Today!

July 6 is the 187th day of the year (188th in leap years)

I did a Google search to see what has significantly happened on July 6th in the history of mankind. I did not find anything that really matters to us. Like:

1483 - England's King Richard III crowned
1785 – The dollar is unanimously chosen as the monetary unit for the United States.
1886 - Horlick's of Wisconsin offers 1st malted milk to public
1892 – Dadabhai Naoroji elected as first Indian Member of Parliament in Britain.
1958 - Alaska becomes 49th state of United States Of America.
1947 – The AK-47 goes into production in the Soviet Union.
2006 – The Nathula Pass between India and China, sealed during the Sino-Indian War, re-opens for trade after 44 years.

However, July 6th of 2010 is significant for me as I'm leaving a job where I worked for 6 years and a crowd I was most comfortable in. I’m also leaving a city which has seen a lot of me. 7 years is not a small duration in one's life.

I came to Hyderabad on the day I joined Virtusa as an engineer. I got the chance to work with one of the best companies in Hyderabad. I started living too far away from my parents’ umbrella which was very tough initially and then eventually I learned the ways of life. This is the city where I started living independently. I bought my first vehicle – a two wheeler – here. Here is where I met my husband for the first time. When I was getting married I remember how my fellow team members travelled all the way to Kerala and celebrated it. We had our baby in this city. We bought our first car & first apartment in this city.

Slowly we were becoming Hyderabadis and the city had adopted us. We felt shame when an outsider said something bad about the roads or traffic. I argued with people who said Hyderabad weather is bad. I proudly invited friends and relatives to visit Hyderabad and enthusiastically took them around as if Charminar is where I was born and Golconda is where I went to school, and Ramoji Film City is where I spent every evening. I felt equally bad as a Hyderabadi whenever something bad happened in the city, be it the sad accidental demise of our chief minister or be it the row of group violence and riots caused as part of the Telengana issue or be it simply the bad condition of roads everywhere in the city.

When I started a blog in Malayalam and joined the Malayali Blogger's group, I was the only one who was blogging in Malayalam from Hyderabad. I chose the blogger name as Biriyanikutty as a testimonial to what this city is most known for- It’s Biriyani. For a long tenure, whenever the Malayalam blogosphere think or hear of Hyderabad, they remembered Biriyanikutty until I stopped writing Malayalam blogs and more and more Malayali’s from Hyderabad started to blog.

When I moved to Vignette which later became OpenText, nothing changed except the company name and work timing. I was with same group of dear people and we continued to do the same work. The 5.5 years I spent in Virtusa and the 1.5 years in OpenText.. Hmmm.. what to say.. are invaluable to me. I found some of my best friends here. I will miss them.

The day I'm leaving OpenText, I'm leaving Hyderabad as well. I had a million good experiences and 2 or 3 bad ones. But that's natural where ever you are and is just Okay. I'm leaving Hyderabad without having any ill feeling for anyone. I'm saying bye to Hyderabad with the contentment because I've solved some slight frictions with a very few people, caused by some misunderstandings and some by my arrogance.

I'm contented. (After all, I worked for Content Management for 6 years, he he.. :) )

Tomorrow, in a new city.

Pragathi Nagar

When my office shifted its location to Hitec city it was too far for me to compromise with. 20 kms in the city traffic to and fro was so much of a compromise at the cost of at least one hour of less sleep plus 2 hours of extra travel and the result would be an outworn me. That is when we decided to move from the Secunderabad house where we lived for 5 years. The search for a new house ended at Pragathi Nagar, a place which literally deceived us with its beauty. You are welcomed with a lovely sight of a vast lake with tranquil light green water on either side of the road, when you enter Pragathi Nagar. The rock stones that peep from the middle of the lake make residence for some small bushes and numerous variety of cute birds. Once you cross this lake you are in Pragathi Nagar. It is actually a panchayat which is the first one to receive ISO 9001:2000 certification. It was only 8 kms from the office which means a 15 minutes drive.

