Smelly THing Called Love

Smelly Thing Called Love

The Crush

I had started to believe in her, when Gina called up, “How are you doing Mandy,” I hadn’t heard from her in 10 days and my last interaction had been a positive albeit a cautious one, I had been flattering myself that she would take an interest in me or my work, after all I was in love with a woman with a ring on her hand.  I had known Gina and Martin for 2 years and only recently realised that I might have fallen for her, apart from having won the “Woman of the Year 2014,” she was a softie, an angel and a die-hard Gene Hackman fan.

Ever since I had met her, we had seen a dozen Gene Hackman movies on her large screen Plasma TV which was Google Chromecast enabled.  Two years of being intern in her company and I was feeling a distinct heady buzz in my brain whenever she turned up wearing her Gucci perfume, smallish earrings and the large blob of a wedding ring that always gave me a headache when I saw it nowadays.  Martin was a great guy and I could see they made the best possible couple, they were smooth, the two of them and could glib talk, woo and entertain any of their guests at the regular Saturday night parties.  The social media was abuzz about their relationship and it turned out every time I turned on Twitter, there were at least 100 mentions of them making news.

I was jealous for the first time in my life, this goddess who was so close and yet so far away

, who took my breathe away was way beyond my reach.  Angrily I had decided that I wouldn’t go to work for 10 days and not call anyone at work, it was April 2007 and New York was glistening with the slightest dews of summers, they said the weather was changing and the summers would come in earlier, global warming and all the gossip mongering we thought it was in those days.  Stories were ripe in my ears from glaciers melting to terrible catastrophes touching planet Earth, and my mind was dizzy with the thought that this one woman had never shown even a hint of affection towards me, “Gene Hackman be damned,” I thought as memories of Rio filtered in, an older woman but so much of class that she could put pretty Julia Roberts into the kindergarten.

The Squeeze

Seven days went by and not a thought or a phone call from her and on the eight day I decided that I was not going to have a bath for the next three days, in penance to Jesus that may be, I was even willing to call upon Satan to further my cause, at least a call, a message, something to keep my heart ticking, I was sure I was going to be heard somewhere.

I spent the first day of unhealthy tenor thinking of her and writing my heart, love letters that would never be announced to the world, I wrote 10s of them and then suddenly I changed track on the second day, my mind slipping into an angrier frame of mind.  I thought of ways I could kill Martin and elope with her, Martin the gentleman he was would have died of heart attack if he had ever heard these thoughts that were ringing in my head.  Then suddenly on the third day, smelling of something I couldn’t fathom, my thoughts started targeting Gina herself, as I began by writing out an out and out hate letter to my Juliet, through the day the tenor of my letters turned blinding and singing in their intensity, there was lose paper littered all around the bed and since I chose to write with an ink pen there were blobs of ink on my clothes as well. 

The Juice

I was smelling, this room was telling me and every time I ventured out of it, the blast came to all the other occupants of the house, I hadn’t gone out of the house for 3 days and hadn’t taken a call either and smelling like a load of goo, when the call came, it was Gina, “Mandy, are you alright, I haven’t heard from you ever since you went on leave,” I sighed relief and spoke to her for 5 minutes and then put the mobile down. My mind snapped back at me, “Mmmmm, I hope she hadn’t smelled my unheralded body odour  #whatsthatsmellboss over the phone,” and then another thought pushed it aside, “Of course she couldn’t have, Oculus had been bought over by Facebook and they weren’t virtual yet.”  I quickly put the lights on my Racold Geyser and decided to have the first feel of hot water in 4 days, the water was already at 45 deg. C, just the right temperature for cool evening, smoke rose up and the water came down stinging my body in pins and needles, my Racold Solar Geyser, always got me home with zero billing, it had been worth the wait.

                                 “Don’t go by the Name, They Serve it Hot at Racold.”

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Two Snakes in Love

I bowed to the wishes of the Lord today and knew that there was no getting away from this thought that I was in love, the more I tried to get away from it, the more it came to me like a rush of blood in my head, like the waterfall that gushes away at the rocks carving niches and its own path.  I have been love before but never known this feel of having loved and lost and wishing that there was someway that I could get back this one who just flew away.  My life till 2 years back was a life of wishful thinking and hope, probably false hope, generated by giving in to people who thought knew better than me.  There is no better way to explain what has transpired, but to take a green leaf sprouting off a tree, and then look at it for hours, till you saw the texture and the veins that carried its life giving fluids and see them in full health

probably revitalised by the touch so soft and so divine that they would never know what had touched me.

I am sad and extremely so, the lamp that gave me life has gone, there is darkness all around, nothing today even matches the sorrow that I feel today.  I met her and lost her, isn't that a lonely thought.  Forget people who have forgotten you, there is nothing much you can do today, it hurts and it hurts bad now.  She says "why is there sorrow in your life today."
"Don't you know, I am just you today."
I just think of that brush and that lock of hair on her head, "I have been hurt and hurt so bad, that its hard to explain where it hurts."
"Forget, my heart, the pain is eternal, love will probably prevail, she will probably marry and I will lose my hope to live."

I put in my papers at work today, got back and sat down to think, its 2 am in the morning here and you know how fast the nights fly nowadays, I looked at the glass in my hand, ice and bottle of Chivas Regal, looking up to the ceiling, then at my laptop, and then decided what has to be done has to be done.  I have to get over her and ofcourse I have been thinking of moving on for 4 months now. Ha' what do I know about love now, nothing, having been pushed to the nadir and back to the nadir.  Love has a habit of coming back and repeating itself.  However much I want her, it will never be more than wanting her to be happy wherever she is, with or without me.
Two Snakes in Love and So We Had To Bite Each Other.

