Parichay - Movie (Spoiler alert)

Parichay – Movie


{Spoiler alert}

It has been a really long time since I saw this movie Parichay (1975). Screenplay and direction by Gulzar. Starring Jeetendra, Pran and Jaya Bhaduri in the lead roles and amply supported by the Children in the movie.

One of my favorite movies, each time I see it I always become nostalgic and it often takes me to a different simplistic world. As I am writing this piece in the background a song that is constantly playing in repeat mode is “Mitwa Bole Meethe” by Bhupinder Singh. As I listen to this song, it transports me into a different world altogether. Personally whenever I listen to this song, I feel like someone is singing this sitting under a tree and lost in his own world and you are an observer who is getting immersed in the song as it comes to you along with a cold breeze, unaware of the time, you keep standing and getting immersed in it. Very few songs can actually give you this feeling. I love all the songs, but the one mentioned here and the song “Beete na Beetaiye Raina” are my all time favorites.

I simply adore any movie which deals with the intricacies of human relationships and this movie does exactly that and also is a good entertainment movie. Subtlety is the keyword in the movie and every scene is handled that way. I am an ardent fan of such movies.

Some of my favorite scenes are:

1. Between Sanjeev Kumar and Jaya Bhaduri. These two actors will always steal the show wherever they are together whether as father-in-law, daughter-in-law or as Father – daughter or as a couple. The song, the scenes that follow the song where the daughter expresses her displeasure that her father is sending letter to the grandfather is marvelously captured. I can watch this scene many times over.

2. The scene again between Jeetendra and Jaya Bhaduri where she recaptures the memory of her late father during his last days.

There are few scenes in the movie which captured my attention and made me think. With very few scenes the in the movie one has been able actually showcase the social condition of that time.

1. A scene where Jeetendra goes for an interview and finds out that he will replace an old man who has served the company for 22 years and is being removed because of his age. It is heart wrenching to see how the old man actually describes his day to day activities to the would be – joinee and you start questioning the hard reality of such days where the old man continued his job despite old age for he had no other means for survival .

Can we still claim that such people don’t exist? I think no, there are still such families in this world where the old people have to work because they have to run the household. But amidst the flashiness of today’s world we cannot see them. They are still left in the dark.

2. Another scene was between Jeetendra and AK Hangal where when questioned about his last job, Jeetendra says that there was a strike and finally he lost the job. After hearing this the uncle ( A K Hangal) advises his nephew not to get involved in this because the only people for whom the strike/protests matter are the ones who don’t have to worry for their food and the ones who anyways don’t get to eat any food.

Did the strikes yield any result anytime? Mostly they failed and it was always a no-win situation for both workers and industrialists alike. Then what are the other platforms for protests that the downtrodden can look up to in order to get their issues resolved. Do our government /constitution support the workers enough to see that they get their basic rights always? Are the industrialists protected against losses when market fails or when workers go on strike? Is there any neutral forum to discuss the issues? Too many questions and to this day unanswered, hopefully we will find answers to these soon.

But the best part in the movie is the constant nagging conversation that Jeetendra has with himself whenever he faces any untoward situation that also provides the comic relief in the movie.

Signing off on a note of hope that we will get to see more such movies made.

My first day at work

Today all of a sudden, I became reminiscent about my first day at work (Real work – 19-10-2006). I joined my company MindTree Ltd as a fresher from College. After a month- and half training we were allocated to projects, and then after the initial introductory session to the team and project, they told me to look into certain stuff for familiarity. My machine was set up with the development environment, required software and other things. They informed me that I will be work for a couple of months in this module and then we will move me into another module. I realized only at a later point that each module was a project by itself. It was a database module where we had to create reports and stored procedures for generating those reports.

So, now I have to start my work on SQL server management studio, and I had hardly used the tool. My mentor Namrata showed me through the database for an hour or so and then told me to explore. There was one CalculationStoredProcedure and some values were calculated wrongly, so my first work was to find out what was wrong in the logic of that stored procedure. Have I worked with SQL server before? NO, we were trained on Oracle database for one training session for a day and during College. All we learnt was Database normalization techniques, ACID properties and worked a few simple queries in MYSQL classes. Wonderful na... and now you have a tool which you have not worked with at all and also something called as a stored procedure for which I need to know “ How to debug”… God level this was for me.

But you see, as a fresher you are full of zest for the work that comes your way and you are always in this raring to go mode. My mentor had neatly set some shortcut keys in the Management studio and told me about them. But I was little over confident about the whole thing called “My memory” and hence did not make any note of the keys and for what they were used. So now, they tell me to see a stored procedure and figure out with Test data what was going wrong with Calculation. Since it was time for lunch, she closes the Management studio, we go for lunch.

Lunch as a fresher in corporate world is completely a different experience. It’s like you are the nursery kid amidst the whole grown up crowd around you and invariably lunch will last for an hour or so and with all the fun of teasing your friends and sometimes getting teased yourself.

Now, after an eventful and fun filled lunch I am back to work at my desk, I open Management studio (SQL Server 2000) and ready to start my work. Ok now I am completely blank as I thought I would remember the shortcut keys and their use. I don’t remember any. Then I remembered that she had pressed F5 to do something after typing the stored procedure name. With that limited knowledge and to see that my mentor is busy, I plan to test the trick on my own. Hence I type the stored procedure name and press the F5 key. But wait, what the hell happened. 46000 odd rows updated. :( :(. I then realize that F5 was to execute and the whole thing EXECUTED WITHOUT MY INTENTION FOR IT. I panic and then run to my mentor to inform her about the tragic incident. To my bad luck she informs that I was not connected to Development database but to Test database which customer used to validate request. :( :( :(. Now, I panic even more, and thousands of thoughts spin in my mind. First of all I am irked at myself for being overconfident about the whole thing. I curse that to my bad luck the database had to be the test database, and I am totally dismayed by the fact that my first day of real work turned out to such a horror for me. Since I am flabbergasted, my mentor after pondering for sometime, tells me the statement which brings some life back to me – “Lets go to your machine and see what really happened”. I explain her all my stupid actions and then she shows me how to see the stored procedure using commands and without using any short cut keys and tool specific features.

