Michael Jackson - GONE TOO SOON

My wife and I are deeply saddened to hear about the untimely loss of Michael Jackson, the undisputed King Of Pop, a man that is considered to have single-handedly changed the face of pop music & pop culture in the 80s and 90s. From his beginnings as the youngest member of the Jackson 5 to setting new standards in dance and music videos Michael was in more ways than one – an icon who through his sheer talent and artistry unified the world through his music.

We will always consider him a representation of our age; someone who inspired our generation (and so many other generations). We grew up listening to his music, watching his videos, collecting his memorabilia & keeping track of his exploits.

I “Remember the time” I was a kid and looked forward to doing the moonwalk in front of friends and family to “Beat It” and “Billie Jean”. His music was so universal; it appealed to everyone no matter if they were “Black or White”. He was always trying to do so much, trying to “Heal the World”. We danced to his music and had to “Blame It On The Boogie”. His music is so invigorating, “You Can’t Stop Till You Get Enough”. No matter what anyone says about Michael Jackson, most people will consider his life quite the “Thriller”, most people will always consider the King of Pop an indubitable part of “HIStory”. In one simple word he will always be – “Invincible”.

REST IN PEACE & GOD BLESS YOU ALWAYS!

Handling the Recession

Researchers and financial analysts (these are the same people that said the US economy was solid for the next 2 decades by the way) say that even through we’re undergoing a recession; some communities are seemingly less affected by the global downturn than the others. This means that if you’re in healthcare or education, you’re less likely to lose your job than if you are in the banking or financial services sectors. Of course this doesn’t mean that teachers, doctors and nurses are recession proof; it just means they are harder to get rid of than the annoying investment consultant bugging you with incessant phone calls telling you to diversify your stock portfolio.

Maybe it's about time some of us switched professions? ;-) Either way, I think we're lucky we live in the GCC. Although things are rough at the moment with job-cuts, pay-cuts and budget-cuts, at least we're better off than the people in the US where the scene is almost literally cut-throat!

My Wife and I

For those of you wondering why I have been out of circulation for the past many months......here is why:

It’s hard to get out of bed these days. It’s partly due to the chilly weather outside but it’s more to do with something else. It isn’t like the old days when I’d just slam my hand on to the snooze button on my alarm clock. I used to hit the button about 5 times, toss and turn in bed and jump out of it after realizing I had snoozed for an hour! Now I have to adjust to someone else in bed next to me. The first bit of realization that I’m not single anymore (the first bit of realization of the day I mean). I have to be careful not to let my flaying hands hit my wife who’s sleeping snugly. And I realize the real reason I get up late these days; I just can’t seem to drag myself out of bed with her right next to me.

Just to fill you readers in, I got married last month and am just about getting adjusted to it. Honestly, some of my friends told me it would be a piece of cake. Others said it would take a lot of time getting used to. But on the whole, it’s been great!

Why? Because after you’re married, you’re a team. I love having a team-mate who will go to all lengths to ensure our team wins.

Take shopping for instance. My evaluation of products stems from looking for items in attractive packaging. Men don’t generally look at food-color types, calorie content and most importantly – expiry dates. How else would you describe the heaps of expired products in my refrigerator before I got hitched?

Then think about instant foods like making pop corn at home. Unless you’re a chef, you’re not going to take the trouble of putting oil into a frying pan, adding kernels of corn and standing next to a vessel full of them until they’re popped. Men just like popping the stuff into a microwave, giving it 3 to 5 minutes and voila! Pop corn! Or how about salad dressing? How many guys have actually taken the time to prepare the dressing from scratch? Now I am being trained to make every food preparation from scratch.

Being married has its other advantages. It’s great that you’ll find someone who laughs at all your jokes no matter how many times she’s heard them just to make sure you don’t look uninteresting or boring.

It’s great that you can have someone tell you very subtly via sign language that you’ve something in your teeth while you’re having dinner with friends.

Let’s look at it from another perspective. Before you’re hitched, you’re always on the phone to your boyfriend/girlfriend. Endless amounts of text messages and phone-calls later, both your budgets take a hit in the negative. But once you’re married, you’re literally living together. No needs to text or call, your wife’s right there next to you. You can judge the complexity of a situation (if there is one) without having to second guess and what’s better is your thumb doesn’t get stretched typing or dialing.

