Yaaawn.

Ever since my last outrageous dream-slash-nightmare only to not remember that in full after I woke up, I told myself that as soon as I wake up from a similar experience, I would note it down and may be start a chronicle of sorts. Today was one of those days, and I thought I'd give you a glimpse as to what is happening inside my head, even when I am not aware of it.

Ok...so I have to skip the first episode, as it is, well, between someone and me, so I'll jump to the  next one.

This one, is straight out of a Spielberg Movie. So I was in this airport with my friends in Chennai. But this ain't the Chennai airport. In fact, even the best of the international airports I have seen don't come close to whats about to happen inside this airport. First of all, like all dreams we have no idea where were we before the airport episode. Second, I have no idea why are we there; we sure didn't receive anyone at the airport. On a passing note, two guys I knew loooooong time back were just coming back to Chennai from abroad. Weird thing is neither of them were in US and neither of them stay at Chennai. But it is a dream, so anyway. And then, the most outrageous thing happens. From the top, something like small satellites drop down, dozens of them. They don't fall on the floor at once, but hold themselves in suspension until the people underneath them clear, and then gently fall on the floor. Now my friends immediately look to hold on to something, and so does everyone else. Before I ask them why they do that, the entire airport stretch elevates, something akin to an open bridge when a ship goes underneath. This makes the satellite-like things to go to the corner, or almost, until the floor is held inclined. And when everything is settled, people just went to one of those satellite thing, opened it and took something. My friends and I went to the one near us, and we opened it. Guess what was in it? Apparently, it contained the food that we ordered (in the distant past of the dream that is now very vague). I was like.."whoa..cool." And of course, I went on to gorge on brownies (no guess needed to know who ordered that one!)

Now back to reality, I woke up to my alarm at 6:00 AM. Feeling just so lazy after a long day yesterday and decided to go back to sleep...just for a little while. And now the part 2 starts..almost immediately I went back to sleep.

So I am back at the airport, but somewhere at basement here you have this hugeee shopping complex (Chennai airport would be so cool if it were this) and I seem to have lost my friends. As I am going through the shops, there this flagrant transvestite, who starts to hit on me. I was like running away from him/her, and before even I realize I am being stalked and chased. I start running away like crazy, I get out of the airport apartment and then fly out to the streets. It is about 8 PM in the night I guess, judging by the thickness of city traffic. As I am in the process of searching my friends, I see them at the end of the street where. Before I call out to them, one of my friend (Ram) calls out for me "Riaz Gaffooooor." Weird, why would any of my friends call me using that name...but again it is a dream. And then suddenly, one guy who was in the vicinity, catches the shirt of my friend and asked, "did you mean RIAZ GAFFOOR? I am searching for him, where is he?" And at that moment I come to the scene, and this guy takes a piece of log that lay nearby and says, "I have been searching you for so long." Before I even comprehend what the hell is happening, we are surrounded by couple of dozen people armed with all sorts of non-ammo tools (Chennai style). I was like, dude why?, and then he says, "remember sometime back you threw a ball back in this street to a group of people who were playing. The ball you threw hit one of our friend's arm and that lead to a blood clot which lead to a complicated heart condition with which he now has to live for ever." I was like, dude. Now I get a flashback within my dream (oh yeah!), and I now remember what I did. Coming back to my senses --in the dream that is-- I asked to talk to the person whom I apparently inflicted the injury upon. That person came -- I swear I had seen him before -- and said to him, "Man, I didn't mean it." He was like, "yeah it is alright, these guys are just making a big thing out of it." He then talked to the crowd and all was well.

Not sure how much had elapsed after that, now I was somewhere, I think it was in one of my friend's place. We are planning a birthday party, and we are in the process of inviting the rest of the gang. And then flash forward, I am reading Business Process Management, which incidentally happened to be the last one I read before going to sleep.

And then I wake up from the slumber, it is now 7:00 AM and I hurry to get ready for a long Monday.

It's definitely a different feeling to jot down what I had dreamed about. I feel that there are so many of my characteristics are evident from most of these episodes, like how much I miss my friends and hanging out with them. Rest, I have no explanation!! 1 to 10 on outrageous scale, this one is probably at 3-4 ish level. I have had 9s and 10s in the past, and I wish I had remember more of them for they would have made some of the best stories.

