Eggs

A short story


“It’s been 45 minutes since this guy went to the shop to get eggs and he’s not returned yet. Even if he had to crawl all the way to the store he should’ve been back by now. Wonder where this guy has gone.” Bharathi was getting anxious; she was expecting some guests for lunch she just had enough time to cook something before they could show up. With most of the cooking done, she was waiting for her son to get back from the store with the eggs. Just when she thought of locking the house and going to the store herself to get some eggs, she heard the door bell ring.

Bharathi just hoped that it wasn’t the guests, she opened the door and there stood her son Vinay, with a plastic bag in one hand and his G I Joe toy in the other.

“Where the hell have you been? What took you so long to just get the eggs from the store? Where have you been loafing around? Every time you go to the store to buy something it’s the same nonsense. I hope at least today you brought the eggs without breaking them.” As Bharathi took the plastic bag from Vinay while she was still venting our her frustration on him there was another shock that awaited.

“Again the eggs are broken, can’t you be careful with the eggs at least once? IDIOT. Being a 12 year old kid if you can’t even do such simple things, I don’t know what kind of a guy you are. Don’t you have any shame? I’m tired of tell you the same thing over and over again.” Vinay however didn’t seem to be bothered much of what his mom was saying but was staring at his other G I Joe toys on the table.

“I should’ve gone to the store myself instead of sending this idiot. This guy is good for nothing” Bharathi stormed into the kitchen as she was shouting at Vinay. Vinay removed his glasses, kept it on the table, sat at a corner and started playing with his G I Joe Toys.

Bharathi managed to cook something by adding some sliced tomatoes and capsicums to the two eggs that were still intact. Before she was done cooking, she heard the door bell again and this time she was certain that the guests have arrived. It was another anxious moment for Bharathi as she opened the door thinking the guests have arrived, but she was greeted by a granny.

“Yes. Can I help you?” asked Bharathi, still wonder who the granny was.
“Is there a small boy in your house? One with specs?” Vinay came over to the door hearing the granny’s voice, he smiled at her as he peeped out of the door. Bharathi was a bit surprised and confused with what was going on.
“Yes. What’s the matter?”

“Well. I stay in the adjacent street. I’d bought my provision from the store and was struggling to carry the bags. This kid walked up to me and offered to carry the bags to my house. So I handed over my bags to this kid and I took his bag and we were walking home. As we got closer to my house I dropped his bag accidentally and the eggs broke. I told him I’ll go back to the store and buy some eggs for him but he said its ok, he needs to get home. When I asked him if his mom will scold him, he said ‘ya she’ll shout at me but it’s ok.’ Before I could check if there were any eggs in my fridge that I could spare the kid left.”

“Oh is it?” Bharathi was listening with patience.
“I felt bad and I was worried that you might scold him so I enquired in the neighborhood and found out your house, thought I’ll at least tell you what happened. It took me some time to get here as I had difficulty climbing the stairs.”
“oh no, that’s ok. Thanks. Please come in.”
“It’s all right; I’ll come some other time. See you kid.” The granny left as Vinay waived her good bye with a smile.

Bharathi closed the door, looked at Vinay and asked, “You couldn’t open your mouth and tell me?” as she stormed back into the kitchen to complete the cooking. Vinay returned back to the corner and continued playing with his G I Joe toys as if nothing happened!

You have been Acronymed!

I recently started a new job with an organisation that is so obssed with Acronyms! so much so the organisation's name is an Acronym by itself, IBM. The downside of getting comfy with such acronyms is that over a period of time people tend to forget what the expansion of these acronyms are. On my first day, during the new hire induction session when the instructor asked what does IBM stand for some character in the class stood up and said with confidence Indian Business Machine!

When you talk to people who have been with this organisation for quite sometime, their sentances will start with acronyms, end with acronyms and acronyms will be sprinked at regular intervals within the sentance. After an entire day of joining formalities, I walked up to the instructor and asked how to go about getting my workstation set up, promptly came a response - "You are going to part of EUS in ITD so you will not be able to request for your TP at MTP, you'll need to go to EGL and contact your people manager for the same." For a minute I thought the instructor was caling out the 26 alphabets in english but got the order totally mixed up. I still had a little hope that the random callout of alphabets had some hidden message in it, so I gathered some courage to ask her for the "english translation of what she just said." After she explained the samething without using any acronyms, I understood that the moral of the story was - my work location is a different office in Bangalore hence I will need to get there and speak to my boss regading the same.

