AR speaketh...

Lively People

2010-08-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

Foreword: It's that time of the year again. Indians all over the world stop refilling plastic Coke bottles with "filtered" water and remind each other of the fact that they are independent. As in free, from foreign rule. Then, we go back to bribing the traffic constable and pissing in the streets. That's all good, only it's not that much fun. I'm here to tell you what is.

A couple of times on this blog, for those of us who care, I have talked about movies. I'm going to do that one more time. I spent what was Independence Day in India in a cinema in the USA watching "Peepli (Live)" (hence the title, get it?). I've rarely been blown away by movies (except, maybe, by those starring Angelina Jolie) but this time I was. "Peepli..." was witty, non-preachy, non-partisan and most importantly, naach-gaana free. I was reminded of "Jaane bhi do yaaron" by the easy satire and lack of pretense. The part I liked best was that the director offered no solutions, just showcased some problems. In an hour and forty-four minutes, Anusha Rizwi (and possibly Aamir Khan, behind the scenes) told a crisp and engaging tale, one I highly recommend. Enough said.

Managing Business Animals

2010-04-01T23:14:00.000-07:00

Foreword: So, I'm about to graduate with my MBA and in the two or so years that it took me, I noticed a few things. Many of my beliefs were reinforced, some were challenged and some shattered. But that's the thing with beliefs- you have them, and then you have a few more, you know- as backup. This is not that story.

I've always maintained that most people are idiots- complete duds, the rocks for brains variety. You often meet them in real life- like the one at work that insists on printing only on one side of the paper, the one you meet on the way home who thinks honking causes traffic lights to change quicker... you know what I'm talking about. Business school is different. Don't get me wrong, most people are still idiots- they are just a different kind. That makes it very interesting when you can watch them from a distance, or another dimension, or something but when you actually have to deal with them, without the benefit of a LART, things begin to go south very quickly. So, I've compiled here a list of idiots you are likely to meet at a business school.

Mega Marketer

This person makes "brand promises" to his/her spouse and is convinced "brand experience" in life is all that counts. Almost always characterized by a compulsive obsession with marketing-speak.

Typical argument structure: So you said [fact] but I feel customers want [some sad promised land attribute from a cheesy ad]. My [random family member] is [some attribute that makes said family member a target user] and she thinks [lame ass point about an aspect nobody cares about].

This person is convinced "building a brand" is a corporation's number one goal and any questions about marketing expenses are sacrilegious. He/she talks too long in words nobody understands about things nobody cares about. With some effort you could sell this guy an idea to use a picture of poop in an advertisement because it is familiar, has no known brand associations and has great "recall". To scare him away, say Ln(exp(x)) = x. Works every time.

"Tally-ho" Trader

This finance enthusiast follows the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, a few hedge fund managers, adores George Soros and can talk of straddles, butterflies, implied vols and technical analyses all day. Frequently seen scouring bloomberg.com to find their next "insight" which they will promptly rattle off at the slightest provocation. What separates this creature from a real trader is a complete lack of understanding of the events behind the news he so closely follows.

Sample conversation-

TT: The CDS spreads on Greek bonds are widening more than expected. The Euro is doomed. They'll never kick Greece of EMU...

You: Why?

TT (with a superior smile): Well, none of those agreements in the EU are really enforceable, so what can they do?

You: If none of those are enforceable, doesn't that make booting Greece even easier? What can it do?

TT: What? Soros says... I mean... Bloomberg says...

In-human Capitalist

This is an interesting variety. I'm kidding- these are as mind numbingly boring as they come. This animal's natural inclination is to talk about people at such a superficial level that it makes [random teenage pop musician] seem deep. Conversation involves terms stolen from pop-psychology, interspersed with popular business-ized imports from real psychology (source: seminal works from the Stanford basement) and a chorus of "people are a firm's best assets". E.g., People prefer optionality and if we don't give it to them, they might resort to malicious compliance, which will hurt our triple bottomline. As we know, people are our best assets.

They love talking about organizational culture and the impact it has on people and the impact people have on it, till it all reduces to one big clusterf**k. And that might adversely impact firm culture.

Compulsive Consultant

This one owns the rights to "creating value by leveraging strategic" [totally random pretend business concept]. E.g., Pets.com aims to create shareholder value by leveraging strategic eyeballs. And tooth fairies, except on Wednesdays, when they go looking for synergies. Most commonly found spouting the word "structured" as if using it as an adjective increases the awesomeness of the subject by orders of magnitude. In reality, this animal is structured like a retarded baboon. Somehow everything he says has three reasons or three parts or three wingdings or whatever. The magical number comes from a very well respected source- PIROMA (Pulled It Right Out of My Ass).

Toyota Mouth

Used to be called motormouth but out of respect to recent events, has been renamed. No one really knows where this one's motivations lie. Characteristics include acute verbal diarrhoea and some more. Makes completely pointless remarks about nothing in particular in an often untraceable accent. Just to make it seem as if he is really going to make a point, tends to speak faster with every spoken word. This one's so arbitrary that he makes this blog seem relevant and focused.

Sample conversation:

TM: How would you do X in [a stylized example which has been constructed to avoid X]?

Professor: You can't. That's the whole point of the example.

TM: But X is an important action, especially in the current economic environment. I feel not allowing it takes away from the options available to handle this situation. As [incorrectly quoted and totally irrelevant, even when correctly quoted, example] shows, Y is a great alternative. I believe Z may or may not be applicable in the situation you haven't even mentioned yet, but I think you will because I'm so smart. So the question is, what's my class participation grade for today?

Conclusion

Remember that these are only a few of the possible idiots/animals you will encounter. Composites bearing characteristics of more than one type are not unusual. You will do well to carry a nice thick book on Econometrics with you at all times. If that doesn't scare these away, you can always try throwing the book at them. Though, I'd recommend rocks.

Source: PIROMA

Blooming Phools

2009-12-21T11:34:00.000-08:00

Foreword: It is that time of the year again. Gifts, and more disturbingly flowers, are at the forefront of our collective consciousness. I'm all right with them being there as long as they stay out of mine but alas, this was not to be. A friend recently asked me to get flowers for her boyfriend's birthday. This got me thinking…

A long time ago, I wrote about the subtle art of gifting and it seems people have long since forgotten about it. The lack of attention to some of the finest pieces of knowledge fills me with despair, but I digress. Back to my travails. Tasked with finding the right kind of flowers, I focused my considerable mental faculties and gave up in about 39 seconds. I had no clue! Disbelief and consternation- how is this even possible? If the revered writer of this blog professes complete inability at something, who else can you turn to, besides Oprah? Ah! There it was, cocooned in the charming expression was the answer. So, I turned on the TV and watched The Hope Channel and felt instantly better. If they had a right to live AND feel smug, so did I. Besides, I am smarter and better looking (all comments relating to this sentence will be summarily deleted. -Author).

