Last day in my first company

Today was my last day in my first company. Finally feeling pretty happy and relieved. Gotta get one more sign on the clearance form and booom i am off :). This whole one week or a bit more has been one hell of a busy week...attending parties.....giving parties...getting clearance signatures.....+ few other blah-2 things......

Well this last day was unlike the usual last days that generally happen coz today there was also an "ice-breaking" session in our group !! All in all it was a great day, real fun, some INTERESTING moments.

First of all there was an intro round, there were few interesting ways in which ppl gave their intros...but the most popular way seemed to be some kinda thinking posture or some sudden feeling of elation...well me borrowed the "pehchaan Kon ??" from the bar-girl waala boy frm GILC :D

Then there was a round where u had to show some kinda depression...well this was a pretty boring round !! Almost everyone doing the same thing, in same way...some of them were so depressed that we could hardly hear them :)). Apart from 2 songs sung in that round it was pretty tp, interestingly one of 'em was sung by our GPM.

Then there were few funny rounds like someone having to enact as elephant trunk with ppl on his sides enacting has elephant ears, one round with ppl enacting as boats n all......the current elephant had to chose the next bakra [aka elephant] and when sanjayku san was selected as the elephant i somehow knew me will have to become the next :), but well wasnt this supposed to be my last day ? yes, so there came a twist from our GPM...he changed the elephant script to shooting script !! And i had to enact a person dying after being shot :o, with 2 ppl on my side weeping :)). So i was officially dead now :D

Then came a round a group of ppl had to make some given scene, and others had to guess that from our depiction of that scene...well my laziness in shaving made me a pick-pocketer :o, anyway that was fun....picking the pocket of a PM :D

Then came the finale round, and it had points...well the best thing about having points is that it turns on the competitive spirit. In this round one of the team members had to enact a situation or anything given on the chit and the rest of the team had to guess that and then become part of that situation..a bit like dumb-c only but with some twist :) ...Our team started in the worst possible manner, with our team member reading something else on the chit, and enacting tht ! On the other hand Alok san and Mihir san's team did outstandingly in the first round !! After the first round, in which 4 ppl had turned up for each team, our team was last..., then came the 2nd round and luckily most teams did badly in this round and me, who had to enact the situation got an easy one, which we actually did pretty well to get the bonus points also to get right back in the game. Then came the 3rd and last round, it had so many points that it could turn the tables 180 deg...n well that's wat happened sasan san lead his team like a TM and enacted the final clue brilliantly and all his team members did really well to earn the bonus points which virtually won them the game. If either of Mihir san's team or my team had to win they had to take bonus points...Mihir san's team scored but failed to get the bonus points...so our team was last....bonus points, we win, else we lose....and somehow
at the last moment at this crunch time my PL who was originally supposed to act the final clue, threw the responsibilty on me :o, anyway i went there and saw the topic...and was amazed ! wasn't this my final day ? yes !! the topic was "employee firing his BOSS" !! well-2 i wonder if it was specifically chosen for me :)), anyway i think i enacted it pretty well, even my PL guessed it perfectly correct, + other team members also got quite well into the scene...but alas....the performance ended, our GPM glanced at the scoreboard for a minute or so and said most of them could exactly guess the situation correctly, so we got a ZERO !? :o :o :o, common even if some of them got wrong still we would have got MORE than SOME points, but ZERO ?? again was it delibrate/biasing or something ? [fingers crossed] wtf why would i care ? anyway the surprise score left us on 3rd position. still that was fun :)

Then it was followed by a senti speech by our GPM, over the group and all..but i am sorry [sorry to Mihir san only] that it failed to evoke many emotions in me...anyway won't go into the reasons.....Though i believe that speech surely would have served some purpose, atleast it will effect the new freshers that have joined the group :)

PS: i wrote after a long time, was TOO-TOO busy to write :)
PPS: saw skeleton key yesterday...kinda fine....nothing exceptional....but u can see it once for sure :)
PPPS: would be entering a new world in the new week !!

End of an era of dominance

July 21st, 2005 [no i am not talking about my bday] a battle started for one of the biggest prizes in the history of cricket. And today September 12th, 2005 it ended. And surely it has more than lived upto all the pre-series hype.