I was really getting lost with these acronyms that was thrown at me day in a day out. One day I was telling one of my colleagues about how lost I was with these acronyms and he told me that everytime I need to know what an acronym stands for I could go to BOT. I asked him "BOT? what is the expansion of BOT?" He said he wasn't sure but if I type an acronym in that application it will provide the expansion of the same.

After spending a week in my new job, I bumped into one of my instructors who conducted the onboarding session when I joined IBM. She asked me how things are going and I said "I'm completely lost here especially with these acronyms that people keep throwing." You won't believe what she told me, she said "I know these TLAs could be very confusing at times." It was at that moment I realised that I was such a good artist, I was 'drawing' blank all these days. I returned to reality in a few seconds to ask her what TLA stood for, but by then she was gone.

I then followed my colleague's advice and opened up BOT and typed TLA, it said TLA stands for Three Letter Acronym. Wow! An acronym for acronyms! I was glad that BOT could make my life simple and I won't be lost anymore. Just then I received a meeting invite for a daily meeting called the DMH call, I was pretty certain what I should do to figure out what the call is all about. I pulled up BOT and typed in DMH and the search result came up with District Mental Hospital! While I was still baffled with what just happened, one of my team members told me DMH stands for Daily metric Huddle.

The other day I was talking to one of my team members to find out if he had complated all the paper work required to hire new people. So I asked him, "Have you rolled out the BBMPs?" He appeared clueless, "Have you rolled out the BBMPs?" I asked him again. Now BBMP stands for Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike, its a government agnecy that deals with cerfiying / approving properties in Bangalore. This guy must have wondered why on earth would I ask him about BBMP, he quickly reasied what was going on and he said, "actually the term you are looking for is BBSI."

Now after spending a couple of months I've been acronymed too and I also use some acronyms very frequently such as yw. np. tx. I also use some US Military acronyms such as WTF, FUBAR, SSDD, BOHICA, SNAFU, TGIF, OFIM, etc.

fb

Evolution has changed a lot of things, the species that once considered Food, Clothing and Shelter as its fundamental needs has added more to this list. Some of the recent additions to this list are things like FaceBook and twitter! I’m a regular on FaceBook and keep putting up some stupid or funny stuff as my status messages regularly. Sometimes I try and add a serious message if need be.

Some of my friends appreciate some of the nonsense that put up on my FaceBook profile which got me into thinking why not compile all that and publish as a post here. Updating your status message on facebook has become a necessity these days and people get additcted to the same like crazy. I remember reading this joke somewhere where this kid is shouting for his mom while sitting in the bathroom. The mom goes near the bathroom door and asks him what hepened for which the kid replied, "can you uodate my face book status message saying I've got loose motion?"

Here are a few from my wall that some of you might enjoy….

I just realized that I’m a good artist, I’ve been ‘drawing’ blank too often these days.

_
__ .
. .
. . _ . This was Morse Code for TGIF – Thank God Its Friday.

Here’s my point - .

I realized that life becomes miserable when you are wanting things, so now I’m wanting not to want things.

I hate when people put every small thing that happens in their life as their facebook status message, by the way, a mosquito just bit me.

If you are the kind of person who rubs salt, you better stay away from Brad Pitt

If you don’t end up getting married to your would-be, he or she will become your would’ve been.

Watched salt for 5 minutes and then my mom kicked me out of the kitchen

If you spell details as detals, it means you don’t have ‘I’ for details

Crack Pots are the pots you keep outside your house to cover the cracks on the floor

After a 2 hour long brain storming session, the storm is gone and so is my brain

When will Indians ever realize that if fairness creams really work as the advertisements claim, one shouldn’t be able to differentiate between Indians and Brits.

Looks like 90% of people who drive in Bangalore have learnt driving through correspondence.

Oh no, reality sucks….

Some jerk has set up an alarm in my body clock and now I can’t sleep beyond 7 AM, even on vacations.

Just had Tanglish (meaning tamil + English) break fast… Idli, vada, fried vegetables, bread, butter, jam egg and so on….

Off to Chennai… and I’m not sure of the season there. It has to be either hot, hotter or hottest.

I have always been good at quitting bad habits. First I quit smoking, then I quit drinking and now I’ve quit MphasiS.

After the rain Gods did all fart and no shit for the entire day yesterday, they finally managed to send some heavy rains last night.

Indian batsmen are preparing the west indies for the semi finals by giving them fielding practice… Way to go India…

50% of the weekend gets over in just 24 hours… Damn you Romans…

Vimal has been hit by a car, since it was a 1/48 scale model there hasn’t been any damage to the man or the machine

By the time the judgement is passed, by the time all the activists are done with their ‘anti death sentence’ protests and by the time all interim stay orders are filed and cleared Kasab will die of old age! So let’s skip the cliché and hang him anyways.