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X-cuse Me Please

X-cuse me Please

There’s Always Music Somewhere
“It’s a beautiful piece of equipment,” she said, sure that I was going to like it, I had looked around all over for this equipment that would bring me the joy of my past, I was in Denver at a store that didn’t look out of the ordinary.  These streets looked familiar, it was like the by lanes of Navi Mumbai, and thoughts came streaming from those days of old, of breaking house windows and starting gang wars in Lokhandwala, we were kids, just breaking the rule to prove a point and then I had moved out of the scene.

Years later the news had come filtering in that now there were actual gangs in Lokhandwala holding people to ransom, that was the fate of a third world nation.  “I am happy to be here,” I said to the sales girl and got talking to her, she was from Tennessee and “damn, she looked familiar too,” something about this town, my mind snapped back at me.  It always did these days, especially when I sat on my “hiney” on that old armchair wondering and dreaming.  “Am I drifting,” it would ask me and get me out of my coffee induced reverie, “damn how I hated this feeling of nothingness,” it felt like I was a 100 years old with my legs on a stool and staring at the fire glowing deep and this warm, some would say “stupid” feeling inside me.

Suddenly she pointed out to a device lying invitingly on the glass rack all by itself, did I say her name was Chara, “Chara, it looks divine.”  She smiled finally, the tension of not knowing what the customer wanted out of the way, and walked me to the aisle where the device lay.

Logitech Squeeze Box Radio

She turned it ON; it was a small intuitive looking power on and the light flashed on a medium sized square panel of the black piece.  There was a huge dial in the front “for navigating the Menu,” said Chara, she was beginning to like the look in my eyes. 

I twisted the dials and got to a menu that said, “Internet Radio,” wondering what next, “press the damn dial,” my mind said again, and I did softly pressing the large dial, suddenly the world had opened up in front me, stations from all over, music, talk show, sports shows. “I am beginning to like this device,” said my mind, “Can you afford me,” the squeeze box seemed to be saying and just as I started to look around for a tag,

Chara pointed to the other specifications and my interest began to develop even further, I could even play repeats and to top it all it’s a wireless.

Chara was packed with energy and it all came out now, “Fantastic device, you are going to love this one, it will give you company through the night, especially the lonely ones and sir, I will pack in a battery at discounted price so you could go cordless on the grass lands.”  The pitch had me convinced, “damn, how did she know I loved the grasslands,” this time my mind was curious. “Don’t,” I told my mind, the deal was done.

“Squeezebox eh? This one was special and she knew it”

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Abstract - Dealing With A Love Story

Dealing with a Love Story

Abstract

Very often there is this need to be able to form concrete plans to tackle hard problems that seem to be inflicting the industry and the company in general.  It is important to understand that there is no one person who can possibly solve the problem nor identify the problem in the first place.  The ideal deal is to be able to get to a resolution that satisfies all and in the time available.  Often enough there are numerous solutions that are available and these might be the cause of various people trying to implicate or bundle a quick try solution for a potentially hard problem.  Here, as will get obvious there are only the following things that can be done : 

1. To quickly outline a theory and demarcate a boundary condition in which the solution can be scoped out.  

2.  To slowly define the problem and the gradually reach a solution using the profound logic, that is there at our hand due to the scientific community.

There have been a number of people who have tried and very often got to it by logic and this far exceeds the people who normally use the solution 1.  Technically speaking if Bill Flower, a good friend of mine was to identify where he got the idea to solve the problem from then it would be probably be from his perspective.  On the other hand there were like, multitude of noises just beginning to get into the head that there were going to be a million of like minded people who  probably wanted this to be worked out through and through.  It was the normal gambit of taking the logic that if we try to become the problem then there would obviously be a solution to it as well that would occur when the time was right.  

Bill and an another close friend of mine Kathy Lambert closely identified that the Solar Industry was going through a bad patch because there was turf war going on.  There were the dealers who were fighting the customers into believing that they were getting a raw deal from the company, the company was fighting the customers to tell them the dealers had to be bypassed as there was precious little that could be done.  The customer on the other hand were confused what to buy and where to buy it from.  If the customer was confused then it could be safely assumed that they were not going to be any sales.  

Here is where the thought of going through a system 1 falls into place.  Intuition and gut feel often has the ability to overcome anger, anguish, selfish and all other traits that prevent human beings from reaching their full potential.  There is a lack of this in the modern management terminologies where it is only a number crunching game, reaching targets the only motive.  A study of the Harvard business school of management has identified that if there is a need to develop it is this instinct for business and not the core principles of business on which a whole lot has been written about.  Truth be spoken, this feel comes from connecting with inner self and understanding how the terminologies and existing implications impact our business decisions. 

So the business as a whole was going through a bad patch, it had been 2 years since a good deal had been cracked in the region.  The site was well developed and the area had been notified as the subsidized zone.  What was not being felt was the impact that in truth was the result of the cultural and other such mismatches in the region.  People thought of the solar business to be run and identified with the aspects as dictated by the market conditions and by the dealers and distributors who developed and nurtured relations.  The customer is always right is the only idiom we believe in. 

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