Little above a year back, a young man of 20 something, having finished a year at his new job, received the good news of his secondment to London. In preparation for his six weeks in London, the young man set out to a few shops in the city to buy the necessary attire for the new job profile that he would be in.

On 3 May 2010, this young man took his first long haul flight from Bangalore to London. As he walked out of the airplane and took the cab to his apartment, he fell in love with the city and hoped that those six weeks would be a lot more. Little did he know that his wish would come true. However, his work was recognised and he was given an offer he could not refuse. And, he didn’t.

The six weeks turned to six months and the six months turned to nine, as he waited for his visa. After a brief visit in Bangalore, he packed up his belongings and returned home to Mumbai. In Mumbai, as he struggled to adjust to the time zone difference, he tried to put his affairs in order and met a few friends. He was back to London in early March to begin his new job in a role where his friends would refer to him as “Banker”.

I don’t need to tell you that the young man is me and am happy to say that I have completed my first year in London, in a job I grew to love!

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. This isn’t the case with Ajay (yes, sad joke!), who is perfectly at home at his work place. But, I do go out and have my share of fun and this included a wardrobe improvement with the help of his new found friend Sveccha (introduced by the great Idea-smithy.

We went to Westfield mall, which is one of the largest malls in Europe (view on Google Maps). I picked up a few shirts at the T.M.Lewin store and at Marks & Spencer, a pair of shoes and something that makes me smell real good!

Some Vietnamese food, pastries and Starbucks completed the rest of the day. This was the first day of the long two weekends, the Easter weekend and the Royal Wedding weekend, most of which were spent in the confines of my super sexy apartment!

What use is a good, well furnished kitchen (courtesy Tesco Direct), when you don’t put it to use. Met up with Sveccha on Saturday and we decided to cook at home. She did the cooking and we did the eating. The prawns turned out to be super awesome and the rice and the dal were yum! Need, I say, I need to take up cooking as a hobby!

And, work continues as usual…

My secondment at my company got me flying off to London and I fell in love with the city the minute I stepped out of the airport. And, I have grown to love the place even more in the past three weeks.

I must confess that I haven’t seen much of this place, because I have been working a lot more out here than back in Bangalore! But, the work is good and responsibility is even better. I am hoping that the week to come will be a bit lighter.

I landed here on the 3rd which was a bank holiday out here in UK and so grabbed complete opportunity of seeing some parts of London.

Hope to get some more tomorrow.

Photos on Facebook: http://su.pr/566o5r

I’ll upload some to my album soon. Still need to get the T-Mobile Content Control knocked off!

I’ve been using Flickr Photo Album on this blog for a long long time now, maybe well over a few years. However, in a bid to reduce memory usage at this blog and to also utilise my unused domain AjayDSouza.info, I decided to move the location for my photos.

In fact, until August last year, AjayDSouza.info served as a secondary location for displaying my photos. It was powered by a script that fetched my albums from Flickr. However, I wasn’t too pleased by the script and so didn’t bother to promote the site.

I decided to hunt for a new script today and came across Glickr. Glickr is an extremely easy to use, smal, but very powerful script for displaying photos from Flickr.

AjayDSouza.info will now serve as the primary location for display of my photos. With a little .htaccess magic, I have redirected all existing links on this blog to the site. Please let me know if you notice any malfunctions / broken links.

I plan on working on the stylesheet and theme but that will be at a far later date. Until enjoy my photos.

Christmas week is always busy and the week this year did not disappoint. Began the week meeting a friend for lunch. Went over to Lil white mouse‘s place the next day to help wrap presents. Sat at home and coded and blogged the day after that.

Sneha came over on Christmas Eve for a while before mass. Mass was relatively short and sweet. The choirs have improved since the past few years, which is a good things. Returned home immediately after mass.

I met Lil white mouse and Ruth for dinner at the 5 Spice in Bandra. Being, Christmas night, we had to wait a while before we were given a table. We definitely ordered a good deal of food and desert, a lot more than our normal capacities

Went over to Lil white mouse’s place on 26th morning to prepare for the engagement. We went over to the church in the morning itself and engaged rings and vows. After a good deal of furniture movements, to accommodate 30 persons, I went over to my ENT for a follow-up.

The party at Lil white mouse’s place was fun-filled like any of our other parties. The only difference was that we had my part of the family there too.

Got a host of presents for Christmas from Lil white mouse and her family. It was like sweeping the Oscars!