Vimal has been diagnosed with Monday blues and requests friends and family to pray for a speedy recovery…

Its time to celebrate the first Sunday after the first full moon followed by the vernal equinox. In short ‘Happy Easter.’

IPL gives you a tip to save energy during the toss and then they go on to waste so much of energy that the whole world would have saved if they followed that tip.

Has just switched to 3G… lightning fast… wait a minute, why is lighting going on a fast now?

Vimal wants to rename the vada as the Indian Donut.

Vimal wonders how come no one’s got the balls to complain about Mumbai Indians having outsiders in the team.

People at work think I can perform miracles all the time, It’s time to tell them “I ain’t no Moses.”

Vimal wonders how archeologists would remember which site they work in if they happen to be in Bangalore as the whole city is dug up all over!

They always say if you eat the last bite or drink the last sip you’ll get a beautiful wife, but no one ever says whose wife you are going to get.

If I’d been a Roman Emperor in any of my previous lives, I would have made sure there are at least 2 Saturdays and Sundays in a week.

Vimal’s advice to all working professionals, ‘When you know you are going for a debrief session, make sure you put on at least two briefs.’

The most desirable things in life are either banned, illegal or married to someone else.

Vimal is planning to buy a couple of floors in the Burj Kalifa.. that’s the only way to spend his annual bonus.

Vimal wished Jesus Christ a very happy birthday and Merry Christmas to the rest of the world and any other alien civilization that may be in existence.

The whole world is waiting to celebrate one man’s birthday… Awesome!

Vimal strongly recommends people to use public transport. By this we can reduce carbon emission and Vimal can get enough parking space.

Vimal read this interesting Chinese proverb somewhere, “ching ming shang shui meing shei hein shei!”

Vimal has decided to go green by eating only non veg from today and letting all the plants to survive… “Jokes apart, please act today to fight climate change so that we don’t have to regret it later.

There is a new networking site for all donkeys… Its called AssBook.

Too many movies releasing and just two days of weekend. There is clearly a social imbalance…

Commonsense is becoming a coincidence these days.

Ever wondered why fairness careams never make anyone fair? When you try to apply the cream to your face, the cream actually gets applied to your palm and not your face. Don’t believe me.. check out your palm and you’ll notice that its fairer than your face.

Vimal has invented a new technique to improve digestion: People should read book while they eat or just after they have finished eating. Because ‘Readers Digest.’

I used to be so hot once upon a time that I burnt myself.

The secret of success is to start from scratch and keep on scratching.

How to succeed in life? After you’ve eaten the fruit, suck the seed instead of throwing it away. That’s how you suckseed.

When the going gets tough, the tough goes for a smoke. – One of my ex-boss came up with this one.

The Indian Donut

A Short Story

It was small tea stall, about 23 kilometers from Chennai City on the way to Bangalore. While the morning news in the radio was at the best of its decibel, the villagers sitting at the tea stall had evenly distributed the pages of Daily Thanthi amongst themselves in an attempt to validate the radio news. A few were interested in knowing where the country is headed while the rest had much more important things like gossips, Kanni theevu (translated virgin islands) and Sindbad cartoon strips to catch up on.


The guy at the kitchen was busy filling and refilling the empty glasses with beverages, with unimaginable speed and accuracy. A kid, about 10 or 12 years of age, was busy sweeping the place around. The number of cigarette butts thrown around kind of gave an impression that the tea stall was in the middle of an ash tray.

A little away from the crowd stood an old man, with a stick in one hand and an empty vessel in the other, staring at the crowd with a hope that one of them will take care of his breakfast. The old man was wearing a torn full sleeve shirt and dark brown trousers that was of uneven length. He didn’t have any shoes but had wrapped a cloth to his feet. The dirt on his body, his beard, his uncombed hair and dull eyes indicated that he is one among the thousands in this country who live on others generosity.

It was safe to assume that it would’ve been two days since he had his last meal as he could barely stand on his own for long. For a man who stood there amidst the early morning cold breeze with a bit of shiver in his body and a lot of hope in his eyes, the only thing he managed to get was a half smoked and still lit cigarette that someone had thrown away in a hurry to leave. The old man took the cigarette in his hand, had a couple of drags, put if off and safely kept the remaining cigarette in his shirt pocket. Who knows if something like this will ever come his way again. The people in the tea stall were indulged in their own activities as if this old man was either invisible or as if he was a billboard on the side of the road.

