SHANTARAM…

I just completed reading the book, “SHANTARAM” written by Gregory David Roberts.
It was awesome, mind blowing and according to me, a literary masterpiece.
Here is a prologue to the book. I hope you enjoy it as I did.

“It took me a long time and most of the world to learn what I know about love and fate and the choices we make, but the heart of it came to me in an instant, while I was chained to a wall and being tortures. I realized, somehow, through the screaming in my mind, that even in that shackled, bloody helplessness, I was still free: free to hate the men who were torturing me, or to forgive them. It doesn’t sound like much, I know. But in the flinch and bite of the chain, when it’s all you got, that freedom is a universe of possibility. And the choice you make, between hating and forgiving, can become the story of your life.

In my case, it’s a long story, and a crowded one. I was a revolutionary who lost his ideals in heroin, a philosopher who lost his integrity in crime, and a poet who lost his soul in a maximum security prison. When I escaped from that prison, over the front wall, between two gun towers, I became my country’s most wanted man. Luck ran with me and flew with me across the world to India, where I joined the Bombay mafia. I worked as a gunrunner, a smuggler and counterfeiter. I was chained on three continents, beaten, stabbed, and starved. I went to war. I ran into the enemy guns. And I survived, while other men around me died. They were better men than I am, most of them: better man whose lives were crunched up in mistakes, and thrown away by the wrong second of someone else’s hate, or love, or indifference. And I buried them, too many of those men, and grieved their stories and their lives into my own.

But my story doesn’t begin with them, or with the mafia: it goes back to that first day in Bombay. Fate put me in the game there. Luck dealt the cards that led me to Karla Saaranen. And I started to play it out, that hand, from the first moment I looked into her green eyes. So it begins, this story, like everything else- with a woman, and a city, and a little bit of luck.”

I’ M FREE…

I’ m free…I’ m on BENCH.

Since the last 6 months, I have not been getting much work in the project. Today, I m relieved from the pain and burden of having a project code against my name.
Yesterday, on hearing this, one of my friends asked,
“I don’t understand. You didn’t have to work earlier and you don’t have to work now. What the difference does it make?”
I hope this blog can explain the difference.

My association with the project was much like an affair with a young, gorgeous lady.
(I call it ‘young’ because it was a single resource project and ‘gorgeous’ because I got to work on niche technologies).It gave me high visibility (due to client appreciations and good appraisals) in the circle (my project in particular and unit as a whole) and also envious on-lookers (due to my late-to-office-early-to-go routine). The only and the biggest problem with the project was that I didn’t have “enough” work.

The case was like -You can sleep with this young, gorgeous lady but you can’t make love to her. Now, this is an insult to the manhood of any person. You just cannot expect any MAN to do that. Of course, ‘Making love to her’ is the single-most important thing in the world for a man in that position. I am sure, ‘just sleeping with her’ does not even feature in his ‘Top 10^n, n-> Infinity, actions I would like to do in my life-time’ list.
Similarly, for a Software engineer, it is an insult to be in a project where there is not enough work. I would like to have all the good appraisals, appreciations and envy from my project mates, but for my work/quality of work rather than for the lack of it.
A release from the project gives me two immediate benefits:
Reduces frustration
Makes me available for service to other projects. (It is very much possible that I don’t just have to sleep with the lady this time)

So, this is for the other gorgeous ladies (projects)…

I’ m free…I’ m on BENCH.
Only Term and Condition: You know what ;-)