CHAPTER 29 2011-2012

                                                                                      Chapter 29

                                                                2011 -2012

                                             

The ERP project for Hutti with which I was associated as Functional Consultant for the Finance module ran into rough weather in early 2011.   The major modules of ERP were Mining, Metallurgy, Engineering, Personnel, Finance, Hospital  and MIS.  Finance module encompassed Financial Accounting, Budgeting, Costing, and  Payroll. Provident Fund Accounting was also included in this module. 

Though the core functionalities of these modules had been completed,  Sign-off of completion could not be obtained for many of the modules from the departmental heads.  Cosmetic and peripheral  changes were being insisted upon by those at the operating level.  Lukewarm involvement of Top Management was also a contributory factor.  Moneys  were not being released to Keonics  as per schedule on the pretext of non-implementation of minor changes which naturally resulted in non-payment to VGSL.   Exasperated,  Vikas Global had to block the programs and withdraw their personnel.  This put Hutti Gold Mines in a fix.  After a gap of almost a year,  they released  the money relating to some modules but moneys in respect of Mining and Financial Accounting modules were only partly released.  I received  rupees two lakhs  from VGSL towards arrears of remuneration due to me totalling around 3 lakhs.

Now Vikas Global was in a fix.   The programmers and analysts had left the company and fresh hands had to be recruited and they had to familiarize themselves about the  different modules of the ERP package before they could make effective contribution to the final completion  of the  project. I had to spend time educating the freshers about the Finance modules of the ERP project, the tables maintained in each of the modules, program logic,  reports generated etc.  Some of the freshers had to be introduced to PL/SQL, the programming language of Oracle. The new recruits had to pick up the threads from where they were left  a year before.      A couple of  freshers  came to my house to pick up this knowledge.  After this I lost touch with the project. I do not know whether VGSL got completion certificates for all the modules and whether full payment was released  by HGML.  I understand that it was agreed between Keonics and Hutti Gold Mines that any balance work to be done will be completed during the currency of the Software Maintenance Agreement to be concluded with Keonics.

It was during this period that I started writing ‘My Story’, a record of my life experiences spanning the period from 1936 to a  few years into the second decade of the 21^st century..  To gather the material, organise them chronologically and put them in a readable narrative was  quite a task.  I wanted to do this because even my own children were not aware of all the details about my early life.  I didn’t have time and opportunity to talk to them  and when I got time they were busy with their studies , jobs or their own families.  I wrote this down for my grand children also.  I  uploaded each Chapter as a separate post in  the blog titled “M Story” with URL  “ramamurthypr1931.blogspot.com”  which is  accessible to whomsoever is  interested.

In May 2011  my elder son paid a short visit to us from Muscat and he took us,  his parents,  to a  branch of  Vasan Eye Care Hospitals in Bangalore.  After the usual tests I was advised to undergo cataract  surgery in the right eye.  Before the date fixed for the surgery there was a general health check-up to be done.  The systems in Vasan Eye Care Hospitals were very streamlined right from the registration process to the discharge after treatment.  Each patient, on his/her turn, was led by hospital staff to the appropriate locations/ floors /doctors  where the tests,  surgical and other services were to be carried out.  Comfortable seating arrangements had been made for the patients who had to wait for several hours in some cases. Light refreshments, coffee or tea was made available for the waiting patients.   The surgey was performed on 11/05/2011 by  Dr. Narendra P. Datti, M.B.B.S., M.S.,Phaco & Medical Retina.  The surgery was completely painless and took less than an hour.  The procedure  was described in medical terms as ‘Right Eye Phacoemulsification with Hydrophobic Acrylic foldable IOL Implantation done under Topical Anesthesia’.   After the surgery I was told that the eyes should not be wiped, rubbed, or washed with water for upto 4 weeks.  Head bath could be taken only after  4 weeks after the doctor had given the green signal.  Eye drops of the following medicines had to be administered at spaced out intervals over a six week period as  per the schedule given below:

Predforte eye drops- 1^st week  6 times a day , 2^nd week 5 times a day, 3^rd week 4 times a day,

                                      4^th week thrice a day, 5^th week twice a day, 6^th week  once a day

Vigamox eye drops   4 times a day for  2 weeks

Aqua Surge eye drops thrice a day for 4 weeks

Nevanac eye drops  twice a day for  4 weeks

The eye drops should spaced over  period of 12 hours say 8 AM and 8PM

There should be at least 30 minutes between two drops

The frequency with which the drops had to be administered required that some one was at hand to do it at the appropriate time.  The patiet himself might not be able to do it himself.    I had to interrupt my wife  15 times a day in her household chores during the first week,  14 times a day during the second week , 12 times a day during the third week and 11 times a day during the fourth week. During the fifth week 2 drops a day and the  6^th week  1 drop a day of  only  Predforte eye drops were to be administered.  