A black Hyundai Accent drove in and parked in front of the tea stall amidst the trucks that were parked there. As the doors of the car opened, the loud music that was playing in the car grabbed the attention of the people at the tea stall. Two men walked out of the car and came up to the counter in the tea stall; they were comfortably dressed in shorts and t-shirts. The people at the tea stall looked at the two men as if they were aliens and since the Hyundai Accent had a KA registration, couple of them at the tea stall even gave them a dirty stare. Not seemed to be bothered by any of this, the two men started ordering their snacks & beverages.

“Boss, two chai. Should be Strong.”
“Raghu, you’ll have an Indian Donut?”
“Indian Donut?!”
“Well, they call it the Vada.”
“oh no I don’t want.”
“ok. Boss one vada.” The guy at the tea stall handed over a vada wrapped in a piece of newspaper.
“Thanks. how is the road from here?”
“It’s good, the road was made very latest.”

Raghu took the match box from the shopkeeper, lit his cigarette and picked up his tea glass as he waked to the side of the tea stall with Sethu.

“Sethu, how do you think our presentation went? Do you think we’ll get this
business?”
“Well the way those guys reacted to our presentation, I guess they were convinced but the problem is they are going to talk to some more vendors before they leave India. If this deal comes through we have a very good chance to move to the next level.”
“Hmm that will happen only if our senior management folks don’t come up with some stupid stuff on pricing and project planning.”
“That is there, because of some idiots in the top we've lost so many deals at the last moment. If our company continues at this rate we’ll never be able to move to the next level.”
“I’ll see for another 6 months, if things don’t progress I’ll quit my job and join Maniratnam as an assistant director.”
“Well if you didn’t know, Maniratnam has planned to make one more movie after which he will retire and settle down in Kodaikanal.”
“Aw God.”

Sethu noticed the old man who stood at a distance and watched them, as he reached out to his wallet, the old man walked up to Sethu with a hope of getting something. Sethu pulled out a 50/- rupee note from his wallet and handed over the same to the old man. Raghu appeared a bit confused seeing this,

“You gave 50 bucks to the beggar! That’s a little too much.”
“Why what’s wrong?”
“Look at this guy, he is not handicapped. He could very well work somewhere and earn his bread rather than standing in the street and begging.”
“Look at him, the only kind of job he can get are the ones that require physical labor. Looking at his age, no one would employ him? So for elderly people like him the only hope is the money they get from people like us. That's why.”
“Ya you are right, why did I not look at it this way? Let me also do the right thing by giving the guy another 50 bucks.”

The old man thanked Sethu & Raghu by putting his hands together and raising his hands above his head (that’s one way of thanking people in India).

“What is your name?” Raghu asked the old man.
“Mahadevan.” said the old man in his trembling voice.
“Mahadevan is an old fashioned name, change it to Madhavan it will be more stylish.”
“Started, don’t get too hyper mate?”
“Sethu, let me stand with him can you take a picture of the both of us?”

As Sethu pulled out his phone to take a picture Raghu put his arm around the old man’s shoulder and got ready for the picture. While Raghu was smiling for the camera, the old man was staring at the money in his hand and smiling. Sethu and Raghu showed the photograph to the old man, paid for their tea & vada and returned to their car. With the money in his hand, the old man didn’t seem to pay attention to anything that was happening around him. He surely didn’t pay attention to Raghu waiving from the car as they left or the guy who said “What luck for the beggar” as he left the tea stall.

The old man walked straight to the tea stall staring at the vadas he’s been staring at for a long time now. As he stood there staring at the vadas without blinking his eyes, the guy at the tea stall appeared a bit uncomfortable having the old man there.

“Hey old man, you’re back again to ruin my business? Go away from here, stand in that corner, I’ll give you something later.” The old man didn’t move an inch, it appeared as though he didn’t hear a word the shopkeeper said.
“Listen up old man. What do you want?” screamed the shopkeeper. The old man
handed over the two 50/- rupee notes to the shopkeeper while he was still staring at the vadas.
“Look at his luck, for a guy who doesn’t even know what money is. Here take these vadas and here is the change. Happy?” said the shopkeeper as he took the two 50/- rupee notes from the old man and handed over a vada and a two rupee coin in return. He then put the two 50/- rupee notes in his shirt pocket and resumed his work.

Happy with the fact that he got something to eat and that the shopkeeper gave him some money back, Mahadevan waived at some random black car that passed by, with a big smile in his face.