Mind vs Heart

I don't hate Mondays. I only hate working on Mondays. I spend every Sunday watching movies, drinking beer and every Monday morning my mind spends few minutes convincing my heart that I am not sick and must attend office.

One of the biggest tragedies of my life is that every Monday morning I wake up and find myself not sick. I believe I have fever, common cold, body pain or any possible disease that will allow me take a sick leave and will disappear as soon as I call my boss and say, "I am not feeling well, Can't come, have a nice Monday. Bye Bye." 


Unfortunately, my mind knows that my heart is a coward and can easily be conquered with fear. The fear that my boss will catch my lie just because he too might have done the same on few Mondays when he was not a boss is good enough to make my heart surrender to my mind and take me to office. I know it is a long, stupid and grammatically  incorrect argument but it always works.

Every Monday my mind conquers my heart and takes me to the place which I hate the most, my office. Okay that's not true. The place I hate the most is Pakistan but my office is also full of terrorists. A Pakistani terrorist's job is to drop explosive bombs whereas an office terrorist's job is to drop email bombs. Bombs of Pakistani terrorists kill you whereas bombs of office terrorists make you wish that you were dead. Murder or encouragement for suicide. End result is the same. You die.

Today when I woke up my heart said don't go to office and my mind said go. Before my mind could use its dirty trick of terrorizing my heart, my heart said to my mind, "You know what the cricket score is? Sachin is going to score his 50th test century today. Instead of watching it you want to read this historical moment on cricinfo. I feel so sad to be part of a body that has a brain like you."

My brain was totally dumbfounded. He just didn't know what to say. The heart had just pawned my brain with its awesome argument. My brain remained silent for few minutes and then replied, "STFU heart. Abhishek, get the beep out of bed before the beep heart beeps your beeping life." My heart asked doesn't beep means fuck and my mind replied, "Yes and you are the one who is to be blamed for all the beeping. It is you who instead of downloaded pirated movies made Abhishek watch Big Boss 4. Now suffer. Beep you heart and you lazy beep ass still in the bed, start getting ready for office. Beep Beep Beep. We are going to get a late mark today."

This was a complete role reversal situation for me. My heart was using logic to convince my mind and my mind was beeping to make my heart shut up. I knew my heart was right. I also knew my mind was asking me to do the right thing. Mind vs Heart. Cricket vs Work. It was simple decision. Cricket is what I love and work is what pays my bills. Money cannot buy happiness but……..as part of the great young Indian generation driven by consumerism I know one thing – No money, no happiness. So I got out of bed and reached office hoping Sachin won't mind one less fan cheering him today.

To sum up

Heart vs Mind = Cricket vs Work = Story of every Indian = Cricket rules my heart and work my mind.

One blog for the MBAs

One of my colleagues had coolest life ever. Since he graduated from a decent college, he got a decent job with a good pay. Not only that he also had a girlfriend. Decent job, good pay and a girlfriend, this guy was practically living my dream life. However, this guy thought, “Fuck…who needs all this…..I don’t want people to be jealous of me living their dream life so I must get married.”

I am not a misogamist which means I don’t hate marriages. In fact, I would like to put on record that I like marriages. I have spent a good deal of my life in hostel and I know the importance of good food. I love marriages for all the free good food they bring in my life.

Unfortunately for my colleague his marriage didn’t turn out as he had planned and he was still happy. So he decided to do the worst thing one could do to his life. He got himself enrolled for a part-time MBA course. Since he couldn’t become unhappy he decided to make others unhappy by becoming an MBA (Mean. Bastard. Arrogant).

Today during the tea-break I came to know his exams for the first sem of MBA had started. He told us that he appeared for a paper of MBA and was stunned to find people were filling supplements. I too was stunned. MBA means you must be able to speak crap at length without knowing a single thing about the topic and this future MBA couldn’t even write crap. I am scared to think one of my favorite colleagues is going to become an MBA which cannot talk crap. God knows who will hire such an MBA.

While talking about his exams he told us that something very stupid happened during the exam. The invigilator told the class that mobile phones are not allowed. I would say it was a smart move by the invigilator to stop cheating. You don’t think so. Go and watch Rajni Sir’s Robot now.

My colleague followed the invigilators instructions, switched off his mobile and kept it in his sack in a corner of the room. With fifteen minutes to go the mobile started ringing. My colleague full of embarrassment immediately submitted his paper and ran out of the classroom with his sack.  

I was relieved to hear this story. My colleague (who by the way is an engineer) by the end of first semester of MBA had become incompetent enough that he couldn’t even switch off his own mobile. I am sure by the end of his MBA course he would be competent enough to talk crap as if he was born to do so. This will ensure that as soon as he completes his MBA, he will be flooded with job offers. By the way I have one wish to make…….God help the engineers who will be working under a Team Leader that cannot switch off his own mobile phone.

To sum up

MBAs are the James Bonds of India. They have license to kill people with crappy talks.

FML

I think the reason deadlines are called deadlines is because they turn the people working on deadlines into Zombies. People working on deadlines have no social life. They don’t log in to facebook, don't read newspaper and come to office with a mood to kill their boss. The only thing on the mind of the people working on a deadline is work. This turns the employees working on a deadline temporarily into workaholics which is a good thing for the company and bad for the people interacting with the Zombies in office.

It is a well known rule of management that for better management people must work in teams and for a cheerful atmosphere in office some people who are expert in giving unwanted, irrelevant and stupid comments must be hired and allowed to interact with other employees. The expert commentators being hired to reduce tension in office try to be funny by enlightening the Zombies with their expert comments. This leads to the situation where you will find someone laughing on his own jokes and the other person in the conversation with a look on his face that he wants to jump on the expert, bite him and turn the expert into a Zombie like himself. Don’t blame management for it. It is a well known problem associated with Zombies. They have no sense of humor.

I told you that working on deadlines is a bad thing. However, there is something which is worse that than working on a deadline. It is working on a deadline that doesn’t belong to your team.

For the last two days I am working on a deadline that doesn’t belong to my team. The deadline belongs to a team that is headed by a Very Senior Manager (VSM). The VSM being a Very Senior Manager is working on more than one project and has asked me to do some work that she is supposed to do. Since it is a request from a VSM I cannot say your deadline is not my problem and have to work on the deadline.

Today I received an email from VSM that she has been checking the work done by me. The email started with Hello Abhishek and told me that she is extremely impressed by my work. The quality of my work is awesome and I have done few things which she might have overlooked. I read the email, then read it again, decided that I am taking the print out of this email to my next appraisal meeting and then instead of replying to the email went back to work.

After lunch time I received an email from our COO.  The email was a reply to the email send by the VSM to me. The email didn’t start with Hello Abhishek. In fact, it didn’t even have a single line. It had just one word. The word was ‘Great’. I read the email by the COO and immediately checked the CC field. I found out that the email send by VSM to me was marked to few people in senior management.

If I had read the CC field before I would have replied to the email with a thanks you note, a smiley or just few lines like - it is is my pleasure to work with you and I am always ready to work on deadlines because I am a dedicated employee and also I love being a Zombie. However, now I am an arrogant employee who doesn't have the common courtesy of saying thanks when someone appreciates his work. Don’t blame it me. I am working on a deadline and hence turned into a Zombie and as you would have learnt by watching several Hollywood zombie movies, Zombies don’t reply to emails.

To sum up

Every dog has its day. I had my day and totally ruined it because I was not a dog on that day but a Zombie. Also that, I love the element of surprise in my life. Just when I think things cannot get any worse, I find out they can.