The Indian Protocol

I have been harboring this feeling for some time, but it exploded when I was watching Mission Impossible 4: The Ghost protocol movie. So much has been said and written about the role of Anil Kapoor, an INDIAN, who has supposedly a plum role in the movie. Now we all know that's not true but that is not the source of my irritation. For some reason, we are unable to shake off the inferiority complex even after decades of Independence. Not sure if it is due to the way we look through our imaginary green tinted glass, or the "color" complex, or it is just how we are raised by parents and in schools -- to be respectful and humble. For me, there is a difference between humility and bending-over.

I personally have witnessed and heard about harrowing biases against Indians in our very own India. My friends were made to wait, or even overlooked, to entries into bars when the foreigners have just walked past them. Or it is the first-class service they always seem to get when they are in hotels, when we were treated like a third class citizen. I could give you a thousand examples as to how we were very much obsessed with everything foreign so much so that we were ready to put down anything “Made in India.” Earlier it was only the inanimate objects; unfortunately, not anymore. I’d be lying if I say that prejudices don’t exist anywhere apart from India. They do, but as far as I know, no one puts down their OWN race to talk better about others. To say that it sickens me is an understatement.
There is nothing wrong being an Indian! We are more than a billion people, so statistically speaking we would have a lot more assholes than many countries’ population put together. But let’s not generalize that all of us are backstabbing hypocritical idiots. It takes a collective approach to change this mindset; one person thinking or doing differently will not improve this situation. In fact, he or she would be brow beaten yielding to the eventual peer pressure.

So why after MI4? So much have been blown out of proportions by our stupid media as to how this IS the break that Bollywood (the Indian Film industry) has been waiting for to get into Hollywood mainstream. Many touted as this is the next best thing after ARR’s Oscar. Fine, it is the current media’s responsibility to put journalism ethics to shame so I’ll leave it at that. But the damn audiences in the movie theatre, they pissed me off to no end. Getting to act in the most awaited move of 2011 is indeed a big deal, yes, but please do not say that this is the biggest moment in his career. It is as if ridiculing his milestones such as Ram Lakhan and Mr. India. And to go on to say that Rajnikanth didn’t get his big a chance! The nerve! I ask them tell one actor –living or dead – who will be able to pull as many people as he can.

Don’t belittle our very own people, people. We Indians are getting “bounced off” almost everywhere around the world. We deserve respect at least in our own country.

Staying Alive

Within a span of just four months into my pursuit, I have made more mistakes than I have made for as long as I could remember. Blame it on the break-neck fast paced life with no excuses for errors. Thats the MBA life, thats the professional life, but I have learnt so much from them, where each time I did/do something stupid, I took a time-off to reset my life. This is not the story, like that Chetan Bhagat's book, these are not the mistakes of my entire life, as I have been into bigger unmentionable shitholes, but they are making me to live, and not letting me to live. Contradictory..well I am a Gemini!

Four months, four mistakes, three of them are my own fault, one of them, perhaps that could be the most profound, it is not my fault...or thats what I think. But it is not anyone's fault either, but it is still a huge problem for me. But for the other three problems, there is a common theme running through it. "I can handle anything." Trust me, that wasn't the story until the last 5 years, some freak incident changed my belief system. From a guy who was always nervous and worried about anything and everything, I became someone who believed that everything happens for good,..worse..that I could get out of any pickle. Now thats all and fine, but problem started when I subconsciously let most of the situations get into a pickle because I kept thinking...well..to quote Barney Stinson.."I am Awesome."

Apparently, I am not...at least not as awesome BS is. BS here is Barney Stinson...clever huh. When I asked myself, why I shouldn't make mistakes, my mind posed me a different question: "Why aren't people trying to make mistakes. " The mistake here, which I should clarify, will affect oneself and not the others. A doctor or a  judge shouldn't make an error in his profession. But the kind I am talking about, only you are affected. Now that I have clarified, let me move on.