Sp_helptext stored procedure name had to be my life saver, which somehow I did not know and did not care to make a note of it when my mentor taught me. But then she goes into the stored procedure and finds that it is a parameterized stored procedure, and wonders how it managed to run only to discover later that there was default parameters defined. Ok, so now what happened, she opens the default parameter table and finds that it was a multiplier of 1 defined in it for that default parameter and hence all the rows previously present got multiplied by a factor of 1 and effectively remained the same. As soon as she told that to me, I sprang to my feet and started thanking her so much to have said what she just now said. Imagine that time I did not have the clue that Test database could be just backed up using production dump in the worst scenario.

I have moved on from that day to what I am today, I can say that there have many such incidents where I have learnt how to do things “on the job” and it has been a pleasure to work with people who have shared the enthusiasm of learning and BTW, I did become an living encyclopedia during my days in the project regarding the stored procedures and calculations done on them. :) But I learnt a valuable lesson that day, I got into a mess because of my over excitement and it is very easy to get carried away when you are in a new phase in life, but we should always keep ourselves grounded. We always have something to learn and sometimes overconfidence can ruin the future for us. So, next time you embark on something new, just take it as another normal day and you will feel that every other day there is some learning for us, there are some newer challenges to be faced. And then your life will be a collection of such stories where you achieved something, learnt something, messed up something, rejoiced something. Take life one day at a time and enjoy in its serenity.

On my Birthday

Sometimes life throws some inexplicable surprise at you that you can only be dazzled by it and nothing else is possible. My birthday was on August 19th and I had a bad day just the day before, for no reason I was feeling very low. Just before going to bed I sat wondering as to how will be birthday turn out to be and desperately wanted it to be “Just fine” and not a repeat of what had happened on that day. Lost in my thoughts and struggling to get some sleep as I lay on my bed watching the moon outside the window in my room, my mobile beeps and forces me out of my lost world. I see a message and assume that It must be from one of close friends with a birthday wish, but to my surprise I find the message from one of my college friend and it turns out to be one of the regular message that she sends us as a routine.


This friend of mine is a very sweet one, she sends the messages to our whole college group every day. Sometimes the messages are funny, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes pathetic shayari, sometimes hopeless romantic, sometimes philosophical and sometimes inspirational. The sweet part is that she sends this to all of us without fail and continues even if you 'don’t respond to her. I like the messages sometimes that she sends us and acknowledge the fact that “this was a good one”. This is her way of remaining in touch with all of us, because she cannot come to meet us when we gather together. It’s because she comes from a very orthodox family where e they don’t allow her to go out unless and until there is something important. Yes, I know sometimes we don’t realize that normal things like going out with friends can be a real gift to someone simply because they hardly get that chance. Anyways as I had said that this message was from her and the message read something like this:

“Face everything in your life ,it will make you discover many things in life and you will realize the meaning of life. Life never seems happy. WE SHOULD MAKE IT HAPPY!! ”

I know many of them will feel that it is one of the full of gyaan message, but the fact was that it came at that moment in my life just few minutes before my birthday and when I especially needed that “something” to go ahead. I messaged her “Thank you” and she wished me “Good Night”. Well, she did not remember my birthday and neither did she wish me, but what remains a fact is that with her simple gesture that she actually gifted me something for my life and I will always cherish that. I know that this message was not exclusively for me, but still it changed that very instant something in me or at least triggered a few thoughts in me. I decided to read that again in the morning and think about it. With a new found hope I slept a peaceful sleep.

Waking up in the morning, getting ready I thought about the message and decided that today and any other day I am going to do things that will make me happy. I am not going to worry about what others did and from today I will do what I am supposed to do ( justly, righteously, ideally) and that will make me happy. Deciding that, I was on my way to office and listening to some new songs in my iPod. One song that played first and continued to play for the rest of the day. That song seemed to answer a few questions which was disturbing me for long…Questions like I did make the decision to be happy, but how will I do it. Sometimes you need a lot of strength to carry out such decisions; I always felt that I never had that much of a courage pr strength both to carry out any of my decision. But I was thinking of making an exception this time and so I needed to gather everything around me and get back that spirit in me, which says , yes I can go for this and I will not FAIL. And this song seem to give me the answer for that question. It’s a prayer to the Almighty and that’s where I derive from inspiration from Everyday of my life.

The song is written by our great poet Rabindranth Tagore find its lyrics in English transcript here below:

http://geetabitan.com/lyric_eng/P/ly_PRAN_BHORIYE_TRISA_HARIY_401.htm

I have tried to translate/summarize the song in English …find it below

Fill me with life, full of life, filling all the thirst in me.
Give me a place in your world, in your abode ||

Give me some more light, more light into my eyes
Fill me with all the music of the world and give me more songs||

Give me more Pain, Give me more pain and give me more knowledge
Remove all the obstacles and protecting me from everything ||

Give me more love, more love, let my ego vanish in that love
Fill me with more nectar of life, fill me with more life, more life ||

Fill me with life, full of life, filling all the thirst in me.
Give me a place in your world, in your abode||

Praying to the Lord Almighty to give me more life, more light, more love and more knowledge…

With this prayer I proceeded to start my day at office and the rest of the day just followed in its melody. This may not be the accurate translation of the song, because I did this on the fly while the song is playing in my iPod. But nevertheless it does convey the core meaning of it.