kartik kannan's space on the web

All about the weekend.


On Saturday, LG,Sid Vinu and myself met after what was quite a long time.I guess it must be a year back when all 4 of us met at the Eden restaurant in besant nagar way back in august 05.This time too the venue was no different,but the occaission was Sid's onsite trip to the UK.Our gossip started gaining momentum when we had to wait outside for about 45 minutes before we could get a seat inside,and as usual Sid played the "man" of the group taking care of enquiries and routine seat checks,while we 3 jabbered along.Invariably each one started talking about his workplace and our lives after college.LG seemed more than content with Honeywell in Bangalore,while Vinu seemed to exude extreme anguish at his job at CTS.The guy was suffering from benchophobia and felt he was not being used well as a resource.Sid,whose maturity and responsible image,which we have seen since college, has not deserted him at all.He's been offered a promotion to a PL.All of us agreed on one thing that each one of us being in the junior level (about 2 years exp) were being exploited in someway or the other at work,but hey we need the experience ,so none of us actually complained beyond level 2. After exchanging pleaantries at work, we got down to dissecting some gastronomic delights.

It started with Tomato soups,Cashew soups, cheese rolls and meandered into some continental cuisine of Risotto,Sausages and Lasagne.We washed it down further by having chocoloate ice creams and milkshakes.We weren't that focussed on making a meal of it,but were just hooked on to our lives after college. Of course the gossips followed on which girl got married, the circumstances under the marriage blah blah...and a followup on who's working where.

After a rather heavy and tasty dinner, we set off to the nearby besant nagar beach at around 1o pm and spent half an hour each discussing our plans for the future.Vinu plans to somehow take up a more functional and business oriented role in CTS, to escape the lull of Mainframes.(Geeezzz to think a year back, I too was coding in mainframes :-) ). Sid is planning some serious slogging at office to get a higher rating at TCS and then moving over to write the TAS for Tata group employees as he foresees lesser competition there than the bloodthirsty world of the CAT and GMAT.Ganesh seems to have got the green signal for his love story so life must be pretty peaceful for him.He plans to stick around with Honeywell for quite some time.

but since all good things ahve to come to an end,and we folks had to return home , all to different corners of the city,some relying on public transport,we decided to call it a "night".

DAY-2

This was more so between my department college mates at Marina Beach.It was good to see a big number gathering up.12 folks ended up coming,which was by our meetup standards pretty good. Again life here was all about each person's life in an IT Company,and each one took turns to justify that his company was the worst.From conversations it seems HCL employees really are the lot who are frustrated.The other folks being evenly distributed between a few local chennai based smaller software companies and CTS,TCS,Ramco and Sulekha.

This meeting was different in the sense all of them were more keen on a longer meet up,and have decided to spend a week togtether, if things go fine, this new year at Goa.One perceptible dampner is that guys are so wary about the effect of a 5 day leave on their impending appraissals.We had no major agenda to eat,as all we wanted to do as a rewinnd from 2004 till now,even though we are a very active "Reply-all" group via our office mails, but still nothing bears the physical meet up.

Here's a link to one of the videos of yesterdays conversation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fes-zoCu9Fs