So you want a better job?

So you want a new job? Because it is more lucrative? Better benefits? Better work-life balance? Well, a choice between continuing to live your life as it is now, and dying to move on to a new place and the possibility of a new, better (after)life is not much different from choosing to continue in your current job and moving on to a new one. They are, in fact, eerily similar.

You don't believe me, do you? I understand. Even thinking about death can be scary. But in the interest of keeping this though-exercise as non-morbid as possible, let's assume that death is painless, easy, and instantaneous. Let's also say that you possess the ability to glimpse into the new life and see how it is expected to be. And by this I mean something like a YouTube recruitment video from Google, and not a pastor's interpretation of a religious book. These two assumptions take away the uncertainty and pain out of dying. Now you know where you are going, and you also know it doesn't have to hurt. What do you think now?

•   Both moves involve breaking existing ties. 

◦                  Once you move to a new job, you never meet up with your ex-colleagues.  Once you die, obviously (and hopefully) you don't come back to visit them either. 

◦                  You might bump into some of your ex-colleagues at your new job, when they also decide to make the transition. Or you might meet them in heaven or hell when they make the transition.

•   Both are permanent. 

◦                  Coming back to an old job is almost as rare and miraculous as coming back from the dead. 

◦                  Returning back to your old job in a relatively small time frame after leaving is more frequent, just like the possibility of reviving someone whose heart just stopped is a little bit higher than someone who died a while ago.

•   Both can mean making adjustments to your current lifestyle, and learning new tricks and skills. Or not. It completely depends on where you go, in both cases, and what you need to survive and thrive there.

•   You don't exactly know what you are getting into, sometimes in spite of lots of research. Your new job might turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to you, or the worst. You might be in heaven, or you might be in hell - well, in one case, literally and in the other, figuratively.

•   How well you do at the new place depends a lot on your actions in the previous place. If you worked hard in your previous job, displayed great work ethics, and leaned a lot of skills and new tricks, you will be able to get a good job at a big company and will do very well. All the hard work you put in at your previous (not so great) job will now reap dividends. If you have lived a noble, righteous, virtuous life, most religions promise you a great after-life. And the opposite is true too. It is called Karma.

Do you agree now? I hope so. If you still harbor some doubts, let me remind you gently that people do get laid off and fired from their jobs too, mostly against their wishes, and sometimes even unfairly when they have done nothing to deserve it.

From Twitter to Ice Ice Baby

I lost a precious two hours of my life,without even realizing it. My total recollection of that period, on coming back to reality was - I had gone to twitter to check my timeline, and now I am on youtube watching a ridiculous video with hideous lyrics called 'Ice Ice Baby'. My cellphone said that two hours had gone by. Now I know that as long as I am conscious, drug-free and sane, I would never have anything to do with 'Ice Ice baby'. So how did this happen?


1. I started on twitter. I checked my twitter timeline, and read a news tweet about 2 members of the state assembly of a prominent Indian state - Karnataka - allegedly photographed watching porn on a smartphone while the assembly was in session.
2. I visited the Times Of India website by expanding the link on the tweet and read the news item - the assemblymen explained that they were trying to figure out what a rave party is. My brain immediately wondered why.
3. So I googled 'Karnataka rave party'.
4. I went to another Indian news website from the search results and learned about how a state sponsored international music festival - Spring Zouk Island Festival 2012 - had veered into becoming an XXX-rated episode of Miami Grind. I also watched a censored version of a news sting video from that rave party that was creating havoc in Karnataka politics.
5. I then searched youtube to see if I could find the uncensored video, just out of curiosity, seriously, and was surprised to not find any.
6. That done, I went back to twitter to read the next tweet, which was a link about staff and readers of the A.V. Club picking their favorite comedy bits by stand-up comedy legends. So obviously I went to that link.
7. I watched embedded youtube videos of Louis C.K talking to Conan O'Brien, George Carlin doing his 'baseball or football' routine, and Bill Hicks talking about drugs, quite fondly I might add. Also mentioned in the link was Richard Pryor's imitation of white people. But there was no video.
8. So now I had to go back to youtube to find Richard Pryor's imitation of white people, and didn't find it. However, I found and watched a couple of other Richard Pryor videos - saving white people from the Titanic, and Richard Pryor as the president.
9. I was lured into watching a related youtube video about Eddie Murphy talking about the first Black President, and from there on to Eddie Murphy doing his Michael Jackson impression, his James Brown impression, and his Elvis Presley impression.
10. Not liking Eddie Murphy's Elvis too much, I went to a related video of Jim Carrey imitating Elvis, then Jim Carrey imitating Seinfeld in the ghetto, and finally Jim Carrey imitating Vanilla Ice.
11. I couldn't remember the real name for Vanilla Ice, so I went via google onto wikipedia to refresh my memory of Robert Matthew Van Winkle and the article mentioned his signature dance move - the Ice.
12. Curious now about what 'the Ice' might be, I had to go back to youtube to watch 'Ice Ice Baby', and when Van Winkle said 'Ice Ice baby' for the umpteenth time, that's when I realized that I had lost a good two hours, learned nothing, and was now watching absolute drivel called 'Ice Ice Baby'.


I would still like to thank Vanilla Ice for saying uncorrelated nonsensical gibberish like 'brand new invention' and 'collaborate and listen' because that brought me back to my senses. If that had not happened, it would have been MC Hammer next, and from there who knows where I would have gone and how much time I would have further wasted.