If the two of you are driving together, you have company and don’t have to listen to sloppy radio programming. You can have simple conversations about why the fender of the car in the next lane looks crappy to subconsciously complex conversations like why you didn’t let her know her favorite TV show was on while she was taking her nap. And conversations get even more fascinating if you’re stuck in a jam.

Planning a weekend is tricky. When you’re single, you’re more than ready to mingle. You’re more or less ready to set the dreary desert sands of Kuwait on fire with only your thoughts of being in a foreign land sipping martinis. If a friend calls you over, you oblige. Now it’s a different ball game. “I have to check with the missus and get back to you mate” is the reply to those impromptu invitations I have these days. And rightly so. I love saying things in the collective noun way. Like “My wife and I are having a blast” or “my wife and I will be dropping by later” or just plain and simple “my wife and I are planning on staying in tonight” I love saying sentences with “my wife and I”, it sounds so grown up.

Another fun-filled task is ordering take-out. Somehow you’re stuck between Chinese and health-food and after tossing a few take-out menus back and forth for 20 minutes you both decide to order a pizza with the works.

All said and done, for those of you thinking I’m being a know-it-all on marriage, I most certainly am not. Just treat this as a spiel from a guy wanting to impress readers with his astute first hand views on being married. After all it’s not smart taking marriage advice from someone who’s been married for a little over a month, is it?

This is from my January article in the bazaar magazine

A New Year's Message from BarryUno

Cyberspace has not seen Barry for quite a while and admittedly, it is because of a lot of reasons. Blame it on new responsibilities at work, the new employees we hired, the new Sony Experia and what have you but mostly it is thanks to my wedding that took place in November in Goa, India.

Needless to say, planning and executing weddings are arduous tasks that need to be accomplished with the panache and dexterity of a lion tamer on his last bit of meat. My wife and I have worked tediously to ensure a smooth transition from single-dom to wedded bliss which has been attained by the both of us and even though the world bliss isn’t easy to put right next to wedded (except of course in wedding speeches), we’re doing quite well, thank you very much.

Any-ho…without further ado, I will now subject you all to my effusive new year’s message as usual to be taken with a pinch of salt and perhaps some lemon-barley water; something I’ve got addicted to since my wedding…makes you piss like a horse!

First of all, forget all this hogwash about life being a roller coaster, life’s a bitch etc etc. Life is life. And no, before you smartasses think I am referring to the Opus song of the eighties Life’s is just what we make of it.

The past year has taught me just that. The only difference is that we all have a multiplicity of choices to make. Some of us choose wisely while others think we have time and go about knocking the wrong doors. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. We screw up, we get ourselves out of the mess we made and move on. That’s the beauty of life.

For me, the year 2008 was great. It was great in the sense that I got a new perception on life; in the sense that I moved up a little at work. In the sense that I now get to share the rest of my life with my wife Eva who is now my best friend in the whole wide world. (I know some of you might be cringing now)

And so I say: 2009…bring it on baby! Bring on the tough battles along with the light-hearted moments. Bring on the emotional quandaries and the rag tag arguments at work. Bring it on….bring it all on!

But most importantly, bring on the good times. Here’s to a happy, wonderfully charged up, excitement filled, (terrorism free) new year!

Happy New Year Everyone...!!!

What's in a title?

Some of you might find this post familiar. It's just my article for the bazaar magazine for the month of February. It might be a little too stale and the moment but the topic still makes my head boil at times......and sometimes makes me laugh until I almost puke my guts out! Anyway....read on:

What qualifies a person to be a manager? Or what qualifies a person to be a Director or Vice President for that matter? Let’s take a peek at how titles are derived these days.

I don’t mean to pass judgment on the people that have gone up the ladder the old fashioned way – hard work, hands-on experience and leadership abilities among many other traits. It’s just that in recent times we have seen an unusual, almost abnormal growth of titles in large corporations and medium sized company. Gone are the days when being a Sales Manager or Product Manager was the “in” thing. Now we have complex titles like Manager, International Relations, Middle East & Africa or Senior Corporate Advisor, Asia & Emerging Markets. They have titles, subtitles and the area in which they function both in terms of the company itself and sometimes the geographical location.