The house we saw in Pragathi Nagar was an independent duplex house in a gated community of 30 neighbors. The resemblance of our houses in Kerala and the sight of a small soil compound attached to the house tempted us to finalise that house. I used to feel sorry for what my son was missing for being brought up in apartments when we had our childhood so free in air, soil, mud and water. This small piece of bare soil made me happy as my son could play with it as we did in our childhood. It was a neatly maintained community and was gate watched. The house was not occupied by anyone else before. The sight from the kitchen windows and the bedroom balcony was so nice like a painted scenery. Little did we know of the problems we were going to face at the time of finalizing the deal with the house owner.

The night after the first day in the new house we realised that we are sharing this house with some others. Some others meant a million others. 1 million mosquitoes! Advantage no: 1 of having a big beautiful lake next to your residence. We partially solved the issue by fixing mosquito nets on all the windows. But the dream of spending easy evenings in the society's gardens outside the house turned out to be a fanciful one. We neither wanted to be seen with elephant legs nor to end up in hospital with dengue fever.

The first day morning in the house I realised that the scenery of the small green rocky hills from the kitchen window in the morning had special appearance of artists performing their morning pooja with a cup of water. I knew about the labor colony at the base of that hill but never imagined they had this mass pooja performed behind the small rocks and bushes on the hill. Yes, convenient for them - fresh air, abundant fresh water in the lake - such a relief. They must be singing the film song aa aa..aa aa aaja.. piya tu ab to aaja.. I was sure, indeed in relief. I never opened the kitchen window again.

Soon we realised that the promised 24 hours bore well water supply was not valid for summer. Society made it clear that they would release water only from June or July that too as per the availability of ground water. Did they expect us to wait for 2 or 3 months to take bath as they do? We had to start depending on water tankers. That became an additional expense and an added head ache to call them, wait for them, watch them not stealing water from our tanker and sell it to someone else.
I have to say that my son enjoyed playing outside and started digging the soil, filling the well he made with water (that we buy for a price) and molding different shapes with mud. We were happy for him, till the monsoons. We were happy to see the monsoon nearing so that our water tanker events could come to a halt. But the monsoons brought us new guests at home. They appeared from nowhere and scared us. The small hill top that we were staying was recently developed prior to which it was a rocky bushy jungle. The locals were not so happy for the new occupants and they had not left the place. They were hiding till then and came out to enjoy the rains. My son's play in the garden was then stopped. After all the water snakes and scorpions were not so fun to be with.

From then onwards everything was a problem. Or we felt so. The road from this panchayat to the main road was so broken that it made the commute very difficult. The original road to the main junction was so broken that we had to take an alternate route which added another 15 minutes to the journey. I had 2 accidents with my 2 wheeler both the times I was nicely injured. As if the gutters are not enough they had speed breakers every 200 meters. Our 4 wheeler had to get serviced twice. The panchayat roads were all cement roads, not black top tar roads which made them very very dusty. How come we did not notice all these before the decision was made? I told you that lake, like an appealing slut with her charming smile invited us and we were trapped.

The panchayat being an award winning one they were not selling any alcohol. Leave alone liquor or anything alcoholic, even fizzy drinks like Coke, Pepsi etc were also not sold in shops. Though this did not particularly bothered me, it was the prime reason for my husband to find the place as 'not livable'. Most of the people in this village were not speaking anything other than Telugu made our problems to double it. Those days how I missed the 1 pm Sunday doordarsan news(for the hearing impaired)! The housing colony that we stayed had many houses vacant. Among those who occupied more than half of the house wives were also Telugu only-s. (Though the husbands are all placed in MNCs) This limited my interaction with the neighbors .