Filled with hope, no wait- that was gas from all the peas I’d been eating, I went back to the problem at hand and decided to look up a few florists on the Internet. I found 179 different bouquets completely appropriate for the occasion, sender and receiver and each of them cost a little over the combined TARP budget. This, of course, was a roadblock of sorts, since I didn’t expect the administration to bail out said friend any time soon. Though, given that all that required was printing a few more currency notes, I think it was decidedly unkind towards her.

Spurned by the stores in the clouds, I turned to good old brick and mortar- Kroger! Thanks to the holiday season, there were lots of flowers on sale. Unfortunately, they were attached to potted plants. Now, I will have you know that I know enough about social mores to realize that build-your-own bouquets are somewhat frowned upon by the friendly Kroger staff, especially when the constituents are sourced from plants on sale. I decided to change the game by buying a potted plant instead. Surely, they were acceptable substitutes for short-lived flowers? Closer examination revealed said potted plants to be a kind of cactus and that struck me as somewhat odd, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on it (almost literally). Recalling from my business education that communication was vitally important, I immediately called up a friend, who despite being admittedly unqualified to help, expressed confidence in my choice. So I bought the nearest bouquet because:
1. It had flowers
2. It had been made within the last 6 months
3. It looked like, umm, a bouquet
4. The pots were heavy

Realize that while my methods were, I am proud to say, “structured”, this isn’t necessarily the right overall strategy. Without repeating what I’ve already said, the fact remains that a digital Playboy subscription would have gone a lot farther. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll go buy some radio controlled vehicles for my grandfather.

Ware, were we?

2009-11-06T14:02:00.000-08:00

Foreword: Long time. So this is where I offer the usual excuses for being tardy and you nod sympathetically or roll your eyes, so lets take a few seconds and get that out of the way. Good. I've had a rule for myself while posting stuff to this blog- posts had to be absolute gold: literary delights, full of intellectual humour and socially sensitive and responsible. No wait, that's my online playboy subscription I'm thinking of. The rule for this one was a certain minimum length and I just threw it out. Thus empowered, now I can write whatever I want, however I want and go on for as long as I want. You do not comprehend the subtlety of the change, but you will (no, not you with a service animal for arithmetic).

Life is. I wonder why people feel the almost compulsive need to add another word after that. Like "beautiful", or "nice", or "shitty", or "a seven footer standing on your little toe while a trombonist feeds your auditory canal with 120 dB of sound". By definition, adding any of those narrows the range of meanings life can take and thus loses generality. So what you inevitably get is someone disagreeing with your definition and that leading to a long social interchange which could have been avoided. Unless you actually LIKE people and I can see why you would. And warts.

So, I've decided to not think about life too much, at least not in the sense that limits possibilities. So from today, I've decided to ignore gravity, especially in social situations. Just to show my level of comfort with, and commitment to writing short posts and not being averse to ending abruptly

Taking Stock

2008-12-13T22:03:00.000-08:00

Foreword: Apologies for the painful pun. As you already know, it has never been my intention to hurt people, except my neighbours (who don’t qualify as people anyway) but there is something about the world these days that forces you to take notice. I mean, there’s so much going on out there: there’s the economy (all right, there’s not much going on there, I’ll give you that), politics- America just elected its first coloured president, life- there you just lost a second of your remaining life, etc. But let’s cut to the really important part: movies. I watched, with sadness, the latest Bond movie and I’ll be damned if I don’t tell you about it.

I know it became one of the biggest earners this year but, really, a Bond in love? A Bond that does not ask for newer, bigger, meaner gadgets, doesn’t bust his car twice, doesn’t even introduce himself- “Bond, James Bond.” And people LIKE it? WHAT is wrong with the world? Luckily, Tom Cruise wasn’t in it or I wouldn’t have known it from Jerry McGuire. No, that’s not true. I would have cried less in JM.

Between all this, the Mumbai attacks happened. Right in the glamour capital of India- where the biggest and the brightest stars reside. And that has raised interesting questions. Its one thing to write a facetious blog, it is quite another to credit an event involving more than 60 hours of pure terror with “interesting questions”. Allow me to explain. India, to the uninitiated (I have no idea who that is, since the entire world and its mother-in-law has strong feelings about it but in keeping with Holmes’ advice, we never discount the possibility of the improbable), is a country of more disparity than a Benetton ad. Maybachs run on streets that also serve as people’s homes. This time it was the not just the man on the street who bled, but also the man in the rear seat of the Maybach (possibly staining it irredeemably, but that’s another story). Terrorism suddenly shifted from being SEP (someone else’s problem- H2G2) into your own manicured front lawn and that pissed people off. How come these no-good politicians (who grace our page 3 dos, get our illegal farm houses legalized, straighten that pain-in-the-ass customs officer, and/or clear the mess involving that illegal immigrant domestic help- do you know how tough it is these days to get kitchen help?) cannot ensure our security? Off with their heads. I must admit, I loved Suhel Seth’s rant on a news channel. That guy sure can talk. The passion you feel for a situation when you nearly lose your life in it lends you poetic eloquence.

Well, it’s not quite funny. Or maybe it is. Depends on whether you have a dark sense of humour. So what does it mean for “the system”? Nothing, really. There were some candle light vigils by women toting Gucci bags, corporate India’s appeals for private security- which happened to be a “Central government issue”, a rather funny incident involving a chief minister and the father of a brave commando who lost his life in the attacks and oh- a very strong address by the Prime Minister who really should be lending his voice for Mickey Mouse in the next Disney movie. Nothing against the Prime Minister, really- just that he would me much more useful building a statistical model for the way out of this recession than leading a billion semi-literate people with more superstitions than food in their belly. But I digress. We are not here to talk about Economics professors caught in the crossfire of political ambitions. We are here to talk solutions; only, in this case, I don’t have them.

