Replug

As I relentlessly hammered in my last post that I was in the organising team of the Annual Get-together of my firm and I did nothing, this post is all about the work I did for that. These posters and the write up at the end for some magazine I have no idea about.

The design was not by me, only the words were.

This was entirely done by me.

This was also done by me

The name was suggested by a colleague.

The background was contributed by a colleague, the rest by me. Though the original lines went something like these

“ We still snarl ‘kutte’ to our friends at times,

That hot girl is still ‘Chamiya’ for us,

People with “Thakur” as surnames are still asked for their hands at times.

And still more jokes are made on Sholay that on our politicians.”

And then followed all that is written on the poster. But it all was edited out.

And the write up is

“The evening began with poise and ended with exuberance. In an nutshell, that was the ambience, tone and the general spirit at the annual family night “Spandan’ we had on 26^th of November.

 From buffets to drinks, from dancing troupes to employee dance performances, from casino to karaoke, from lucky draw to fashion shows ,  from musical shows to couple games and from kid games to childhood picture games, we tried to incorporate all. The fact that there was fantastic enthusiasm and participation shown from the employees and their families obviously spiced it all up.

  There was a mesmerizing semi classical Indian dance performance by the daughter of one our colleague while another of our colleague chose to partner his son on “Tabla” an Indian percussion instrument to result in an utterly mellifluous ballad. A tiny tot’s dance performance completely belied her age and some of our colleagues who tried to copy her steps are still recovering from cramps!! While a senior colleague chose to remind us of his splendid skills with harmonica, the innovative couple games involved such twists and turns that the participating couples were left exercising those muscles and bones of their bodies they never knew existed.

 A family event that it was, it never could have been complete without the involvement of the newest addition to our CH2M HILL family- The Halcrow Group. Several Halcrow employees were also present and delighted us all with their active participation. One of them actually won First Prize in the Fashion Show event. Well Done Sir.

 A memorable night was rendered truly momentous with the verve of participation from one and all. It really was a night to dance, jive and feel alive.”

Any creative media agency reading this post and liking it ? Anyone?? 

Bored Ruminations

It has been four months since I have been employed. And the only thing I have learnt apart form the fact that you actually wish your colleagues “Happy Weekend” on Fridays is to unlearn the theory that you have to work a lot while you are being employed while I was in college. Well, another thing I have learnt of course is that your supervisor will come to look for you to fill timesheets, to tell you about some non-technical training, asking you about the coming get-together, hand you your termination letter at the exact time on which you will not be present at your “work”place. Ok, he didn’t come to hand me my termination letter, but maybe he did come and didn’t find me anywhere. But Murphy taught us all this years back. Didn’t he? So there goes my chance to “learn” anything  because just learnt that before I should have learnt that. Frankly, why are you still reading this post??

And even more frankly, I don’t know why I am writing this post.  May be plain boredom at work. F act that I was in the organising team of our Annual Get-together, fiction that I actually helped in that organising. Fact that Internet has now marked my blogspot blog URl as a phishing address, fiction that I actually harboured fishes there. I even deleted the widget “Feed these Fishes”, but to no avail. Fact that I am thinking of buying a personal domain, fiction that I will actually do so. Fact that I am writing something meant to be a blogpost, fiction that I will actually post it. Ok, did you just say that it is not fiction that I will post this as you can read this blogpost. You too are damned bored right now, aren’t you?

So, if you are still with me you may have read that I was in the organising team of the Annual get-together of my firm. Forgive me if I make that sound like organising of Olympics, but still there were lessons to learn it. Like how to shop with ladies. “Shopping”, “Ladies” and “Men” have difficulty in existing together. I knew that beforehand, but I learnt it now. Then naming an event is the most difficult part and you have to start with that. Or that lucky numbers are not really lucky. Actually we had a lucky draw prize based on the coupon numbers allotted with the invitations to employees. Now as the organisers , some of has had first access to the coupons and selected numbers like 123, 111, 013, 007 or like in order to get lucky. But the numbers which won were 072, 078 and we realised that the numbers we thought were lucky were actually only good looking numbers. On second thoughts, 13 x 6 = 78. Now did you tell me to shut up?

Another lesson I learnt was that while expats got to know about the timing of event , 5.30 pm that is  by looking at the invitation card and arrive at that time , we Indians never require the invitation card to know about the timing. Like we Indians all arrived at 7.30 and that was the time the event started. Telepathy, anyone?

Also, recently we had a Rewards and Recognition felicitation at our office which is held to reward the outstanding performers of the last 3 months. Only, this time it was a little different. Instead of rewarding people with outstanding work in the last 3 months, the management decided to award everybody who worked in the last 3 months. And the awardees were in total 5 in number.

And at last, as the year draws to a close, it reminds of the number of great people we lost this year. Along with Shammi Kapoor and Dev Anand , the person whose work I liked the most was Shrilal Shukl. And,

मैं श्रीलाल शुक्ल के बारे में कुछ नहीं लिखना चाहूँगा 

क्योंकि वो शब्द सूरज को ना सिर्फ दीया, बल्कि माचिस दिखाने के जैसा

होगा, वो भी बुझी हुई माचिस ।

And to conclude , I must admit that I have not seen many movies of either Shammi Kapoor Or Dev Anand, but of all the old songs I love and they are far greater in number than the new ones, I realised few days back that 90% of them star either Shammi Kapoor or Dev Anand. RIP All.