Spent the night over at her place. And, the next day we went over to her grandaunt’s place for lunch. After a bit of rest, my weary feet found their way home.

I have uploaded more photographs of the engagement. Check out the engagement album.

Those of you following me on Twitter would have seen a status message that read:

Room 103 is the first room in college to get placed.

Akshat and me were place by November 25 and late last Thursday night, we got the good news that Aditya too was placed. In fact he’s got an excellent job with one of the highest salaries in campus

And, we are a hungry group.

So, we booked a cab on Friday night and headed out to Stone Water Grill in Koregoan Park. This was recommended to us by a friend and it was a first visit to the place. Turned out to be a really good location with great service and a good ambience.

We ate and drank and they danced and we brought up a bill that justified Aditya’s high salary.

I’ve still to get the remaining photos. I’ll upload them to my Flickr album when I do so.

Anyway, we reached college at 2.30am, which excluding New Year’s last year is one of the latest I’ve returned.

The last few days have been as lazy as it has been. One extremely irritating thing is the lack of a proper internet connection because our excellent network folks (I shudder to use the word admin) are busy experimenting with the wifi adapters. I plan on writing a really dirty post about this so called “wifi connectivity” that is promised students out here.

Made a 30 mark worth presentation yesterday for World Class Manufacturing. A day’s work that completes one half of the valuation for that subject. This week is a little tight with lectures (well comparatively)!

The last time we had a major terror incident in Mumbai was when the bombs rocked the train in Mumbai in 2006. Mumbai is no stranger to violence when in 1993, we were hit by a series of blasts all across the city.

However, this time things are different. I reached home at around 10.30 last night after having dinner at Dynasty with Lil white mouse. She informed me off a shooting incident at Leopold in Colaba. I switched on the news to read about the incident and within the next hour realized that it wasn’t just a stray firing but what would turn out to be a full fledged terror attack.

It started off with Cafe Leopold at about 9.30pm and then the Taj Mahal hotel, Hotel Trident, CST Station, Vile Parle, Mazegoan, Cama Hospital and Jewish Headquarters. Read the Terror Roundup on IBNLive.

Incidently, I passed Vile Parle about an hour, if not less, before the blast hit. The taxi blew up below the flyover I had passed over.

The terrorists have taken people hostage at Taj Mahal Hotel, Hotel Trident as well as at Nariman House. Reports currently state that the hostage situation at Taj is resolved, though there are still several persons trapped in the building and it is believed that six terrorists are at large.

The last time we saw such an hostage situation was on Indian Airlines Flight 814 on Christmas Eve 1999.

Reported casualties are 101 killed and several hundred injured, including Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad chief Hemant Karkare, Additional Commissioner Ashok Kamte, encounter specialist Vijay Salaskar and several police officials. However, I’m sure this is not the final count as police are continuing to find bodies in the hotels.

You can check out some photos of the attack on IBNLive.com or view their Live Streaming.

Landed in Mumbai on 11th itself. The visit to Mumbai would consist of a lot of time spent at home, some bank visits, a lot of traveling, a roce, a wedding and a birthday.

Lil white mouse‘s friend Priyanka‘s marriage was on the 15th and as part of our custom, both the bride and the groom have an individual roce which is a traditional function.

The roce was held on her building terrace in Kurla, which required me to ride in terrible traffic out there. Got there very early in spite of this.

Early did mean that I had to wait for a while before the function actually started… an hour later.

The usual dirtying of the bride-to-be took place followed by dancing. We left the place and I dropped Lil white mouse home.

The next day was rather silent. Saturday was the big day of the wedding. Being free in the morning, I decided to head over to Big Bazaar, this time in Mulund. My last two experiences were rather bad. However, since I had Rs. 1,400 in discount coupons, I had to go make and expense. Picked up a black sweather that shall hopefuly assist me this winter. I spent last winter borrowing jackets from Ravi.

Also picked up a salwar piece for Mom, who celebrated her birthday on Sunday.

Saturday evening was the wedding. The reception was held at St. Josephs in Bandra. Lil white mouse’s sister and dad were trigger happy and I was able to collect quite a few images.

For more photos check out the photo gallery.

Stayed over at my grandma’s that evening and convinced her to come back with me on the bike. That would have made an excellent photo

Sunday was Mom’s birthday. Just a quiet lunch to which Lil white mouse came over. She left in the evening.

Spent Monday visiting banks and my barber in the morning and the rest of the day at home.

Caught the first bus from Mumbai to Pune on Tuesday morning and reach here by 10am itself.