It was a series between THE champions Australia and THE challengers England. Before the series it was being predicted that this time it is going to be close one and England might just get the result which England have not gor for 16 years and 29 days, which neither of the current players have experience on either sides. Well but surprisingly for the whole series the roles of the champions and the challengers were reversed (except for the first match @ Lords), in all the matches it was Australia who were doing all the running, while it were England who were taking the lead thoughout. It was simply left to Warne-man show for Australia after the first match at Lords. It was a pathetic result for the Australians and i believe there would be some whole sale changes in the Aussie team.

All and all it was THE Greatest Series ever with all of the last 4 matches going right down to the wire. One of the very few series who were this hardly fought. A Mcgrath special at Lords to give Aussies an easy win, a nail biting 2 runs win for England at Edgbaston, followed by a thrilling 4 over stay at the wicket by Mcgrath and Lee against the hostility of Flintoff and Harmison at Old Trafford to draw the game, followed by magical spell from Warne and hostile spell from Lee at Headingley to almost sneak out victory defending a small target of 129 runs and today another thrilling bowling display from Warne was negated by the brash attitude of KP to sneak England a draw which helped them achieve their greatest ever result in a past decade or so, or maybe even the greatest EVER ! While for the Australians it might just be their worst ever !

This result would be a real heartbreak for Shane Warne, because this was supposed to be his farewell series in England and this man gave it all, maybe did what even he or his staunch supporters might not have expected. He scored over 200-odd runs with a batsmen like average of 30 plus and picked a whopping 40 wkts in the 5 match series. But all to no avail ! He even bettered his '93 debut series which he started by bowling the 'Ball of the Century' and took 34 wkts and hence started an era of Aussie dominance over this biggest and oldest prize in the history of game. But today the era has ended and it proved to be a tragic farewell for one of THE GREATEST EVER PLAYER in the history of game.

I guess Warne must be thinking about this song from Linkin' Park today:

Time is a valuable thing
Watch it fly by as the pendulum swings
Watch it count down to the end of the day
The clock ticks life away
It's so unreal
Didn't look out below
Watch the time go right out the window
Trying to hold on, but didn't even know
I wasted it all
just to watch you [Ashes] go

I kept everything inside
And even though I tried
It all fell apart
What it meant to me will eventually be a
memory of a time when
I tried so hard and got so far
But in the end, it doesn't even matter
I had to fall to lose it all
But in the end it doesn't even matter

I guess few of the main reasons responsible for the Aussie defeat are:

• Ponting and aussie management's stubborness of not playing the new players like Hussey, Hodge, Haddin, Tait et al and persisting with the players who were failing repeatedly like Gillespie, Kasprowicz, Hayden, Katich, even Martyn and Gilchrist.
• Inability of few of the Aussie batsmen to accept the fact that English bowling attack is quite good and they have to grind their runs especially when most of them were awfully out of form.
• Dropping crucial catches and getting wickets of no-balls.
• Almost always wasting their first innings and then doing catch-up in the whole match.

I think its enough for today..would surely write a few more posts on this enthralling series.

To finish it i would bow down to the level of cricket that was played in this series and especially to two players who gave all they had in them to win the Ashes for their country. Ironically among those two players one of them, Shane Warne, was playing his last Ashes series in England and the other one, Andrew Flintoff, was playing his first Ashes series. These two players almost single-handedly carried their team throughout the series with occasional support from others. But in the end the broad and young shoulders of Andrew Flintoff carried his team farther then old but pretty strong shoulders of Shane Warne.

The Great Indian Laughter Challenge

Well yesterday i got to watch the finale of the Great Indian Laughter challenge..well that was actually a great fun..The winner Sunil Paul was simply outstanding...for me he was easily the winner among those 6. Coincidently the thing which won him the contest was the parody of a *POPULAR* song by a winner of a similar contest [Indian Idol]. He was also pretty good in mimicry of various actors mainly Sunil Shetty, Naseeruddin Shah et al... I guess Raju Srivastava was pretty good too with that newer version of Sholay with Gabbar as totally un-influential person. For me he should have been second..but anyway there was no fight about the First result !
All n all a pretty good entertainment...

On a finishing note, i think these channel wars are actually getting some real interesting contests in, and allowing some good talents to take the center stage. Almost every channel these days is having similar contests... Indian Idol, Great Indian Laughter challenge, [V] Popstars, Harsha ki Khoj....the list is endless..

Enough for now...wrote after a long time :)

PS: Eagerly waiting for the Ashes to finish, and see the warney retaining the trophy for the Aussies !