I am a cynic- and if you didn’t know that already, stop smoking that thing you still have from Woodstock. So let me tell you that there is no solution. I would love to be wrong, trust me, but that doesn’t look likely. As I see it, we will soon return to business as usual, salute the indomitable spirit of Mumbai (whatever that means), hold a few meetings chaired by different “political types” in the “honour of the brave men that laid down their lives to save ours” and return to devoting countless hours of parliament time to the newest statue in some godforsaken park. The thing that really saddened me about the attacks was that the MPs among the hostages came out alive. At least we could have had a silver lining to the whole episode. Bullet-proofed Maybachs will continue to run on streets lined with half-fed people, intellectuals will exhort the nation to take voting seriously (and choose between the devil and the deep sea), and the elite from south Bombay (no, that’s not Mumbai) will begin to invite politicians to their farmhouse parties again. All will be well with the world. Till the next attacks happen and we’ll go through the whole drama again. I just hope we reinvent some of the parts so it doesn’t get too boring.

I almost forgot to tell you that I am a romantic too. In fact, I’m as cynically romantic as I am romantically cynical. So I do have a solution. Captain Nemo (if you don’t know who that was, don’t bother) said, “Desperate situations need desperate measures” and I think what we need is a revolution to massively revamp our politics. Democracy, clearly the ideal form of government, presupposes an inherent ability, intellectual and otherwise, among citizens. Evolutionists will tell you, that is not a clever assumption. Hence the Big Brotherly approach of the political class to coach the masses into “democracy readiness” which really means vote for whoever can most sway your passions. By definition, passions are irrational; hence they can only engender irrational results. See exhibit (A), the governments of India- past and present.

Our task reduces, essentially, to education. In fact, that is the one silver bullet that can cure India. Now notice the irony here- education, securely in the government’s plate as a state function, when repaired can serve to dislodge the powers that be. Does it surprise you, then, that our education system continues to be abysmal? This is where we can come in and make a difference. Systemic change is more likely to come about from an effort to educate people and arm them with the ability to think rather than react to impassioned pleas, than lighting candles and holding protest marches. Unless you have pretty girls in short skirts leading them.

MBArking on an Atlant-ic Odyssey

2008-08-19T20:43:00.000-07:00

Foreword: By now you were probably scouring the obituaries to see if I’ve finally had the decency to tie a stone round my neck and jump into the nearest overflowing manhole and I really hate to spoil it for you, but, like the French say, c’est la vie. No, I didn’t get abducted by aliens, did not travel in time to see if we’re really descendents of telephone linesmen and salesmen and certainly did not get arrested (really, believe me!). I’ve instead been through what some people call a life changing event. Of course, I refer to the fact that I have tried out a new brand of detergent and it removes the toughest stains (and the clothes are oh so soft!). Otherwise things are pretty much the same, except that I quit my job and moved to Atlanta to pursue an MBA.

After five years of being on a vacation, for no honest man would call a software job that, I decided to get serious about my life. After a dark, cold period of intense deliberation (53 seconds), I realized the world wasn’t ready for the motive force that lies trapped within my human form. And by definition, being serious isn’t much fun anyway; so I joined b-school instead. Here I am, back in school after what seems like a lifetime spent drinking free coffee (oh how I miss free coffee!) and mark my words, things can get tough in here! I have always been a believer in the theory that you always make time for what you want to do: over and above all other demands on your time. I’ve been told by many, including my faculty, that an MBA is different in that you rarely have sufficient time for all that you need to do! One week into the programme, I can tell you that it is true and believe me, we have just about begun ambling along.

If you’re an MBA aspirant and (yet) you’re reading this (don’t you know the number of GMAT takers has increased by over 40% since last year?), don’t get disheartened. No sir, panic! Rethink, is it worth it? You go through the incrementally challenging tasks of taking the GMAT, writing the applications and finally appearing for the interviews to do what? Lose your job and pay (and how!) for getting stressed? If that isn’t masochistic, I don’t know what is (listening to Britney Spears comes close, but we are talking grad school, remember?)

As always, you can rely on this blog to pose questions. But anyone can do that. We don’t run this thing to expand intellectual capacity, we run it for answers. Answers that even someone on the glamorous end of the intelligence number line can digest and assimilate. So here are a few reasons why you should still go for it:

1. Experience: Imagine being in a room with representatives from almost every cultural and professional background there exists. And then imagine them sharing their points of view with you on the most critical business problems of the world: the choice of topping to use with your bagel, for example. I can tell you the wealth of insight is simply phenomenal and you almost always end up more enriched than before.

1. Experience: Imagine being in a room with someone who shares a name with some famous expert in a field. And you think it ironical that they are in the same field as the biggie, till you realize that they are the same person. You don’t feel that smart for a few moments. (Notice any smart comments here, mister?)

1. Experience: Imagine depending on a few strangers for getting you through your courses in a highly competitive and stressful environment. Imagine your wife giving birth to your son half way across the world and the first people you can share the news with, in person, are these. And this really happened. Even cynics like yours truly feel overwhelmed. But only for a short while, there are always more pressing matters at hand. Like Economics homework. Or that babe in the see-through blouse.

1. Experience: Imagine having gone through the week on a total of less than 10 hours of sleep. And then on Friday evening, you consume enough beer to knockout an army of sumo wrestlers. In one aha moment, you see the way to world peace.

1. Experience: … it.

Note: All the above reasons are numbered one and labelled ‘Experience’ on purpose. When you are me, you do not make tyops.

What are you doing here?

2008-05-29T11:36:00.000-07:00

Foreword: I mean, this blog has not been updated in ages! Why would you even want to check? For all you know, I could be dead in my 312 square feet apartment with maggots feasting on my body and remarking that they really hate the taste of software engineers. Or, I could be involved in a major planet saving enterprise which, sadly, is so critical that it must not be talked about. Like playing Ludo against myself. But now that you are here, I might as well make it worth your while (yeah right!) .

I’m on a constant quest to improve myself. Hahahahahahahahahaha… Hell that’s funny. Everybody knows I’m perfect. I just thought that would be a neat way to catch those of you who aren’t paying attention. Anyway, I recently read an article that talked about the 13 Ps of purpose. Yeah it was one of those quizzes that, if you know the answers to, you don’t need and if you don’t, you can’t use anyway. Broadly meant as a compass to chart your life (damn, I can sound lofty!), it asks two sets of questions: where are you? And where are you going? If you can answer those, I have a third one: what are you doing here? I’m going to attempt to answer these here. (Notice how I use the phrase “attempt to answer”, instead of “going to answer”? No, this is not the result of new found humility, it is for those not paying attention. Gotcha!)