Classes began yesterday with a full four hour class from 6.30pm on Advances in Supply Chain, followed by Strategic Marketing and Advances in Supply Chain lectures today. Thus ends the lectures for this week.

Placements is just around the corner and well I kinda tensed. A well kept secret atleast on the blog was my Preplacement Offer from the company I was in for summers, which I rejected last week since it wasn’t up to my expectations. The scene is bad this year, so my fingers are crossed.

I’ve tried to make it a point that I spend my birthday in Mumbai (except last year). It usually isn’t a big affair. I normally celebrate it with Lil white mouse whose is on 15th. The same was the case this year as well.

Went over to her place a little before lunch. The Bus No. 39 is a blessing since the route is from Seepz to Worli Depot. Lunch was not simple, as is usually the case

Was able to grab some sleep after lunch amidst all the preparations that we were involved in for the small evening party. Unlike last year, the party this year was a small, quiet one.

Lil white mouse had few of her friends over. Lil white mouse had baked her birthday cake, which was an extremely delicious chocolate cake with a white chocolate topping.

Dinner was chicken cheese and macronic bake, Ceasar’s salad and spinach pie, all of which were extremely yummy. This was washed down by liquor.

Did I mention that I munched down on tonnes of snacks before that

Dinner was followed by a trifle, which was put together by yours truly. Let’s just say that I ate well

Had plans of staying over at Lil white mouse’s place itself and so, at 12 o’clock we brought in my birthday by cutting the cake. Chatted quite a bit and finally crashed. Woke up late into the morning, which has become kind of custom for me, and which I desperately need to change!

Spent the rest of the day with Lil white mouse who came over to my place to spend time with me and my family.

Sunday was the quiet day spent at home. Watched something on the computer and got my bags packed for the return journey, which was extremely painful and long!

For those interested, I’ve updated my Flickr account with photos of the birthday, freshers’ party and some photos of us in the Admissions Team.

I upgraded my blog to WordPress 2.3 when it released last week and had a great deal of trouble trying to get things to work out here.

This is one major release of WordPress, that really requires you to check all your plugins.

Anyway, one of my favorite plugins is Flickr Photo Album, which allows me to easily integrate Flickr with my photos’ page out here.

The current version of the plugin throws up a

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare get_users_drafts()

This has happened because WordPress 2.3 has done away with admin-db.php and now uses user.php to call the same function.

I found a solution in the Flickr Forum. Open wp-content/plugins/silaspartners/flickr/admin_options_load.php and find

require_once(dirname(__FILE__).$tmpPath.'/wp-admin/admin-db.php');

Replace with:

// changed since WP2.3
require_once(dirname(__FILE__).$tmpPath.'/wp-admin/includes/user.php');

This should fix the error and get your album working perfectly once again. Just need to wait till the author fixes this.

As part of the OSHE program I talked about a few posts back, we had to visit an industry in Pune itself to study the safety measures they have in place.

My batch visited Forbes Marshall in Pune.

The place in around 40 minutes from SCMHRD and the bus ride was noisy (leave a bunch of students in a bus and you will get this), but comfortable.

Forbes Marshall are experts in everything steam. We were allowed to tour their factory on our own and we roamed around gathering information about their processes and more importantly observing things out of place.

The place isn’t too big and we were able to complete our tour rather quickly and so went off to the canteen and “observed the safety” out there. This involved tasting the medu vadas, biscuits and tea. We also checked the table tennis area to ensure that everything was in place.

We ended the session at Forbes Marshall with a brief presentation on their safety plans. We left the place and decided to next survey the safety and McDonald’s and Naturals. This was a little bonus from the Industrial Visit.

If you’re hunting for more photos check out the Forbes Marshall photo album.

August 2nd saw the arrival of the much awaited Freshers’ Party, which ended up leaving much to be desired.

Had mentioned earlier that the juniors had to ask out the seniors as part of “the process”. Clinton found me my date who turned out to be Raghav‘s girlfriend Gandhali.

Aditya, armed with his 7 megapixel Canon Powershot S3 IS, was our chief photographer and went crazy clicking out tonnes of snaps. I’ve filtered out the huge list with some “worthy” ones.

To sum up the Freshers’, the food sucked and the music sucked even more. The only thing good about the event was the icecream. And, as a nice bonus factor I had a long conversation with the cute li’l mouse.

We all went back to the hostel around 2am, which is one of the latest that we have been out so far.

I look forward to such events, though we need to find a better DJ and definitely some better food.