Almost everyone I know, is so scared of mistakes. No one wants to be around them. No one wants to admit them. No one wants to try them. It is so very true, that you learn a lot from your mistakes. You can be luckily correct. But you are never wrong by luck. There are others who fret about their mistakes and let them be defined by'em. There are others, who accept that they have made a mistake and move on. And then there are the successful bunch, who commit, admit it, learn from it, and try to not repeat it. History has taught that they have done well. Try out new things. As I always say, there is only one way to find out whether something will actually work; by actually doing it. Try it, the journey is exhilarating. The more mistakes you make, the more confident you get about yourself. Your mistakes is the testimony that you believed in yourself and decided to bet on yourself. if you can't do that for yourself, don't expect anyone else to do it for you.

Aaaaand then the fourth category, those who seem to make the mistake coz well, they can. Yours truly is dabbling with the fourth category now.May be, I am trying to compensate for the insanely boring guy I have been since I was a kid. I have begun to explore, and the more you want to do, the more you make. It is indeed stupid to repeat them, but given the sheer number of stupid things I am doing, they repeat. They aren't identical...but they are similar. Now I am intentionally not specifying what mistakes I had made so far, definitely not the fourth! But that has been the most memorable and most exciting mistake so far. My mistakes, the results of my escapades, my penchant to look "over-the cliff", and my itch to look on the other side, have made my life in this new country more memorable and fun.


P.S:
As I am writing this blog, I got out of the first one. I am awesome...

Stupidonymous

I love my name a lot...it is short and sweet (??). Easy to remember, and as I found in many cases, it is also easy to pronounce even by people not from the same cultural background. But when they ask what my FULL name is, that is when the trouble starts.

You see, till my tenth grade, my name had gone under a multitude of evolution (no numerological or astrological reasons btw) to get to a point where I can write my name with a constant spelling, and took painstaking measures to have the same name in all school records. From Md. Riaz -> Mohd. Riyazudeen -> Mohamed Riazudeen -> Mohammed Riyazuddin -> Mohammed Riazuddin. This name was great, I thought, and I begin to practice my signature with this specific spelling with my dad's initials A.G. (the reason behind my "silver") at the front. Things were fine, not so much so when I appear for the exams (think CAT), where I had to shade my full name in all those ovals. But it wasn't until I wished to apply for passport my troubles started. You know that the passport requires a last name to be filled. In our community, there is no concept of last name. A person just has a name, with no links whatsoever to the family name, mother's name, dad's name or whatever. We were never the "Mr. & Mrs. Sharma" types. So when I required a last name, I went the "western" way by expanding my initials and putting them after my name. Got the passport as "Mohammed Riazuddin Abdul Gaffoor" a name with 32 characters  including space, the significance I didn't realize until I got my job at Verizon.

It seems like many of the systems have a limit of 30 characters for name. So at VZ, I was given Mohammed as first name, Riazuddin as last name, with Abdul as middle name. Even my id card said I was "Mohammed" and I was being called by that. It was very different at the start, as in my then 22 years of existence, I was never addressed as Mohammed. So every time I was addressed as such, I took the pain to correct then and there.."hey you can call me riaz." But over the period of time, all was well, and since I made many "public appearances" my peers knew how to call me.

All was well, until I started to apply for colleges in US. Again the problem, I was called as Mohammed. What's worse, my name started to get cut as my whole name wasn't fitting in many of the application systems. I was Mohammed somewhere...Riaz...or just Abdul Gaffoor. I heaved a huge sigh of relief when my university (UGA) began asking whats my preferred name is, and I very happily replied, "Riaz."

Problem over, no! In my SSN, my name was cut, Riazuddin became Riazudd...and only god knows where these details would be propagated. Add to that, while introducing to my peers, I go, "hey my name is M..R...A..G.. but you can call me Riaz." I lost them at "M...." Then one day came where I had to give what name I wanted to put on my business cards and resumes, and after much deliberation (unfortunate people who were with me when I deliberated know how bad it was) of Mohammed Riazuddin, Riaz Abdul Gaffoor, AG Mohammed Riazuddin, Superman(??), ...I FINNALLYY became Riaz Gaffoor. This ain't my official name as that is still what is in my SSN, but for everything else, the US will now know me as Riaz Gaffoor. Sorry mom, sorry dad, but you shoulda asked me what name I wanted before you kept one!