Hi dudes,

Bandhu Peace, - aap bond hain! Hum tuchch vyakti - aapke charanon ki dhool! Kahaan raja Bhoj, Kahaan apun Gangu Teli!

So, here is the low down (read excuses) to my not writing the afore-hereafter-mentioned article (yet).

Sometime after Lambu spoke to me, I decided that custom demands it, and I award it(big time apologies to Shakespeare). Ergo, an article - certainly, why not, nobless oblige.

Then I ran into the rather formidable obstacle of what to write about - Peace Dude, you have a lot of things going for you in your fast paced, happenin', blond infested life. Me, I can only write about how my company (Ericsson) betrayed me and went south. But then, Goks has a far richer experience than me and is eminently more qualified to write on that - you know, don't want to intrude on his turf and all that nice gentelemanly stuff. Pissu dude (and Bahadur Dude), you will grant me that writing anything - without having the foggiest notion of what you are trying to do can succeed in only two places - a) at the BHU and b) this mail. "Continuum", IMHO sets the bar far higher.

Of course, a quick and dirty trick would be to write something that makes fun of Bahadur. Its so damn easy, and I have often resorted to it. Bahadur dude is a treasure-trove of humor-provoking-stupidities; therein, I love him - much like David Letterman loves George W Bush. But, admittedly, chap has finite patience, is 6 feet and some inches - and, well, he might just drop by San Diego; therein I am sh*t scared of him. To make matters worse, Pissu bhai has been elevated to the ranks of those-who-shall-not-be mocked (managers). Ther goes another fertile plain of ideas.

And, I took a "policy decision" not to recount everyone else's life for the past two years and pass it off as "my contribution". So y'all see, I am forced into doing something "original" - as against a "topo" - hardly my forte' coming from where doing an assignment meant waiting for Murali to finish it. I am suffering from "writer's block". And just so you know, the most pathetic writer is given to his whims - the lack of a muse, if you will. The fact that he sucks at writing has nothing to do with it.

Finally as a somewhat lame excuse, I have been rather busy. The excuse is lame 'cos I know that much as I'd like to, I am not exactly doing rocket science 24x7. Generally, I am debugging dumb code, or attending dumber meetings - giving ever more irrelevant numbers to those-who-shall-not-be mocked.

So here is my proposal, I will write something - soon. I plan to trudge down to the La Jolla Coves one of these days and fully expect ideas to gush forth. Until then, let this mail be a sorry excuse for my laziness and incompetence. Of course, you can also publish this as a part of "Continuum". In fact, many years ago, we were falling short of about 2 pages for our IT magazine, "Reverberations" - and I had a guy write a filler article - "The faking of the magazine" which was an unflattering documentation of the Editorial Board's meetings. Turned out, that was the one junta liked best!! And, our lobby's junta has that extra trace of sadism. Someone else's plight shall always get good ratings. In fact, I highly recommend that Bahdur posts this mail as a teaser for Continuum.