Solo

Before I begin my rant, I should quote Ayn Rand
' I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man nor ask another man to live for mine.'
I was just thinking that every person should have an inner sanctum, a place where no one is allowed to enter, not your parents nor your sibling, nor your spouse.
For me emotion is like a sinusoidal wave, one day you are elated and happy and the next day you are morose and depressed.
The reason for this is  happiness has somehow become people-centric, which is to say highly subjective.
Let me elucidate this further.  I am married and sometimes I feel very happy and joyous in the company of my spouse and sometimes there is anger and pain. There are days that are stressful and we have to work things through.
Thats true of all relations.
The need to interact with other humans is what makes us human.
I feel that many times we dwell on the negative half of the sine wave. A bruised ego.
To make matters worse there will be other influences too, where you or your spouse will have conflicting allegiances. Your wife is also a daughter.
There will be times when you feel that your authority is undermined. I am not talking about being respected, that is something that has to be earned. But I am sure no one would like to get disrespected.
I have to be stoic.
There will be days when things don't go your way at office even though your way is the right way.
There will days when you feel that you are not loved by anyone. You are not a son, nor a daughter but a  responsibility, sometimes explicitly stated.
You are neither a husband nor a wife, you are just added baggage that one has to endure.
Such things are routine and is a part of life.
I can't blame people. If you like a person, you obviously like him/her for certain qualities that he/she possesses.
But these things are routing and pervasive through the entire time line of your life. You can't ride the sine wave. You can only have a DC bias.
In other words, if things go well, the sine is positive, above the bias, but if things go bad the sine is lower than the bias but not less than zero.
There will be ups and down but the band shouldn't go to the negative side.
In equivalent terms, there should be an inner sanctum, a place where no one can reach. Only you can reach.
In office, in addition to the routine task, it could be an area of work or research that just requires a paper and pencil or a computer.
At home it could be a hobby, such as reading a book or a novel or pursuing some other hobby.
It would be difficult at first, it would like being aloof, sometimes wrongly construed as arrogance.
But it has to be done, or else I'll be be blogging again. :P

Anger!

Have you ever felt white hot searing anger? The desire to break something? To destroy anything in sight, to shout profane abuses? To curse a lot ? I felt all that a few moments ago. Thankfully I didn't break anything. Last time I broke my phone.
Those who are married would know what I am talking about.
The subject of the conversation or the reason for anger is secondary. These things are bound to happen. There are times when you will feel anger and pain. There are times when your ego and that of your spouse would be bruised. A man/woman is nothing without the ego or self.
Some people just forget about it, and move on. While other harp on it for a few hours or days.
In the end it is calmness of the mind that matters.
For instance, I just closed the door took a few deep breaths and started writing this post.
I am ready to have a conversation to resolve the issue, but my wife isn't.
Instead of getting angry, I'll just move on and wait till she is ready to have a conversation.

The Viscious cycle

From the contents of my post, one would conclude that I am a pessimist to the core. I am not.
It is just that writing gives me solace. It frees my mind, and helps me stay calm.
Just like everyone else, my life circles around office and home, in addition I have my sitar lessons on weekends.
I may have posted earlier that the commute to office is 30 km one way. The commute to my sitar lessons is 12km one way. I live in a so called luxury apartment. I have no peace of mind though.
The office seems like a gulag and home like a Ghetto. To add to that, I am now supposed to be responsible for the functioning of the Ghetto.
I feel like I am loosing control of my life, and there is nothing I can do about it.
In office, my promotion is deferred by two years. The only measure of competence in my office is the performance in an Interview, which may have no bearing to the work a person does.
Why don't you quit your job and search for a new house then ?
Its easier said than done.
For starters I am not an expert in any area or discipline. When your family views you as source of income and security, there aren't many things you can do.
In office ,the usefulness of people comes before doing what is right. It is as though people follow a prescribed set of unwritten rules to climb the ladder. The basic tenet of going up is not to make sure the more useful people are kept in good humour, even if its means turning a blind eye to the wrong that they are doing.
My bosses are timid, and I have to face the consequences of their timidity.
At home, I am obviously tired after all the commute. I have no friends here. When your family likes the concept of living in your 'own house' to such a great extent that all else is insignificant then there is nothing much you can do, that too when  a baby is on its way.
I have to bear the ambient noise, the responsibility of making things work, even if I can't communicate with the workers here because of a language barrier.
My neighbours and many more can flout the rules of the association, the corporation workers can burn garbage out in the open, letting me breathe intoxicated air in the cleanest city, and there is nothing I can do about it.
I can't get a house in the office quarters, because I didn't make the grade.
I feel like blaming others for whatever is going on, but I can't. I am responsible for my own actions.
The weekdays in the office with all the politics and the weekends at home with all the pain.
Perhaps there are times when, I'll have to take harsh decisions. I just can't stay here, and it becomes uneconomical when I have to travel  all alone to office. Uhhh....god damn it..god damn it to hell.....
LOL..

OUT

Incensed

To think that I would get a computer as soon I entered the Net Center during lunch time, seemed far fetched. But looks like at least luck is on my side for now.
I am writing from my office basically just to let off some steam, and yes the advanced research center where I work does not have easily accessible Internet. The management calls it Information security and I call it Information Paranoia.
We have a net center with 10 computers for a thousand employees. Thankfully many of the old timers are not that tech savvy.
Today being Friday, every one is in  a pious mode. So the first one hour in the office is spent, smoking up the place with incense sticks. Some rituals are also carried out.
I have nothing against that, but it is the acrid smoke that irritates my lung and nostrils. Some may call me blasphemous, so be it.
I do not subscribe to robotic gestures for divine appeasement. 
I am writing this post with smoke in my lungs and nostrils. It is good to know that the net center has been spared of the Incense sticks.