Occasionally these fancy titles take about 40 per cent of the space available on a business card (and half your breath away). The people with the titles for the most part are just “suits” or sometimes just “skirts” if I may use that term. People with a fancy degree from an even fancier sounding college or university that speak with a Western accent get fancier titles compared to the rest of the plebeian folk.

What dictates your title and your position in the pecking order of a company? Is it your experience? Is it your capacity to handle complicated projects? Is it your ability to supervise people? Apparently some companies in Kuwait have no clear distinctions. You could be a Vice President and have nobody except an executive assistant reporting to you. You could be in a department of six wherein all six are managers with no sub-ordinates.

Granted sometimes when you are in a Business Development function and you are meeting with higher-ranking members of the business community, it does help if you have a senior (sounding) title on your business card. However that does not mean you hire people who have just graduated out of a top university and give them a superior title to impress your clients and this seems to be the case in Kuwait of late.

In my opinion, companies in Kuwait have to draw a line on how to award titles. For instance, if you are in the capacity of Business Development Manager, are you in a position to draw up a Business Plan for the product or service that you are selling? Are you able to segregate strategic, tactical and day-to-day decisions and create a plan that will incorporate all these fundamentals? In most cases, I’ll tell you right now, the answer is no. Fine, they probably can drum up an exciting presentation in PowerPoint with fancy bells and whistles and sophisticated graphs and pie charts but tell them to do something a little more strategic in nature and they’ll shun you like the plague! They make simple projects sounds as convoluted as knitting sweaters for an entire football team blindfolded in semi-circles!

This is something I have experienced. I meet these kinds of people on a daily basis all the time. These are the people who have offices of their own and disapprove of working in cubicles. They are the kind of people who appear to be real busy (taking a page right out of Dilbert) staring into their laptops all day making you think they’re diligent workers who have an urge to make it to the top. Little known to the common folk is that these people are actually silently chatting away their time on MSN or of late (Face-booking their profile). Or they could be YouTubing too! What is amusing is their skill on how to maximize and minimize applications in Windows is so flawless that they can make you believe they’ve been working hard on a global product pricing graph all day when the truth of the matter is they’ve been chatting to some East European girl promising to walk down the aisle with them and bring them to Kuwait for better prospects.

Personally I could care less if these people become CEOs within the next year or two. I would rather hone my skills as a professional and climb the ladder – the right way. To those people with flamboyant titles, all I can say is – Damn shame!

Being well dressed does pay off!

I have this reputation of being a sharp dresser and until recently I hadn't given it much thought. Call me boastful or a prude but that is the truth and most of you readers who haven't met me in person might think the same. Both my parents are reasonably good dressers and perhaps I imbibed my dress sense from them. Perhaps it was the fact that I was involved in the fashion industry back home in India in my teens. But what really inspires me to put effort into my dressing is the fact that it makes me feel good about myself. It brings on more confidence and I feel I can take on the world (apart from dressing it's thinking of my fiancé that does that too).

What prompted me to post this article on my blog was the fact that a lot of people (while complimenting me on my dress sense) have always remarked that Indians aren't the best of dressers and I for one resent that. I know a lot of Indians who've got very good taste in clothes and accessories. Of course there are a few people who need a makeover desperately but for the most part I think it isn’t that they don't know how to dress, they're just fixed on an era that was theirs and got stuck to the clothes at the time.

Here are a couple of tips for guys who work in the office and outside either in sales or business development.

Invest in three good suits. They don't have to be designer suits just well cut suits in solid colors or thin pin stripes if you're on the heavier side of the weighing scale. Since we're approaching summer go for one solid cream or beige suit. Your accompanying shits with this one could be a crisp white, pink or light blue. Your second pick should be a blue suit; not dark blue, not navy blue, just plain blue. For shirts you could use plain or pastel colors or even stripes but if they're formal shirts the stripes should be in one single dark color. And no loud ties with these shirts just plain solid or striped ones will do just fine. Leave checkered shirts for weekends and outings with your fashionably challenged friends.