Where am I?
I am (or, at least was at the time of writing this) in front of my computer wondering whether having Maggi for dinner for the 217th consecutive weekday would impact the local cereal farmers and my digestion adversely.

Having dispensed with the disgustingly petty, let me now tell you where I am, philosophically. I am NOT at the crossroads in my life. In fact I have never been at any crossroad, as it were, in my entire life. The to-be-done has been done and continues to be done without fuss, thanks largely to a high fibre intake. In the not so alimentary department, I have become an existentialist, meaning, I can conduct an entire conversation in halting, disconnected sentences while looking over my company’s shoulder. Also, I have found out that trust is what you are at the receiving end of when your one-year-old niece puts her head on your shoulder when you pick her up. Or that could be goo on your shirt. Depends on whether you are a romantic.

Where am I going?
We have already established that I am not at or near any crossroads and as far as I can see (three feet, without my glasses) I’m probably going straight ahead. Which, in a macro sense, is not true, what with the earth’s rotation, revolution and the curved space-time. Why do you want to know anyway? Is this query purely a manifestation of your underlying insecurities? Heck, I’ll tell you nevertheless: I am going on an ego trip. In fact, I’ve been on one for as long as I can remember (umm, what was I going to say here?) and the journey has been fun, including the bathroom breaks. I don’t quite know about the future, even Einstein didn’t, but I am certain it cannot be more obnoxious than I am. Meaning, I will survive it, but will it survive me? But, this is not about me. (Like hell it is! Got you again, you moron! You have the attention span of a teenager thinking about sex in class.) Oh, and since you must have the insignificant details, you will survive it too.

What am I doing here?
Now this is the one that, I must confess, has me completely stumped. Why have I not been handpicked by Bill Gates, Larry Ellison and Warren Buffet to take over their sorry business empires, yet? Have these guys completely lost it? Frankly, I thought they had the vision to spot talent. Or is it that the sheer magnitude of my abilities has paralyzed their once enviable mental faculties?
But that is quite all right, for there is important work to be done. Like waltzing with my one year old niece. Pum pum pum.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get my counters out of the base. Ludo beats the crap out of chess.

Writing Wrongs

2008-03-09T07:15:00.000-07:00

Foreword: A lot is wrong with the world. Of course, you cannot be expected to do anything about it, but I must and I will. I may not be able to correct every little problem, for I’ve been a little tied up these days (what with the Australian open, the cricket series down under, Academy and Grammy awards and the like), but rest assured, I will fix the howlers. Starting with the fact that I actually have to work these days. Like they say, charity begins at home.

I received a lot of flak about the previous post (wrong!). People said I was being crude and insensitive (no contest), especially about babies. That’s another thing that needs correction. So, I promise to coach them on my unique perspective on human values. They learn, fine, otherwise they get berated in the next post (sweet!).

There seems to be an epidemic of weddings (dead wrong!). Everyone I know seems to be in a rush to marry as if bridal makeup is about to disappear from the face of the earth. However, this brings to light the pre-wedding jitters that plague them. Many a bride or groom to be experiences them and spends countless hours shopping or watching football or both (my condolences). Hell, righting this wrong is not only important it also needs to be done quickly. I think I’ll devote the rest of this post to fix this.

Right, before we jump right in, there is a blatant right I must acknowledge. It is so obviously, meticulously, unblemishedly, accurately correct that I can only state it, without qualification: there is a racehorse, a participant in the Hyderabad Derby, called Spinoza.

Back to the point. Lets understand the psychology of individuals about to marry. Obviously, now that they are sober, they cannot, for the life of them, understand why they decided to get married in the first place. It seems like one of those jokes you started that come round to bite you on the butt. Suddenly, you can’t see the humour in them anymore. But wait, let me not add insult to injury. I’m here to give solutions or at least solace.

So now you’re having second thoughts. You think you’re not ready for a commitment of this magnitude, and you have no idea how it will pan out. You begin to remember all those differences of opinion you’ve had (including the black eye last Valentine’s day), and you think, “what if this person isn’t right for me?” Or “will it work?” Or “will JK Rowling write another Hogwarts adventure?” The answer is obvious. The black eye proves the female has her heart in the right place. Or if you are female and your boyfriend gave you one, he believes in gender equality. In either case, they are wonderful people and probably don’t deserve to marry you, but its not a fair world anyway. So go right ahead.

Fact is, you don’t know what is right for you. Like all that broccoli. That hasn’t turned out too bad, has it? I mean I have been feeding tons of it to my dog: all that my mother ever served in those generous portions, and look how much his coat shines. Apparently it IS good for you. Which proves, without a shadow of doubt, that dog is a man’s best friend. Especially when faced with broccoli or other trying situations, perhaps even an impending wedding. The point I’m trying to make here is: don’t bother your miniscule intelligences with all that thinking and re-thinking. You won’t get it right. If you were suitably armed in that department, you wouldn’t be in this situation now. So lie back and enjoy. Or at least act like you are enjoying it. It will give hope to the others almost in your shoes.

Now lets concentrate on getting you prepared for the big event. I am a big believer in books and I know just the texts for this occasion:

“Getting Married” - George Bernard Shaw. The fact that Shaw himself never married shows how much of an authority he was on the topic. Also, it’s a very thought provoking read, especially around the chapters when he advocates polygamy.
“Superman” - DC comics. If you are a man, you already worship the man of steel. Continue to do so. That is the closest you can get to adventure now. If you are a woman, thats the closest you will to a man in shape now.
“The Critique of Pure Reason” - Immanuel Kant. If, ever, you get cocky and think you are beginning to understand what this is all about, read the first 5 pages (that’s all you’ll ever get to anyway). You’ll know what I mean.

There isn’t enough time to read the first and the third and you’ve already read most of the second. How prepared do you feel? Hmm.. I can understand. You need to talk to someone. I’ll send my dog over. Please feed him some broccoli.

Hope that helps.

Flights of Fancy

2008-01-16T20:21:00.000-08:00

Foreword: What happens when a rather sedentary smart alec travels around 10000 km in a space of 30 days? You get his unique (and gifted) point of view on matters concerning travel and life. Rejoice, brethren, for you are going to partake of my phenomenal insights. Whether you like it or not. Between a family emergency and my annual vacation, I logged some ten thousand of the frequent flier kilometres and faced with insomnia, cramped economy class seats and an unfriendly digestive system, had the opportunity to observe the world passing by. Here’s a collection of some memorable episodes.

