The two Abhisheks

I learnt about Dissociative personality disorder from movies. It is a situation where a guy has two personalities. Hyde and Jekyll type. One guy is like your colleague next cubicle and another is a killer. In the end the bad guy takes over, there is some maar-dhad and we all know what happens next. We all have been there. We all have walked into a cinema hall with a Pepsi and popcorn and came out with a splitting headache.

The two parts of my personality are visible at work and home. At work I am the good guy. I do my work, I give pravachan to people that this work sucks but you need to do it because it pays money with which after work you can buy cigarettes, beer and pizza. I also keep myself pretty nicely organized. I have maintained my MS Outlook in such a way that I once opened it front of one of my colleagues to show her an email and she said , “Abhishek, you are a genius. I have never seen such a well organized Outlook in the whole office.” Sometimes I feel so disappointed that my company doesn’t have a best organized inbox award.

At home the other Abhishek i.e. the awesome one takes over. There are clothes that are unclean and I intentionally keep them on floor so that I won’t wear to them to office by mistake. There are wrappers of biscuits and Maggie on floor which must be in dustbin but are not there because I stay miles away from my parents and hence not afraid of a surprise cleanliness inspection by my mom. The best part of Abhishek at home is the way he handles email.

At office when I receive an email I always mark it according to its importance, give a prompt reply and move it to the relevant folder. At home when I receive an email, I read it and then forget about it. I am always sure that the sender would have asked the same info from few more friends and some sucker would definitely reply. My philosophy about emails at work is don’t allow anyone to complain and at home is don’t reply until they complain.

To sum up

The biggest difference between office and home is that in office you do what you are supposed to do and at home you do what you want to do.

Comics

I grew up in a town. A place where the medium of instruction in English medium schools is Hindi. During my childhood there was no Cartoon Network in India. The only TV channel we had during those days was Doordarshan and the only cartoon show I got to watch was the one after the morning mythological TV serial. Today when I see children watching several cartoon channels in high definition TV, I feel jealous but still somehow I feel all these super cool cartoons are no match to the time I had reading Hindi comics.

When I was a child, Hindi comics were a very big industry. Today as far as I know only Diamond comics and Raj Comics are the two active Hindi comics publisher. I was fortunate enough to read comics by Manoj and Tulsi publications. Unlike today’s children who get to watch only funny cartoons, I got to read a whole genre of comics ranging from comedy to action to horror (Raj Comics once upon a time published few comics under the series Thrill-Action-Horror or sometime like that.)

Today when I walk into a bookstore I find all the big comics. From Calvin, Asterix, Tintin to Superman, Spiderman etc etc and I buy them. Unfortunately, all the big bookstores located in the big malls have no space for my beloved Hindi comics. The only reliable space where I find them is the railway station and there also I have been unable to get the latest set of Raj Comics (If also like me you grew up reading Hindi Comics then you know the meaning of set and the eagerness with which we waited for it every month of summer holidays.)

The library I have joined in Pune doesn’t store Hindi comics. It has got dedicated shelf space for English comics that must cost more than Rs 200 per copy but you won’t find a single Hindi comics that costs less Rs 50. I once asked my librarywala, ”Uncle why don’t you keep Hindi comics” and he replied ,”Bcoz there is no demand for them”. I wanted to tell him that is not true because I spend the summers of my childhood reading if not tons than kilos of Hindi comics but then as far as I know none of the children in my family know much about Nagraj, Dhruv, Parmanu or Doga. Their day starts with school, after that tuition and ends with doing homework. Forget reading comics it is wonder that they even get time to watch Cartoon Network. Unfortunately they know nothing about the great Indian comic book superheroes and since I do, I will end this blog by writing few lines in the memory of those I remember.

Chacha Chowdry: It will be wrong to call that the man more intelligent than supercomputer is the only hero of this series. It's not only him but his sidekicks Sabu, his wife and their dog Rocket are equal fun to read. The best comics of this series are those where Raka, the villain who couldn’t die appeared. Believe me even if you are not a comic enthusiast still buy those comics that have Raka. You will not regret that the money that you earned by slogging into an AC office got wasted.

Billo: His hairs were long enough to always cover his eyes. As a child I thought he had the coolest hairstyle and I still believe so.

Raman: I don’t think anyone remembers him. He was a middle-class middle-age guy with a family. His problems were the problems of our daily life. If there has ever been any character that could portrait the true life of an Indian then it was him. Another comics I remember like this was Shrimatij in which a housewife was the central character.  

Tosi: An action hero. He was actually an Ichadhair Nag. As far as content goes he was most genuine action hero I have ever read. This could be because it was written by Ved Prakash Sharma, Hindi’s bestselling author of thriller novels.

