to pavilion hitting nothing. 260 was a decent score after all. Unfortunately, it wasn't for Pakistan. In the end, People already started bursting crackers and howling around when Pakistanis were to hit 30 runs in 6 balls. Misbah-ul-Haq played really good but it wasn't good enough to win the match. Indians contained it very well and was a great match after all.

After the match:
Celebrations were colorful and for a second, it looked like a festival. Thousands of people jumping and howling on the road as Indians entered into the finals. Crackers went on for so long till it woke up everyone who was sleeping (the oldies!!) Youngsters went around in bike holding the Indian flag celebrating the victory. It all subsided later after 11:30pm.

Hope the Indians defeat Sri Lankans and would win the World Cup 2011. Thankfully, the finals is on Saturday Apr 2nd. Guess everyone will want to watch it with their big friends gang that will make it more exciting and exhilarating. Two days to go and the clock ticks......

Pics: Office: Eveyone standing for the National Anthem.	Office: Crowd in Cafeteria -1
Office: Crowd in Cafeteria -2	Celebrations (from Google)
Celebrations (from Google)	Office: Crowd in cafeteria.

Cognizant's Doosra

As India is a country of cricket fanatics, Cognizant has introduced a new fantasy cricket game called Doosra to boost the World Cup fever among employees. The game has been designed by Cognizant employees to knock off employee work pressure (?) with a little bit of fun. Doosra will be active for the entire duration of World cup and to login to Doosra, you should be a Cognizant employee (or have a Cognizant employee's login credentials!) For someone like me, who is not much into cricket, Doosra will make a difference. People in Cognizant seem hooked to the game that they keep talking about it all the time. Doosra is more like predicting the possibilities of winning or losing a game. It has two play modes: Super 11 and My Team. To begin with, every player will be provided with a minimum points in each play mode. It is the employee's way of playing the game that would double, triple or make it 10 times the minimum points provided. There will be a fixed amount of 1100 points in Super 11 that will be given to each player for every match and the player has to select 11 players from two teams that are playing the match as per the fixtures. The player has to apportion the 1100 points among the 11 chosen players and a star player (from the 11) has to be chosen. Depending upon the runs scored, wickets taken etc, the player will be awarded points. Points are awarded based on the points the player has given to each of the 11 players. Suppose if a player has chosen Sachin Tendulkar among the 11 players and have awarded 200 points from the 1100 basic points, and if Sachin has scored 100 runs in that particular match, then the 200 is multiplied with 100 runs + bonus points for every 25th, 50th, 75th and 100th run and if he is chosen as the star player, the final value is tripled. Hence the 11 players has to be cautiously chosen and the 1100 initial points has to be cautiously assigned.

For My Team play mode, the player has to place a bet on one of the two teams that plays the match that day. The player will be provided with 5000 initial points and the player will be awarded 1000 points everyday. For example, if its between India and Pakistan, the player can place the bet on either India or Pakistan. Similar to Super 11, the points are multiplied depending upon the bet. If the player bets all the points on a team, the points are quadrupled and if the team loses, the player loses all his points; If the player bets more than 50% of the bet, the points are doubled and if the team loses, the player loses only the percentage of the bet he had placed on the team.

Doosra has become an obsession among all Cognizant employees. When Doosra was introduced, the number of Doosra players increased every minute and now has around 45k players. If you have a question of what is gained from the game, well, its just mere fun and that the winners will win "exciting prizes." Though Doosra players were given weekly prizes for the top players, I hope the grand prize is gotta be really "exciting".

Very recently Doosra team have added two new features to the site- Silly Points and Tweets. Tweet is something everyone knows in this day and age (for the ones who doesnt know, its an exchange of short messages among individuals; social networking!) Silly Points has the statistics of the winners, losers, bets, highest score etc.

Its really fun to have such a game and I sincerely appreciate Doosra developers to have brought such an amazing game to all Cognizant employees. I had bet all my points on England in the England VS Ireland match and lost all my points. Not just me, 98% of the employees have lost their bet on England. After all, Circket is a funny game. You never know what will happen! Looking forward to win all other matches and I hope I would win that "exciting prize." ;-)

Here are some screen shots of Doosra:

Story of a job hunter..

If you are one among the 2008 or 2009 passed out, then you must've known how hard was it to get a job then. And for a guy who is one among the 2009s and had a very weird preconceived opinion about getting a job, its even worse. I was someone who did not have any ambition to whom i wanna be. If you had asked me then, i would've said that i wanna become like A.R.Rahman. Pretty impossible. But i could've made that possible (Of course not like Rahman but at least a small time composer!) only if everything fell in place. Everything that interest me back in the day was music. So it was pretty obvious for me to choose the path i should be taking. For everything in life, there has to be a bad phase. Like the bad time that struck when i had to choose my career. It was when i went along with my brother for his Engineering admission, my Engineering admission was confirmed. How funny can that be? My focus was to get into Visual Communication but then everything changed when a she-devil cast an evil spell on my dad. She brainwashed him by prophesying her version of the future of VisCom students. It was that they had to shoot videos for marriage functions and nothing else. That's when my dad's conscience had to balance between my words and hers. And obviously, the experienced person wins. That too she was none other than the person responsible of my college placements.