What is with airlines? No, seriously, what is with them? How do they manage to maintain a density of 2.78 goo-dribbling, sonic boom generating and otherwise being a thorough pain in the you-know-where infants per ridiculous row of economy class seats? What about me forces them to seat me next to an indulgent mom travelling with shipping containers full of redolent diapers, baby food, teething rings, baby snaps and as if that were not enough, a complete human mini specimen including a larynx? (The part that REALLY irritates the hell out of me is how they manage to get all of that in one piece of cabin baggage!) And why on earth does that little guy have to be the inter-galactic champion of vocal strength? So, you’re an evolutionist? Tell me this, how is it that evolution has still not managed to provide a mute button for infants? Oh! You’re a creationist, are you? Why did God, in his infinite wisdom, not equip the little angels with volume control? Don’t get me wrong. Like every other nice guy, I like a diapered, rubber-sheeted, well powdered and perfumed baby lying on his abdomen and cooing at less than 80 decibels at no less than 100 feet. It is just that I’m particular about how I like them.

If you thought babies are the only things that airlines choose to accost me with, you’re dead wrong! The other thing that gets my goat is the airline accent. Even if I am lucky enough to be seated farthest from the lone infant on board, I can never manage to shut out the weird airline accent, which is like nothing I have heard in India. Every carrier manages to recruit air-hostesses and even pilots who sound like they were born in Peru, abducted by wandering Eskimos and forced to spend their formative years in Scandinavia, then sold off into slavery of the oil Sheikhs of the middle least and finally given a course in phonetics by the Chinese. Nothing even remotely connected to India, unless you consider the silk-route. Why do they do that? Is that their idea of a cosmopolitan appeal? Or are those stewardesses and pilots simply sneaking out all the airline candy and eating them ALL the time? Honestly, somebody get them to talk like normal people!

Which reminds me, my heart went out to a poor girl who was sporting this ugly welt on her cheek. My blood boiled at the thought of the brute that would do that to her. Then in walked another stewardess with the same welt. Then another. Obviously, the brute was on a roll here. That sounded outlandish, even to yours truly, so I checked again. Sure enough, the welt was their idea of rouge or whatever it is that you apply on your cheek bones to make them appear as if you’ve been at the receiving end of some stiff domestic abuse. OK, so you’re a low-cost airline and cannot afford expensive make-up tips for your employees. Do everyone a favour: save on the rouge (or whatever, see above).

Do I sound cynical and caustic? I’m sorry. Let me tell you about this incident that can almost be called romantic. On one flight, I was lucky enough to be the only one on a row of seats. Just before the doors closed, a very pretty girl walked in, looked right at me and smiled. I smiled back. Then she started coming towards me, looking on either side, apparently trying to locate her seat. I looked at the two vacant seats next to me wondered: will she? Won’t she? As it turned out, she did. She walked right up to me and said, “Sir, please fasten your seatbelt. We’re ready for takeoff.”

Oh wait! I forgot to tell you about the train journey. Kolkata (Calcutta, earlier) happens to be the end of my flight and the beginning of my train journey on my way home. What makes Kolkata Kolkata is its people. I have already gone on record with my opinion about them: I wish the men were half the men that the women are. Sure enough, I saw evidence, yet again, on the station. I saw this guy: seven-footer, built like a truck, the kind you’d apologize to thrice if you happen to brush past, with his head bowed and listening to some really unpleasant words from his four-foot something wife. As if that was not enough, the lady made it a point to underscore her words with rapid jabs to the man’s ribs, which were a trifle higher than her head. Can’t blame the woman too. After explaining how to check your name on the reservation charts about 6 times, and reaching the cerebral equivalent of mishti-doi, you’d get irritated too.

The point being, if you aren’t an expert at reading reservation charts, it’s not advisable to marry in Kolkata. And yes, whatever you do, when you have your little bundle of joy, don’t board that plane I’m on. I mean it.

There’s a Bug in that Cockroach!

2007-12-03T23:54:00.000-08:00

Foreword: Light shall scare away the darkness; the right shall triumph over the Left, Mrs. and Mr. Karat notwithstanding; and the scheming developer shall beat the project plan. Thus, ladies and gentlemen, here I am. A lot has happened over the past few weeks, but don’t worry, I’m not planning to make this an information-packed power-post. It will be as devoid of any utility as everything about this blog has always been.

Recently, researchers at the University of Brussels introduced a miniature robot among a colony of cockroaches to observe them closely. How the Belgians can ever make anything other than chocolates, discreet banks and knives, given their huge demand and the ridiculous size of their population, is completely beyond me. But I digress. The said miniature robot looked like a matchbox that has been on the road at the same time as Britney Spears and yet succeeded in wresting leadership of the colony. Proving, in the process, that not looking like a cockroach is an essential leadership trait. Is Rahul Gandhi listening?

But that’s not what is bothering me. Personally, I have always had a lot of respect for cockroaches, particularly their uncrushable, er, spirit. They have preceded the human race by millions of years and on account of not using the roads of Delhi at the same time as Blueline buses, are expected to exist long after. Being of discerning temperament, dear reader, you will realize that the roach must clearly outrank humans in terms of intelligence. The point that settles it for me is that I am yet to see a cockroach wearing cargo trousers. Imagine my unrest, then, when I realized that even the mighty cockroach had been fooled. My view of the world, based on an intellectual pyramid with cockroaches and yours truly on top, followed by the average humans in the next few rungs and finally credit card salesmen making the rather wide base, changed radically. Now I’m at the top, alone. That’s when I discovered absinthe, but that’s a different story.

Leadership is a subject I have long been interested in. Then, when one of the oldest species on earth decided to entrust their leadership with a robot, and a not too good looking one at that, I was bound to be concerned. So I decided to devote my considerable mental faculties to analyze this anomaly. After stimulating my intellect with half an hour’s worth of Ekta Kkkapoor’s deadliest, I concluded that she was REALLY sick and that there was a mother-in-law to blame somewhere in the cockroach-crisis. That’s when I laughed at my folly. Being such an evolved species, cockroaches have done away with the concept of the said relative, exchanging her for a case of the house’s best at the wedding party. Consequently, cockroach marriages last a whole lot longer than the case.

After considerable thought and strategic inputs from the said bottle of absinthe, light dawned on me. Damn! I had forgotten the curtains yet again. So I just turned the other way and slept off. And the cockroaches? Well, they were probably running an experiment on the effects of crazy observations on the overeducated. The results are hard to interpret: there are way too many cockroach droppings on the report to read it.

