Maa, I look so good, na?

When I was in school, they told me that I resemble Ajay Jadeja. I remember gloating on it because Jadeja was very popular among girls and if I did resemble him, I should be popular too...or so I thought. Unless the girls harbored secret feelings for me, I never got even the slightest hint of my popularity. At that time, I did not understand the reason for this distinction between Jadeja and me, I mean, both of us having the same (almost similar) face and all that. I knew the reason when I went to college and they compared me to Bhim Rao Ambedkar. In fact, for one whole month, they changed my nickname from Sheru to Bheema, as if that was going to make any difference.

To say the truth, I did get a little bogged down when they compared me to the father of the constitution (such great responsibility and all). Adding to this, the Varanasi water and climate cost me quite a lot of hair and my already prominent forehead became all the more shiny and glorious. That was when I left college to join Infosys and they welcomed me to the corporate world by saying that I resemble Mukesh Ambani (why not Anil, pray?). And thus I lived for one and a half years after joining Infosys, in the shadows of the great industrialist until one fine day. This fine day, we were having a project party and one girl (imagine, a girl!!!) from our project said that another friend of hers (also a girl :-)) had told her (why???) that I resemble Calvin. This one, dear friends, is the latest and is also one of the reasons for naming this site Mode C. For the information of all those zealous souls who are going to take this opportunity to study my picture and post comments about how it resembles someone, I have now decided not to take any more resemblances seriously. Unless there is a solid proof (pixel to pixel mapping, for instance), I am going to be Calvin (I really like his style, you know).

Going back to some facts, last night's experience was one that I would not forget easily. It was only yesterday when I was laughing about the incident at Prithesh's house in Gurgaon and joking with him about the seniors being blown over and here I was, being almost blown over myself the last night. I had decided to have dinner at office and was staying back for some time. I also needed to scan some photographs and talk to Abhijeet. The long and short of it is that I was in office at about 8:30 in the evening, talking to Abhijeet on the phone in the adjacent cubicle, when I saw Bijon talking to someone on my phone. He was indicating to me that the call was for me. I asked him to say that I was not there and he did that. I peacefully finished talking to Abhijeet in another 15 minutes and was about to leave office when Bijon dropped the bomb. He said that there was some Severity One issue with my project. I thought that he was joking and started laughing. The laugh, however, turned into a whimper (I could hardly hear myself) when he told me that the person on line was some Powell (some Powell??? that guy is the project manager at Microsoft, primary client contact for my project).

With the client calling offshore, it had to be a serious issue and when I checked my mail, I knew just how serious it was. It appeared that he had sent a mail yesterday morning at 5 regarding some severity one issue that he wanted fixed and which was actually stopping the site from launch. The mail was not copied to my Infosys Id and somehow, I missed it on my Microsoft Id. Nobody else was in today, Sankar and Sathish being on leave and Gomathi having just arrived in India. It also appeared that when he did not find any replies to his mail when he came in to office on his morning (after the working hours at offshore), he got really pissed off and sent a strongly worded mail and copied it to almost everyone at Infosys who is even remotely related to the Microsoft account (and that included a lot of senior people). I even got calls from the account manager in US on the issue. It took me 3 hours of conference calls with locations in Chennai and US to finally solve the issue and soothe the ruffled feathers. I am expecting a follow-up today and a big blood bath with some sacrificial goats (hope I am not one of them :( )

The latest mail on the fresher alumni meet says that *quote Dress Code is casual bordering on formal *unquote. Now what the hell am I supposed to make of that??