While you'll wear these two suits to everyday meetings with clients, the third one should be a dark grey or black one that you will reserve for your meetings with high level officials or when you attend a big event. You could also wear this one to formal events and dinner parties. Make sure you wear a crisp white shirt if it's a formal event and the ties for these night time soirees should be in solid and dark colors.

What about accessories you might ask? Timepieces are very important and are very representative of who you are so leave all your Casio Digitals in your drawer at home and stick to analogues. Ideally you should have one dress watch either a steel or leather strap while the other can be for those casual meetings or evening coffee-shop appointments with friends.

Shoes should always be well polished and you could try carrying one of those little shoe-sponges in your car's glove compartment for those times you're forced to park in a sand-patch and walk to a modern building for about 100 yards before getting to your appointment. Remember your belt always matches your shoes so if you're wearing black crocodile leather shoes make sure you're wearing a black belt and so on and so forth.

Speaking of shoes another big faux pas I've seen guys make is wear white socks on suits or formal trousers. Let's face it dudes, break-dancing doesn't pay a lot unless you're insanely talented so make sure your socks either match the color of your trousers or are a shade darker. Pointy white shoes are for Cuban drug lords, Lou Bega and Jitender so they're definitely out of style unless you really want to make a point (pun intended).

I think I have done my part here so I'll leave it at that. For those of you who have these kind of clothes in your wardrobe, good for you. For those of you who don't, I think it's time you went shopping. And to those of you who think I'm being an ass and don't want to take my suggestions.......just get a subscription to GQ! ;-)

Parking Woes!!!

Parking has always been a problem in Kuwait. From parking at work to parking in crowded streets to even paid parking lots. We find people doing all sorts of nonsense when it comes to parking. Let's break it down into a few categories:

Take for instance the Asian expatriates who drive their Kuwaiti sponsor's cars. Man, just because you're driving a Lexus or a BMW 7 Series, doesn't mean you get to behave rude and obnoxious like your bosses! First of all these people drive like peacocks on a mating spree and when they're waiting for their sponsors to come out pf the malls, they wait right at the entrance blocking other drivers from passing. And heaven forbid you blow your horn, they give you that stare that makes you think they're actually the owners of those fancy cars who just have absolutely no dress sense!

There those other kind of people who think that it is their God-given right to take all their time when getting into their cars after a bout of shopping. It could take anything between 30 seconds to 45 minutes for ladies (who are heavily made up) to get into their car, get out to throw their Oscar De La Renta bag in the back seat, climb into the driver's seat again, adjust the rear view mirror (while simultaneously checking to see if their heavy make up is still on), turning on the ignition and almost rear-ending the vehicle behind theirs while getting out of a seemingly easy-to-get-out-of parking spot. They might not want to Asian driver waiting for them but this is worse than that; at least for people waiting for their turn to park. Ladies, please learn to differentiate between N, D and R in our gear shift.

Then there are stalkers who stalk parking spaces. These people drive slow and steady smack in the middle of the parking lot with little regard for the people behind them. Their only aim is to obtain the parking slot right next to the entrance of a mall or supermarket despite the large number of empty spaces that exist in the next lane. They don't mind waiting for even 15 minutes if it secures their spot right next to the entrance. Now all they need is a red carpet and the steely white flashes of the paparazzi!

Then you have those stupid paid parking lots especially in downtown Kuwait City. You pay to enter and despite that you spend about 20 minutes finding a spot. The whole concept of ease of use has been lost here and this happens quite a lot during rush hour. Why don’t they just keep track of the number of cars they let in and stop people from entering once it is full?

Let's not forget, there are those dim-wit numb-skulls that think they have the right to park in two spots instead of one. They either don't see the white line separating two spots of they just don't care. They park diagonally and think it's a mater of style or it shows off their driving (in this case parking) prowess. These people really piss me off – selfish fu#ks!

Finally, there are the people who block someone else thinking "he's not going to move…..I'll be back in a jiffy". Now these are probably the people who come home from the office for a quick lunch and get caught up in an afternoon quickie that they need to take a small nap after it's done. Forget about the poor soul downstairs that has to get to the office or an appointment on time, he can wait until I finish my nap and get another quickie on my way out!

Why do I ask you are people so inconsiderate? Why is it that they are so lazy? Why do they think they're the only people privileged to drive on the roads? Do any of you want to add to these categories?