The last I heard, the robot roach had deluded itself into believing that it was a real cockroach and raised strong objections to the report. Arundhati Roy has already promised support to it against exploitation by the government. Mrs. and Mr. Karat expressed their sincere regret that such a thing still goes on in the land of Mao. On being reminded that Belgium was not the land of Mao, Mr. Karat philosophically allowed, “Only their chocolates are perfect.”

From Bad to Verse and Now (How)?

2007-10-28T21:53:00.000-07:00

Foreword: So, I have gone from dishing out crap to actually writing “sensitive” verse. What next? Am I maturing as a writer and finding hitherto unexplored genres interesting? Should you expect a romance novella next? Maybe, one that ends in a tragedy? Or maybe, a sensitive portrayal of the new age man finding his feet in a world of changing perceptions and looking to women for guidance? (HAHAHAHAHA, I laughed so hard at that one, my saliva ran up my nose). Actually, none of these. The poem was just a passing fancy. Besides, I have authored a few unprintable ones in my time and just thought of including one on the blog, for better or for verse. And its that time of the year again when I’m just loaded with work and have nothing interesting to write about. But fear not, even when I’m so hard pressed, I think of you, loyal reader (please don’t mention the kidnapping and sedation now).

I was throwing out some junk the other day and came across this piece I had written a few years ago. I realized it was not just sufficient to throw it in the garbage in the real world, and decided to do so in the virtual one as well. Therefore I am putting it up here. (That, incidentally, is called a self-deprecating sense of humour. Works great with the chicks. See, there’s never a moment when you don’t learn something from this blog. I should probably rename it “The Temple of Sophia”.) In those days I took myself seriously as a writer and some of that presumption (now that presumption is very different from this one) can clearly be seen in it. I was in the process of self-discovery (yak yak yak) and very close to finding the genre that would be my true calling (which, as you all know, is crap). Anyway, see if you can take back a lesson or two and/or notice the beginnings of extreme irreverence here.

A Father to Son talk

The young eagle had called on his old father early in the morning. They sat like they had often done, father on a slightly raised branch and the son beneath. The times, though, were not quite the same: the father was no longer the strong vital eagle he had once been and the son, too, was no longer a fledgling, having matured into a fully-grown eagle.

As they sat today, with the sun’s slanting rays just about beginning to reach them, the son knew that this would be the most important talk they would ever have. More important, even, than the one when the father had taught him to capture a darting rabbit. He recalled, fondly, the many times when they had had similar meetings discussing the best ways to catch rats, moles, wild rabbits and sometimes, snakes. He remembered the rush he had felt when he had caught his first mole. He would dream of the day when he would grow up to be like his father, hunting majestically. The day had indeed come and he had set out to make a mark for himself.

But all was not well and this was what the meeting was about. The father opened his eyes and looked tenderly at his son, proud at what he had grown into. The son let him savour the moment and then spoke, “Father, I need your advice. My life does not seem to be going anywhere. When I was a kid…” At this time the father broke in, “you were never a kid son. A kid is a young goat and bleats. You were an eaglet, and look at what a fine eagle you have become.”

“Yes, sorry. When I was an eaglet, I could not wait to grow up and hunt for myself. I thought I would love every moment of it and never tire of it. It was so, quite so, for some time. But now I hardly feel like hunting. Sometimes I even think of turning vegetarian.” The father gave an involuntary shudder at this blasphemous thought and spoke as his father had once done. “What you are going through is not unnatural, though the turning vegetarian seems peculiar to your generation. It is natural eagle tendency to wish to be something you are not. Hence your wish to grow up quickly. Add to that, what you perceived as freedom of the grown-ups. You couldn’t wait till your wings were strong enough to support you and once they were, there was no looking back. You are a magnificent flier and I must say, you’ve done quite well for yourself. But now you have grown used to what you do. As a child, to your romantic imagination, hunting and flying were important and perhaps symbolic of maturity and fulfillment. Your life as you lead it now has become a chore for you. You have realized the futility of flying to the moon (your childhood ambition) and go where no eagle has gone before. (Despite his obvious wisdom, the father was not aware that the part of Apollo 11 that landed on the moon was called Eagle.) Son, when we lose our dreams to reality, disillusionment sets in and that is what is wrong with you. You have realized that your childhood dreams were just that and there is a void in your life now. Ordinarily, that is a temporary phase before you settle down with a family. Then the daily grind becomes meaningful, as a means to provide for your loved ones. But I don’t want that to happen with you. I want you to lead a wholesome life with your family being the support while you pursue your dreams, not an excuse to surrender to reality. Like the great white eagle said, when your dreams dash to the ground, pick up the pieces and construct your reality with them. Your reality will retain the colour of your dreams and the fragrance of your innocence.

The point, son, is that your life needs a new dream. All your old ones are either achieved or unachievable. You need new ones that will inspire you to live your present to the fullest. Just be honest to yourself. Dream away and let your wings beat only to achieve them. Then happiness will be yours.”

The son sat deep in thought. Finally he smiled and thanked his father and flew off. On the way, he remembered his father’s parting words, “And yes, when you sing, sing at the top of your voice and when you dance, dance like no one’s watching. ”

P.S.: I can’t believe the father didn’t include “when in doubt, hold your fart” in his parting words.

P.P.S.: And I can’t believe no one added a comment to the previous post saying “from bad to verse (or maybe worse)”!

Thieves

2007-09-25T08:23:00.000-07:00

Foreword: You keep hearing about these poets who get "inspired" by some event that happens in their lives and then go on to pen a couple of thousand lines in verse about it. Only they don't realize the nobody wants to know, in the first place. It has been my desire to inflict similar torture on unsuspecting souls (heck I don't care even if they are suspecting souls) and recently when I had an experience that seemed to lend itself to verse, I thought this is it! India have won the Twenty-Twenty World Cup! Ok, maybe not quite that, but this was similar, I swear...

He smiled and saw right through me,
And I, I did the same.
I thought no one was watching me,
And he, he did the same.

There she stood, clad in white
Handbag on the shoulder and a faraway look in her eyes.
Long, blonde windswept hair
Cellphone clapped to the ear and luggage between her knees.

He stared and I stared
And the noisy traffic hurtled by.
Unaware I continued staring
And he, he did the same.

Such moments of bliss do not last
And alas neither did this.
Snap! And we were back to the earth
Sheepish, him and me.

And then he saw me and I saw him,
He all of eight years and I almost a score older,
Yet we united in that infinite instant, thieves each,
Stealing glances at her till each caught the other,
And walked guiltily into the moonlight.