If you dislike something , the more and more you start finding faults with it. Same happened to us with Pargathi nagar. We started feeling that there was something wrong with the house. Someone or the other at home was always sick. To add to that I had 2 accidents. Another strange thing was that the grains I stored in closed containers were found to have worms and insects even if they are fresh and I would end up throwing so much of stuff. Then I read somewhere that if the soil is not pure, or if the earth beneath the compound is not clean enough it affects your life badly. The worms in food items were an indication of that it seems. I was not a believer of all these. But it is experience that make you believe.
I no longer wanted to stay there. My husband was also like 'enough is enough'. We said bye-bye to the award winning panchayat after a mere 9 month's stay there.

Red Bulls

We had 2 senior persons visiting Hyderabad office last week. They were here for some training. When my manager talked about this whole day mandatory training my mind was trying to find out some 'valid' reasons to take an off from work on that day. As there were no functions or special occasions falling on that day I planned to take a sick leave for 'food poisoning' and thus 'stomach upset' which was the easiest to make others believe. But somehow I dropped that plan at the last moment and I ended up in the training room. The inhibitions about full day corporate trainings as they are so boring and waste of time had made all our team members to fight for the last row seats and all were equipped with some or the other ways of time passing tools from iPods to scribbling pads.


The trainers entered the room. One guy with a very neatly shaved head reminded me of those vitrified glazing tiles me and my husband went to look for our apartment few days back. They started off with their introduction. From then, they talked. Rather, they never stopped.

They talked about Canada. They talked sports - soccer, cricket, golf, ice hockey. They talked about their families. About their interestes. They made us to talk about our families and interests as well. Then they talked about the weather, the journey, the flight, their city, our city. They jumped, they ran in the room, they climbed the tables and before we knew, it was Lunch break.

Nobody seemed to use their iPods or cell phones!

After the lunch, as usual I was the lazybones till they entered the room - Only till they entered the room!

What! You are supposed to look tired and sleepy after a heavy lunch, men!

But they started talking. As expected they talked about the Hyderabad traffic, the excellent food they had, the hotel staff hospitality and behavior. Then they played, they made us to play. They made us to guess, they made us to shout, and they made us to ask questions. They literally grabbed your moments. It was not a session but an animation. We even painted a house you know!

I don't know where this energy comes from. They drank Red Bull. Hmm..Now I know why it is really an energy drink. ;) Guess what, if I were to write a script for the advertisement of an energy drink I would write a screenplay based on this.

We had fun from 10 A.M to 4.30 P.M and wait.. wait... they also talked about IDP, for which they were actually in Hyderabad. Otherwise such a boring thing it would have been, now we really understand what an Iterative development Process is. At the end of 6 or 7 IDP sessions they had in our centre they had this quiz show which they creatively named as 'Koun Banega Crorepati' and pronounced it with even more creativity contrary to the expected difficulty. The quiz made sure nobody is missing any details of the basic IDP. It was real fun.

Thanks to Andrew King (Director, Global Operations R&D) and Eugene Davis (Senior Process Analyst) for such a vibrant, striking and jolly session.

Hmm.. now I know that,

• IDP is another process of agile scrum, customised for OpenText
• IDP stands for Iterative Development Process.
• Iteration can be of 2 to 4 weeks.
• Ideal Team size is 8-12
• Iteration planning can take upto 2 hours
• The product owners VISIONs are ROCKS. Rocks when becomes stones are easy to handle and when becomes sand is esier and make it more fine is the easiest. That's why the ROCKS become User Story and then become MACRO STORY and then MICRO STORY.
• Iteration can have any number of Macro Stories
• The team stands upto discuss 3 things basically, everyday. That is for 15 minutes. The 3 things need to be what have you done yesterday, what will you be doing today, what will be impacted.
• The Scrum master is there to track all your issues and he will make sure those will not affect your work.
• A customer has all the rights to walk in for the stand up.
• Frequent Demo of what is accomplished is important.
• Iterations can have stretch stories.
• You see a landmark means you are the end of an iteration.
• Retrospective meetings should not strech beyond one hour.
• Retrospective meetings discuss things like, what went well, what did not go well, what can be continued.
And so on. The list is endless because we keep LEARNING BY DOING and hence the list grows.

Foot note: Red Bull should be served in our cafeteria. :)