During the second half of 2011, I had lot of spare time as I was no longer working on the Hutti project. I wanted to engage myself in some fruitful activity for which I had aptitude and,  at the same time, which could be of interest to like-minded people.  In chapter 24  I have talked about a website ‘divyastotras.com’  where we had uploaded more than 200 hymns in Sanskrit, in Devanagari script,  addressed to the different  deities in the Hindu pantheon.  However, the website could not be maintained for lack of continued support from the original sponsor.  I wanted to make these hymns available to a wider audience.    My nephew suggested that I could create a  blog on the internet for free, powered by Google,  and post all these hymns in the blog.  I created the blog ‘Gleanings from Sanskrit Literature’ with URL “prramamurthy1931.blogspot.com”.  To start with I had to convert the text into Devanagari in Unicode which is used universally.  The text with me was created using an old version of Baraha  software which could create documents in Kannada and Devanagari from the input of Roman characters. The later versions of Baraha could convert input in Roman characters into the characters ( in Unicode ) of any of the regional languages of India.  This version had utilities which could convert text generated by the earlier versions of Baraha into text in  Devanagari (Unicode).  Using this utiltity the text was converted and copied to  word documents.  These were copied and pasted to the blog posts, each hymn forming one post in the blog.  As of February 2014 the blog has grown in size with more than 1000 posts classified under the following heads:

 1. Devotional Texts (with English Translation)

      Gita Govindam

       Krishna Karnamrutam

       Mooka Panchasati

        Narayaneeyam (Selection)

 2.  Familiarize Yourself With Sanskrit

 3.  Hymns-Volume1 (Sanskrit, Devanagari script)

 4.  Hymns-Volume2(Sanskrit,Devanagari)     

 5.  Hymns ( Dandakam, Churnika, Gadyam etc)

 6.  Lyrics of devotional songs(Carnatic Classic, Sanskrit)

 7.  Mantras for common problems

 8.  QuotableQuotes (Selections with English translation)

 9.  Ramayana and Mahabharata (Selections)

10. Sahasranama & Satanama Stotras and Namavali

11. VedicMantras

12.  Philosophical Texts and Hymns 

13.  Others (Essays)

 A major part of my spare time I devoted to creating content for this blog. The hymns in Sanskrit are recited by all Hindus though they may not fully understand the meaning. It is the same with Vedic mantras which are chanted by priests and purohits many of whom do not follow the meaning. Most of the Indian languages, however,  have a large number of sanskrit words either  as they are or in a modified form. Therefore the substance of many simple hymns could be understood even by those who have not studied Sanskrit as a language. The thousand and odd posts will cover a minimum of 5000 - 7000 pages of  A-4  size paper. Content for the blog is created using Baraha Direct software  wich will accept Roman characters as input and directly convet them into Devanagari (in Unicode) and store the text in a Microsoft Word document.  This text is copied and pasted on to a new blog post which is opened. I found this method speedier than directly creating the content on the blog post.  One reason was many of my posts ran into upto 10 pages or more  which was easier to do off-line rather than on-line,  given the quality of internet connnectivity available.    

All the posts contained  devotional, spiritual, philosophical, ethical or poetical content in Sanskrit with translation provided in English in some cases.  The idea was to share with like-minded people what I liked and absorbed from the vast treasure house of Sanskrit.  I spent an average of four to five hours a day creating  content for this blog.  My wife was irked by the long hours I spent with my laptop. She thought I was doing fruitless work.  In a way she was right, I was not having any material gain out of this  work.  I could not convince her that what I put on my blog is shared by many not only in India but also in the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Russsia, Australia and Oman, thanks to the Internet and Google.  Statistics provided by Google showed that the blog had already crossed the one million page views mark before the end of 2013.   

It was during this period that I started writing ‘My Story’.  To gather the material, organise them chronologically and putting them in a readable narrative was  quite a task.  I wanted to do this because even my own children were not aware of all the details about my early life.  I didn’t have time and opportunity to talk to them  and when I got time they were busy with their studies , jobs or their own families.  I wrote this down for my grand children also.  I also uploaded each Chapter as a separate ngle post in another blog titled “My Story” with URL  “ramamurthypr1931.blogspot.com” accessible to whomsoever was interested.

In August  2011  I  received an e-mail from Sri DKM kartha who chanced to locate, in my blog ‘Gleanings from Sanskrit Literature’,   a hymn on the Lord of Guruvayoor,  Guruvayoorappan,  by which name the presiding deity Lord Krishna at the Guruvayoor Temple in Kerala is known to his devotees.  He invited me to be a member of guruvayur@yahoogroups.com. I was accepted into the group and   I started contributing, every day,  one sloka in Sanskrit,  glorifying the Lord in his different aspects, from  the treasure house of hymns in Sanskrit. The sloka was given in Devanagari as well as Malayalam scripts (for the benefit of those who could not read Devanagari) and an English translation in prose was also provided.  Every day my e-mail  box received quite a few mails/messages exchanged between group members browsing through which was taking a lot of my time. On top of this I had to think up a sloka for each day as mentioned above and  it added  up to 2 to 3 hours each day. Of course, there used to be interesting material among the mails received.  But I wanted to conserve my time for creating content for my blog  ‘Gleanings from Sanskrit Literature’.   Reluctantly, therefore, I excused myself and exited from the membership of the group in January 2012