(based on a true incident that happened sometime in September 2007.)

Halo there!

2007-08-04T07:03:00.000-07:00

Foreword: The focus, in these materialistic times, is on spiritualism. Quite rightly, then, on the reverse of every coke-stained multiplex ticket, you see an advertisement for your own dial-a-guru. Though not particularly spiritual, I have seen quite a few movie tickets, coke-stained and otherwise and therefore, I think it is worth your while to be apprised of my opinion. Of course, if you had anything better to do, you wouldn’t be here in the first place.

With so many people looking to get in touch with their inner selves and leading richer, fuller lives, I figured there had to be a reason for this fad. Of course, a straight forward explanation would be some kind of aneurysm, severely dilapidating in its effects on human reason (or the lack thereof). But such a fantastic, and indeed a trifle far-fetched, theory is not in line with this blog’s reputation of being THE source of truth for the teeming millions who, blind of the their mind’s eye, stumble along the pizzeria that is life clutching only to the lifeline offered by us. You can continue to rest easy though. Just place your unconditional trust in this temple of knowledge, for we get you the complete story, the real deal, even when there hasn’t, in fact, been a deal.

How do we do that? Generally the answer to that is, “None of your effing business, creep.” But, with this being the ICE age and RTI having finally become a reality we might as well tell you. Our methods, like those of the venerated inhabitant of 221B, Baker Street are simple. We start from the basics, the first principles if you will, and build on the basis of available evidence. There is a subtle point on which we differ from the afore-mentioned genius, (and we think this is a technique that the maestro should himself have used to greatly enhance his success rate) and that is that we do not let minor issues like the unavailability of evidence cramp our style. We go ahead and say what we want to, instead being a sissy and hiding behind excuses like “lack of concrete proof”. That is something that modern journalism has imbibed rather well and we have the deepest admiration for it, though, frankly, we could do with a little less investigative reporting about Britney Spears’ knickers.

But lets not deviate from our rather intriguing topic, or our karma will sneak up on us right when we least expect it and begin sending out bad vibes. That reminds me of a (rather short) conversation I once had with an awakened and perceptive soul trapped inside an obese woman. She complained of feeling “depressed and empty” as a result of receiving bad vibes from her colleagues at her new workplace. Being the naturally helpful person that I am, I promptly produced an ad from an educational periodical I am in the habit of perusing (‘Hustler’, one of our mottos is “Be Prepared”) which promised some excellent vibes, battery powered and shaped like a part of the male anatomy. I’m sure she hasn’t complained of any vibes or emptiness since.

Sometimes we are bothered by the meaninglessness of our lives and instead of doing the decent thing and jumping off a bridge with a stone tied around our necks; we seek recourse in “Feng Shui” (which is Chinese for “make the rich place ridiculous objects all over the freaking place and demolish half their homes”). I am sure that doesn’t work, unless the idea is to send your guests into convulsions of laughter. But I recognize in it the potential of being a real killer. Therefore, I have developed my own variety of Feng Shui, specially tailored for Indian traffic conditions. It involves placing articles like baseball bats, bazookas and anti-tank missiles in your vehicle. After a few ceremonial uses of the said articles, traffic conditions improve greatly for the incumbent of the vehicle.

Then there’s the deal with channelizing our internal cosmic energy and using it to improve general well-being. Before it trudged along what the state governments pass for village roads and entered our cities, it manifested itself in scores of bio-gas plants all over rural India. I think that best sums up the idea of removing all toxic “thoughts” from your “psyche” for healthier living. Talk about getting the best out of waste.

Sometimes, we want to achieve a higher state of consciousness. We spend hours meditating, levitating, gravitating, and not to mention, irritating, to achieve this end while modern science has already solved this problem. Few of us are aware that the deepest scientific research has already been devoted to this at one of the foremost seats of modern learning, University of California at Berkeley. The result they came up with is called LSD. LSD, it is said, enables you to look inside souls, free your mind, converse with God without being called George W. Bush or Pratibha Patil, and if of a remarkable quality, even believe you are God.

I sometimes think that it has a wider following than is popularly believed. Each time people talk of a “glowing face”, “a cold gaze” or “sparkling/bright eyes” to name a few indicators, I wonder if they are on a higher level of consciousness. In more than a quarter of a century of my existence, I have never come across any of the above. For instance, a glow, by definition, assumes a source of light of a non-zero luminous intensity. Now unless the person in question is chewing an incandescent light bulb, I don’t see that happening. Of course, I have been short sighted for most of my life, but I think I’d at least have spotted the moths hanging around faces.

At times, I think I might be wrong about all this. Then I look around and go, “There’s no way those losers can be right. Ergo, I must be.” Yet, one must allow for doubt so I popped an LSD to find out. Can you tilt your head a little to the right? I think your aura is interfering with mine.

Fore!

2007-07-04T04:08:00.000-07:00

Fore-word: Time passes. And takes everyone by surprise, as if they expected it to stagnate, form a thick yellowish film on top, curdle and finally turn into cheese. Time has continued to pass since ‘time’ immemorial yet, we do not cease to be surprised at its passage. Evolutionists might want to look into that one- so much for survival of the fittest.

Recently, I completed four years ‘at work’. Which means, for the last four years I have been consuming inordinate amounts of network bandwidth, caffeine and office stationery and not to mention, indulging in complicated and ineffective office politics. As is common in these circumstances, I decided to look back. Surely, I did and saw Bhavnesh Patel, who else? He’s the guy who sits in the cube behind me.

Anyway, having looked back and been assured that despite the time, I still haven’t completely lost my vision (that I can still spot objects the size of Bhavnesh at six feet) I decided to think about the things I have learnt(other than an encyclopedia of excuses) and the ways that I have grown (apart from paunch-wise). After intense reflection for about two and three-quarters of a minute, I realized that I hadn’t, in ways other than those mentioned in parentheses! It was a crushing blow. I was shocked into silence for the better part of 12 seconds. Then I recalled reading somewhere that people freeze an image of themselves in college and go through all their lives drawing on the experiences that they had had by then. That’s about as grownup as they get. That has to be it, after all, who are you to question the wisdom of the internet?

