Today, as part of a community service thingy, our company and the Rotary Club combined it’s efforts to have a brief activity drive with a message : Road Safety.

This company that I work for has had its share of accidents on the road and even on the railway track (our office is opposite a railway cross that sees it’s share & more of train related deaths). We’ve had employees become victim to and victim of drunk driving. We’ve had crashes and little accidents and so far nothing has been fatal. But we don’t want to tempt fate.

Hence this activity – a bunch of our employees (yours truly included) marched from our office towards to prominent junctions nearby and back, with banners held aloft & lots of pamphlets that drove the message of road safety awareness. It was hot and it was sweaty and everyone was tired 60 mins later when we all reached back to the air conditioned confines of the center. Here are a few pics.

I do not really want to leave my city. My hometown of Cochin is, in my humble opinion, the best Indian city to live in – atleast for me! Bangalore is a good place but over population and over pollution has made it difficult to live there and not to mention the cost of living is really high.

I’ve been applying to many jobs online and a couple of friends are also trying to help me out by referring my name to a few of their contacts in different companies. I’ve been called up a couple of these companies and I think I’m almost through in a really good one. Most of the companies that I have applied with are in Chennai. I do not know if I will like living in Chennai as I have heard too many different opinions about the city. The worrying aspect is the language  – I have never been able to pick up Tamil but it shouldn’t be a huge problem as Chennai is a metro – and the heat.

Anyway, I have a feeling that my life is going to take a big change and I hope it will be right choice and the right decision when I do finally move. All I want for my residence is a small but neat & modern 1 bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, hall with access to cable tv and the internet. Honestly, I do not need much more. A good neat bar and a coffeeshop nearby would be nice too.

Update: I re-read this blog post and felt that I had to add this part – I’m not in any way implying that Cochin is not crowded and polluted! Far from it; the city is getting more & more crowded and several mornings/evenings it is difficult to avoid a traffic jam. Mosquitoes fill the night air as the open drainage system feeds the little vampires with a breeding ground fit for the best of pests.

After a day spent at home, working whatever I could, I expected today to be a lot more hectic. And it was – a 9 hour roller-coaster of emotional lows! I reached the office at 10 am and immediately got into it. I didn’t stop for a moment until I looked up and saw that it was already 1pm! Not enough time for a coffee and since I was quite hungry, I checked with my team and they were all ready for lunch but it was still another 20 minutes before we trudged into the cafeteria.

There’s a client mandated event, but run by yours truly, happening in the office and I had to stop to snap some photos along the way. Post lunch, I headed back to the production floor for some more photos and then back to my seat. Then it was arranging for stuff to be ready when the clients came in. By 4 pm we were in the launch phase of the event and it was in the board room with a couple of videos and some discussion which went on till just after 5 pm.

From 5 pm till 7:30 pm I was preparing ppts on this event. Then as I left the office, there was a huge traffic block, so we had to walk a bit and wait for a while before we could board a bus. Who knows why there was a block from HMT jn till Aluva? Religious morons? Political assholes? Who the fucks knows? I reached home a little after 8:30 pm and went to work on the remaining work on a ppt for February’s performance.

I then realized that I’ve only had one cup of coffee all day (is that why I felt so dull and jaded) and that other than 2 glasses during lunch, I hadn’t drunk any water either! Also, I didn’t have the time to go to the loo as well! Well…no input, no output!! I’m sipping a lot of water now as I type this. Need to hydrate.