Nagraj: Hssss…..the Snakeman. He started off as a globetrotting warrior against terror but nowadays resides in Rajnagar and has a dual identity like Marvel comics characters. The transition from the traveler to one city man had destroyed the charm of Nagraj.

Super Commando Dhruv: My personal favorite. Dhruv’s initial comics were good enough to make hardcore sci-fi fans appreciate it. Personally I believe the stories of his first few comics such as Pratishodh ki jawla, Roman Hatara, Mahamanav are good enough to beat the western comics. Dhruv doesn’t have any superpower except being able to talk with animals but beats villains who are vicious, intelligent and loaded with superpowers with his common sense and athletic ability. Unfortunately all his new comics I have read during the last few years lack common sense and are complete crap.   

Parmanu: Mr. Superhero. Always fun to read.

Doga: If you want to read an action comics then read his. He is only the genuine action hero Indian comics have right now.

Angara: He was created by a scientist who gave him the strengths of several animals like skin that bullets cannot penetrate. He commanded a loyal army of wild animals. The antagonist of this action hero was a dwarf robot who got his energy from Sun.

Krukbond: James Bond ka chela. He and his sidekick Motu not only solved mystery but also made you laugh. He was the best comic action hero I have ever read.

Halwadar Bahadur: His comics were written in the language I spoke with my friends. Funny enough to make you sometimes stop reading the comics so that you catch a break from laughing.

Bakelal: Hehehehe…………….. even the mention of his name makes me laugh. Shivji has cursed him that all his schemes to do bad of someone will turn out to be good for that person. He works as a minister of Raja Vikram Singh and wants to become the King but due to the curse his every scheme to kill the King solves the problems faced by the King. His comics end with him explaining the King that what he did was pre-planned by him to help the King and the King with big moustache kissing him which he hates.

Fighter Tods: Very funny but I have always felt they are rip-off of Teenage Ninja Turtles

Gamraj: Son of Yumraj, the God of death. Munna Bhai of Indian comics. Reading the adventures of Gamraj, his bull Yamunda and his sidekick Shankalu who always made wrong predictions always made me laugh.

Yay!!! We won

I am an average Indian cricket fan. By average I mean I am not one of those guys whom you meet and they start talking non-stop about the latest Indian victory but if I ever meet such a guy I don’t ask him to shut up. Today I reached office with the determination that I will not type cricinfo.com in the address bar of my browser. I knew the score, I knew the score day before and thought a draw is bad for test cricket and after reading 55/4 felt a draw which is bad for test cricket is much better than India losing the match.

I reached office. Checked mails and went to cricinfo. Call me a person with weak willpower but I grew up in 1990s and for me as long as God is on the crease, there is hope. The God got out and my colleagues asked me would I like to join them for a cup of tea. The conversion during tea didn’t revolve around cricket, no one wanted to discuss it because we all had pretty much resigned to the fate that Australia were one-up in the series.

I came back, checked score, got the information that we were indeed going to lose and went back to work. After working for some time I logged onto to twitter. Twitter told me that Sachin is God but against Australia Laxman is the real devil. He always sinks the Australian ship and this time it was not gonna be any different.

I started tracking the match again on cricinfo and was happy to get ball by ball updates of what­ all the tomorrow’s edition of every Indian newspaper are going to call as the one of the best innings of Laxman and Ishant’s careers. India was on track to register a victory which every average Indian fan is going to remember for a long time and I was happy because thanks to my weak willpower I was watching history being made.

As the match progressed some more average Indian fans in my office opened cricinfo and then Ishant got out. Most of my colleagues considered it as the end of the Indian innings and went for lunch. Few asked me do I wish to join them and I wanted to throw paperweight at them but unfortunately the admin dept never issued me one. Lucky for my die-hard pessimist colleagues.

As India reached near victory cricinfo died. It was one of the moments in life when you wish you had plan B ready and I had one. I shifted to cricbuzz and it due to the heavy traffic from several average Indian cricket fans who crashed the cricinfo servers also died. This was the moment I wished I had a plan C ready but unfortunately I didn’t, so googled for cricket score, found few websites and settled for Yahoo cricket because it was still alive. 

At the end of the match there was some drama but it was nothing compared to what was happening at my desk. Me and one of my colleagues were refreshing the yahoo page again and again trying to get the latest score but even after refreshing it two to three times we were seeing the same number of balls being bowled. Either Australia was blowing in slow motion due to which each ball took 2 minutes to deliver or the commentary on yahoo was slow. 30 years back my father used to beat his radio to get the score and I felt I too needed to so the same. Unfortunately, my father owned the radio and I don’t own the office PC so I decided to check the score at cricinfo, cricbuzz, yahoo, rediff, indiatimes etc etc simultaneously only to hear a colleague shout Yaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyy, WE WON.

To sum up

Every Indian loves cricket and loves it even more when India wins and for our love of the game cricinfo needs to buy few more servers.