While going through a Norman-Lewis vocab book, I came across this word for the first  time.  GAUCH. As my eyes passed on to the succeeding line, my brain refused to move. It identified something with this word. On second look and some more of them convinced me that either I defined this word or is it that this word defines me. Either way, its same. One happy thought about this thing though is that I am not the only one in this world. I used to dread social gatherings but from some compulsive visits, my observation was that in a social gathering you can always find at least one person trying nervously to get along with people around even as he (Yes..its always a he...to this day I have never seen a clumsy woman) tries to find a corner seat where he can just while away the time until the party ends. I am not saying that we are unfriendly (Heckles of FRIENDS type) creatures. But we do value our privacy or should I say we enjoy being left alone. It just feels like back-stabbing when you have to tell ur host how great the party was (and over that we are supposed to flash a friendly smile “effortlessly”). In my opinion no normal human being can go through that kind of pressure. I remember once my father mentioning that this clumsiness comes from the fact that we think too much about what other people are thinking about us. That is very true. Why else would I put so much effort in walking straight and stiff when I can just drag myself around with a bow-like stature. Some people might term this kind of behaviour as being self-obsessive. To them I might say that we respect other people too much to ignore them. We respect their opinions and try to make this world a better place for them. Now if Obama can get a nobel peace prize for just talking, what about us who are actually doing something.

I have seen some people treat this behaviour as some kind of mental disorder. They try to reform you (In fact my mother used to do this all the time and now that I am away from her, the baton has passed to my sisters). But these futile efforts wont last long. Wisdom will dawn upon these self-opinionated people when they will realize that whatever they do, “Kutte ki poonch kabhi seedhi nahi hoti hai”. But they shouldn’t feel lost since we enjoy our own bent ways. I have seen a show about “introverts and extroverts” on Discovery where these people were trying to put the “Awkward” among “people who act as clumsier than Awkward”. They think this might be a confidence booster. But the problem is not confidence. You can put us among a group of penguins and we will come out as clumsier than them. This is as inherent as our blood group or for that matter our skin colour. There are no external parameters controlling our social functionality. Just to state an example..I was going through album pics on one of my classmate’s orkut profile when I came across this group pic with our class teacher, principal and some other guys. Seriously to make my “awkward-even-among-penguins” point, that pic would be like an illustration of all that I have written till now. I have some more pics (one from my brother’s marriage, jokes on which run around the family even now) to clarify my case. I would really like to paste them here but again this would be like a very ironic case of self-violation of privacy. Sorry for depriving u fellas of a very hearty laugh. By the way, thanks to the owner of the orkut profile I was talking about for providing an opportunity to have a hearty laugh on myself. I mean it.

A Typical team meeting:

Got to the conference room early enough to get a seat far enough from MD's seat, an action I thought was a result of being a 'visionary' (since I foresaw the results of getting seated nearer to MD), an action which proved me wrong in the later part of the meeting. How? We will get to that later.
There is always this nervousness creeping into me before the meeting with these folks. Half of the tech jargon they use just bounces over my receptors. And when he asks me "So, what are u doing now?", all I say everytime is the project name.
Leaving out all these dizzying detail, let move forward to the part where 'V' enters (he signs all his mails as V. very fittingly a man with Vendetta). Takes his seat. wrt V I was sitting at 10'O clock. Far enough I thought. But this geometrically correct position was not so correct when viewed strategically. How? Well, lets come to that a little later.

So the meeting starts. Some of the guys tried to stand nervously as V entered. Damn u guys. Please get over ur college days. This might have been the thought crossing V's mind. "You guys don't need to stand. Its not like college here". This is what he said. "So guys its a quick meeting to sync up whats going on in breakaway project".
"Oh shit". I hate these sync up meets. All I hear is blah blah blah while I all I say is blah blah and blah. The name is so fitting to my situation here. Every day passing by is breaking me down and driving me away from the thought of continuing in this company.
"But before that a little thing to mention. I have been going through ur status reports everyday. I have seen improvement in most of them". I was pretty sure I was not one of "them". "But I would like to see more details in ur report. At the end of the day, you should ask urself,'Am I satisfied with this work' (Oh! yyyyeah), 'Is this the best I can do' (believe me, for the thing I am being paid this is better than the best u can get out of me.). "You should question urself"(hey dude, that is the thing I do for almost half the day)."I want u folks to introspect"(sorry but I am not so self obsessed. I would rather judge u). "I want to see the personality in ur reports".(I am a funny personality. should I draw caricatures in my report).
Then started the hell
"I dont like the attitude where you just make something work and send it for review. This kind of attitude wont be tolerated here. This is not our philosophy. u should find the root cause. Until then u should keep digging. I see some reports. There is only 'done this' 'done that'. You should write in detail so that we know what u were thinking" Suddenly these blah blah packets started getting decrypted in my head. I missed a simple fact that all this while his eyes were fixated on me with little breaks in between when they would sweep the room for once and again back to me. This is when I realized my folly of sitting there. I was almost in front of him. So whomsoever he may address his eyes will trace back to me.
It felt like this meeting was called just to pick me out. Wow!! Now the best part.
"Lets go around and see what each one of us working on. After 4 people's turn, it was me.

"Sir, I am almost done with the IDA part...blah...blah." I should have stopped there. But inspired by his 'personality' speech "I am also working on the bonjour component. There is this issue where VPN is not working if we enable this option. So I disabled it and checked in the fixes and its working fine now". It felt so right when I thought it out in my head.

"So what was the fix approach"
"Sir, this was because we were enabling this option which is not supported"
"No, thats fine. But why is not working. What affect is this option having?"(I am so screwed)And then I uttered those dreadful words which I was trying to avoid all evening.
"Sir, I got this fix from Integration team. I didn't investigate the bug yet." It was almost like I injected a gallon of adrenaline into him. I never saw this guy so excited. No examples are coming up to me for scaling his excitation. And the fact of me being the reason for such a Typhoonic outlet of expression wasn't helping so much.
"This..exactly this is the thing I was saying to u guys. U see. I was seeing through this issue and the integration team were giving some very meaningless reasons. This is exactly what I was telling. This is the behavior we have to change. See you did something, it worked and you think its fixed"(Its fixed isn't it? I mean 'if' its working). "But you did not fix it. blah....blah....blah." I so hate it when I am in the spotlight and that too for wrong reasons (which is sadly the case most of the times. Seriously. Most of the people remember me as that guy who screwed up that part. Well, I cant blame them). All this while when He was blabbering non-stop, I was trying to come with something decent to say.
"I will look into this behavior Sir."
"No, Thats ok man. I am thankful that you brought up this issue (read "thankful for giving me an opportunity to show the team what I can do to them"). 'Oh Please don't mention it Sir. The pleasure was all mine'. phew!!

PS: I still dont understand why they say "minutes of meeting" when there is so much detail in each second.