Four years of Engineering was hell when it comes to studies but was fun otherwise. Every semester was like a war that i had to build a very strong heart to face every paper and so do for the results. For my parents, arrears in the very first semester was a pre cognitive notion that i would never graduate Engineering at all. It was hard to convince them that arrears are just a part of Engineering life (for us it was like an unofficial mandatory custom to have at least one. Mandatory? Well, arrears naturally comes our way!)

When God closes one door, he opens another (for all reasons!). He didn't want to see me struggling all alone. So he had gifted me an awesome set of friends and asked us to stay together since childhood. And they gave a helping hand when arrears fell like rain during my college days. It was one of my close friend Naveen and me who always used to study together. Like all other Engineering students, we dust off our books only during our study holidays. If there is 3 days preparation holiday, we would take our books the night before the exam. Our method of studying is different. We used to start studying at 10pm, each of us would complete 2 units in a book of 5 units, would finished it by 2am, do a knowledge transfer that goes till 5am. The rest one unit, would finish it on the way to exam. I still wonder how we used to clear the papers. Well after all, Engineering papers evaluation method is still a mystery.

As days went by, the biggest burden of placements started to petrify me. Not many companies come for placements in our college and being the year 2008, nothing really came. We had a very confused placement officer who knows nothing about anything. One day he would walk in to announce that L&T or TCS is coming, two days after he would walk in again to say it is not. This used to happen very often and then whenever he walks into our class, we never used to take his words seriously. It was one day he informed about Infosys placements. We never took it seriously as usual but we came to know Infosys is really coming from other outside sources. I started preparing but the preparation wasn't enough to clear Infosys aptitude test. The first 8 toppers from every two class of every department went home with their offer letter. Me, just went home with a heavy heart. We are 7 in our gang and 3 people got placed except me 2 more friends, and my brother (though he is far better than me and since just 2 companies came to our college, it was hard for him!!) My brother and two of his friends decided to start a small time web designing business till they get a job. I didn't wanna join them cuz i couldn't compete with their technical intelligence.
During my final year, i had a promise instilled in my mind that i should not have any backlogs cuz it would be hard for me to clear it then. Hence I needed more people's guidance. Its always easier to listen to someone explaining than learning it yourself (quick learning!) I used to go to some 5 of my friends house everyday for the knowledge transfer. It wasn't difficult to write what my friends explained and hence cleared all my final year papers (kudos to them!)

Graduated out of college with no job. It was then Nikith, another close friend of mine became my good companion for THE JOB HUNT. Every week we attended around 6-7 companies. Either we will not get selected or will it not be like a company at all. There was this one company called us for the interview and we couldn't find the company even after hours of intense search in that area. Later a tea shop owner helped us locate it. It was in one corner of a building terrace which had only two rooms- One to take interview and the other, a so-called 'workplace' which had only 3 computers.

After a very long search, i got into Allsec BPO and the other guy got into Cognizant BPO. I guess many 2008 and 2009 passed outs would've been in at least one BPO before joining an IT company. Allsec was one of the best BPOs. Had so much fun there and made lots of friends. My batch in Allsec seize to exist after 3 months cuz everyone in my batch were Engineers and everyone absconded when they got a job cuz that's when IT field started to come up. Many of them got into big IT companies except me. I listened to my friends' advice that i wont be able to find a job being in a BPO, night shift. After leaving Allsec, i again started my job hunt, this time, all alone.

Everything changed one night when i went to my brother's office for night stay. My brother and his two friends started asking me about my future plans and made me realize that i wont get a job unless i gain some technical knowledge. All of a sudden it was like a star of wisdom shone above my head and showed me a road to travel when i was stuck in pitch dark. I started learning the basics of few technologies and prepared myself to face any interview and come out with an offer letter. My brother was smart enough to get into Systech solutions but i got stuck right at the technical round. It was then Shaan, a HR working in Systech, helped me out and gave me a chance to attend the final round straight away. Still, my preparation wasn't enough for them as their expectations were more. I started to think if i would ever get a job. It was then my friend told me about the Cognizant recruitment. It was a mere joke for me when he asked me to attend the interview cuz for me, companies like Cognizant, Infosys, L&T, etc were like Microsoft, Google, Facebook. Imagine where Microsoft, Google, Facebook are.? They are not even in my list. After so much advice from my brother and friends i just wanted to give it a shot. Luckily, I cleared all rounds (even the 2 rounds technical interview, each 40 mins!!! Can you imagine??) I felt "joy" within me, churn out with vibrant spectrum of colors. I wanted to thank Shaan for trying so hard to get me into Systech. Nothing can be equivalent for her timely help but bought her a big bar of chocolate as a token of thankfulness (I had to insist her to take it. And Choco?? Well, money constrain!! :P) I also wanted to thank the VP for rejecting me there which had me get into One of the World's Fastest Growing IT Companies In The World.

Life after college is so different. Hope this post would've tingled a reminiscence of your past struggles to get a job (strictly for guys of my type!!) Its time that i had to add Google and Microsoft in my list.... LOL!!