So incensed I am due to incense sticks. And life trundles along. 

OUT...

A New Hope

Obviously I am a Star Wars fan, hence the title.
I thought about the time spent at office, and I've come to realize that I am not an expert in any field. In seven years, I know a little bit of everything, but am not an expert in any particular field. Not Good!
Being an Instrumentation engineer, I have given up hope of gaining expertise in that particular field. The reason being that I have no avenues to get my hands dirty. If one needs to become an expert, one has to gets his hands dirty. So what can I do?
I have a computer in front of me, so why not start coding and automating stuff. Automation is not just  for a plant, one can automate other stuff and add transparency to the system.
There are people who will tell me that numerous people are doing this, why should you do this too. You are an Instrumentation engineer and so on so forth. But I got to do something, and it is the best thing one can do, when the only resource available is a computer.
If all else fails....Code!

When everything goes south

In my previous post I mentioned that I had to attend an interview to get promoted to the next grade. In between the last interview and the recent interview, the promotion rules got modified. A new option was added, which could postpone the promotion by a year.
As luck would have it, I attended the interview and have now got a delayed promotion.
I studied a lot, but there were questions that I could never answer. The composition of thermocouples is not something that I am prepared to commit to my memory. You open a book its available.
I happen to work in the area of simulation and software etc. However, just a day before the interview, I have to wear the mask of an Instrumentation engineer. Thats bad!
Unlike last time, I am not very disappointed. People who are 2 years junior to me would become my peers. My batchmates would either become a year senior or two years senior.  All that doesn't matter, as long as the job is satisfactory. I wish I could say that.
As these promotions are the metric through which one can climb the ladder, and with what has happened, my ladder will be quite short.
I somehow feel at peace and yet there an urgency to jump ship.
I'll have to work towards that.
Obviously, twice in a row is a message of incompatibility. I can't just leave. I have responsibilities.
I have to be an expert in a field and maintain my market value.
As far as Instrumentation is concerned, I think the field is saturated and it is more of managerial work. We don't develop Instruments, we use them.
I am still working on my escape route but who knows, in the end I will be languishing in the same organisation and would be describing my next promotion interview after 6 years.
To quote Andy Dufrense, ' Hope is a good thing and good things don't die'.
I hope that I will enjoy my job, I hope that things will work out, I hope that I'll sleep content, and wake up happy.
I'll work towards that.

The Plan

When it comes to my house, I normally brood and think what have I gotten myself into.
Then I read the book, 'The Martian', I watched the movie long before. In the book (and the movie), I could see how the protagonist an engineer (and a botanist) was analytical and solved all his problems. His problems were a billion times greater than mine are. Getting Inspired from that book and being an engineer myself, I will get down to solve the problem.
To start with I live in a house which is about 28 km from my office. I knew that when I bought the house. After moving in, a road nearby was opened, and now a lot of traffic goes by my house.
The increased vehicular movement has made it very noisy. Somehow I find that most of the people here have a proclivity to honk. In addition, there is ambient noise from the neighbours walls. Last night he turned on his AC. The split unit made a lot of noise. I do not know why he turned on his AC, when the ambient temperature is around 20 deg C. Anyways, I got up in the middle of the night.
My house faces the Road, so in the morning and evenings are cacophonous. I can reduce the decibel level by closing all the windows, but even then, it still is uncomfortable.
In addition, I have neighbours who love to keep their door open and watch TV.
Neither my wife nor I have any friends here. There are many families living here, but we leave in the morning and return in the night. Weekends, I don't know how they fly by.
The obvious solution to this is to move to another house, which is peaceful and nearer to my office.
That presents 2 options.
Option 1 : Take a house on rent.
Option 2 : Move to the office colony.
Now Option1 is an immediate solution, and there are virtually unlimited options.
But moving into a rented accommodation has its own problems, for starters the rent increases yearly. There are virtually very less modification that one can carry out. The owner may object to banging nails etc. And there is always a likelihood, that I may have to vacate.
Option 2 on the other hand depends on many factors. There are three colonies for the office. Two of them are in the city and one of them is in the outskirts of the city. My office is also on the outskirts of the city. The colony that is located on the outskirts which I shall call colony 3, is okay and houses are available, but it is near the office (in fact to close for comfort), and being the outskirts, the power cuts are more and the nearest supermarket is about 15km away. That won't be a problem, because I order veggies online. But it is really remote, and I am sure, my wife won't like it.
There are two other colonies, Colony 1 and Colony 2. Colony 1 is beyond my pay grade(I'll come to that later). Colony 2 is in the city, in a very good area. Many shops nearby, a nice and vibrant place.
But most of the employees are seeking colony 2. It has a play ground and the dispensary is located within the colony. It is also very old.
Colony 1, is just one step above my pay grade. I would have been eligible, had I cleared the promotion interview. But I didn't.(I mentioned that in my previous post.)
Colony 1 is about 5 km from were I stay, but it is located in a very calm and quiet place. And it is bang in the centre of the city. Lots of amenities around.
So I guess my best bet is to wait it out till I get eligible for the Colony 1. The next promotion interview is in January 2017. I need to clear that 'son of bitch'.
Clearing the interview is completely unrelated to the amount of work I do(my productivity). All I have to do is study like a mad man and answer the questions that are posed. Nothing else matters.
That gives me six months to prepare.
I can't study at home(Too much Noise :P ). I have to study at office.
Earlier I thought I'll write GRE, or the German equivalent. But all that will not work out, not when you're married.
On working days, I am loaded with work and even if I am not, the atmosphere is not conducive to studying.
I will have to go to office on weekends to study. Can't help that.