So I thought of verifying this assertion, starting with the way I talk, when I think I’m out of my mom’s earshot. And that hasn’t changed. I still use more invective than ‘actual’ words in sentences. I add a six(four + ‘er’)-letter suffix to most words when I’m excited, I think ‘cool’ is a perfectly acceptable response to most questions. When people ask me why I’m sporting a beard I say things like: Its not a beard, just some fungus that grew because of the rains. Or, if it is someone who warrants a more elaborate answer: “The three most popular men in India are Abhishek Bachchan, Himesh Reshamiya and Emraan Hashmi. What do you think is common between them, apart from a complete lack of talent? A beard! Now talent is God given, so that I can’t really do much about what I already possess. What is in my control is to grow a beard and that’s what I have done.” So, that checks out pretty well.

Interest! Yes, how about my interests? Surely, they must have ‘evolved’ over time. Let’s see, I still think playing with guns is a great idea. Riding a bike at speeds that can be expressed as a significant fraction of ‘c’ is as stimulating today as it was ages ago. Books that were either banned or burned in public (better!), still interest me more than books that threaten to be either improving or intellectually stimulating. I still prefer ‘Playboy’ over ‘Investor’s Guide’. If it rains, the activity I’m most likely to indulge in is sleep, provided no-one’s around for playing football. Playing cricket seems to me the most constructive way of passing a lean day at office and watching it makes me extremely expressive. And cartoons still rock. Check.

And attitude? Hmmm… I try and shirk as much responsibility as possible. Everyone other than me is no great shakes or a faker or both. Couples having a romantic meal still get bombarded by chilli flakes or pepper corns, depending upon the cuisine of the restaurant. My responses to most situations are still mildly vitriolic. If there are more than one ways of doing something and one of them is not completely compliant with regulations, the chances of it being adopted shoot up dramatically. Check.

The surest signs of maturity is the way one handles relationships. How, then, have I been doing on that count? Don’t make me laugh. Check.

Someone once told me that a sense of humour is always preceded by sense. So, how have the years affected my sensibilities and therefore my sense of humour? Mr. Bean is still not funny. Calvin and Hobbes are. Peanuts, sometimes. Karan Johar, politically incorrect and gender insensitive jokes and public bouts of flatulence all continue to inspire uncontrollable laughter. Check.

So, we see that spending four years perched on a revolving chair and staring at a monitor does not:

cause you to grow up
make you a better human being (if you are loser enough to want to be one, that is)
make you a professional (whatever that means)
do wonders for your anatomy
improve your chances of being taken off the singles’ market

What it does, however, is that it helps you gain perspective on what maturity is all about, on how the world really functions and on whether Playmate, June-’06 was really hotter than Playmate, October-’05.

Along Came a Spider-Man...

2007-06-05T02:20:00.000-07:00

Foreword: As a matter of principle, I don't intend to denigrate my blog into a cheap movie review website. There are plenty of those around. Besides, as you might have noticed, an issue does not figure here unless it involves the well being of mankind in general. You will, then, also notice that this isn't a critique of a movie, as much as of a concept, if you can call it that. This development is perhaps the biggest challenge facing mankind, with the possible exception of finding a coach for the Indian cricket team.

Recently, I tried to watch a movie titled Spiderman, part III. I am happy to report that it was an unsuccessful attempt and I gave up after fifty minutes into it. Ordinarily, I maintain that time is perhaps the only thing that God has given me in plenty, but those fifty minutes were truly wasted. So much so, that probably working would have been a better idea.

To those who have had the good sense to give it a miss (I salute your intelligence) and those that didn't and don't regret it (well, you're truly 'special'), I owe an explanation. The theme of the movie is Spiderman's love live and the crises it undergoes. Also, though I didn't get that far, I'm told there are no real villains in the movie- everybody becomes nice in the end. I ask you, dear reader, I appeal to your intellect (not yours, you dimwit, you watched and liked it, remember?), what kind of crazy, pussy, wimpy story is this? If I wanted to watch a movie about relationship troubles I would have watched 'Alien vs. Predator' or 'When Harry met Sally', depending upon whether I was feeling mildly desperate or suicidal.

The point I'm trying to make here (bear with me here, you who were smart enough to stay away from it, for there are those that didn't and they need all the explanation that they can get; preferably in short sentences) is, why make a superhero movie in which no villain gets torn to pieces by his own evil contraption or falls into an erupting volcano or is forced to listen to six hours of Celine Dion's 'Greatest Hits'. OK, probably the last is too gruesome to pass even the rather liberal standards of the American censor board, but surely the rest is not too bad? Also, what self respecting superhero gets nagged by his girlfriend? What are we trying to show, a realistic superhero? Isn't that a howling contradiction? If you wanted to watch a henpecked wimp swing from the rooftops, my advice would be to watch Manmohan Singh dangle from the clothesline at 10, Janpath.

A careful examination of the demographics of Spiderman's audience would reveal that it consists largely of pre-adolescent children and men (pardon the redundancy). As such, it is difficult to comprehend why a story such as this, which would appeal only to women and metrosexual men (pardon the redundancy) was chosen. A likely explanation could be that the director was:
a) female or, b) gay male or, c) a post-adolescent block of wood having a history of traumatic childhood abuse. I have a feeling that this might enrage a lot of socially sensitive activists, hence I take that part about the block of wood back.

Having said that, I must admit that I always knew that Spiderman was a wimp. What kind of a superhero doesn't wear a cape or underpants on the outside?

An Anvi-able Vacation and Beyond

2007-05-22T03:01:00.001-07:00

Foreword: It was that time of the year again: time for the week off from work to head home, in search of cooler climes and starry skies, what with the Hyderabad heat and dust. Only, this time, I got more than my money’s worth- a veritable bonanza!

The occasion was the birth of my niece, Anvi, born on the 19^th of March to my sister Vinati and brother-in-law Amit. Accordingly, I reached home to see their bundle of joy, bundled in a baby blanket. She was quite a sight, almost as good looking as I am and showed (rather early) signs of a similar ability at talking. Over all a great kid with an excellent future, what with a mama like me!

Since a lot of relatives and family friends came to pay their respects to Princess Anvi, I was at the receiving end of the rather limited set of questions that they ask. Namely, “How long have you been working?” (Close to four years) “Oh! So, any plans of getting married?” (None, unless Monica Bellucci is asking) “But you would at least have a girl in mind…” (Umm, heard of Groucho Marx? He once refused the membership of an exclusive club saying he didn’t want to belong to any club whose rules were lax enough to admit him. Likewise, I wouldn’t marry any female whose taste in men would permit her to marry me!) “Er..(simper, simper, stutter, stutter) strange…what then?” (Heard of the great Indian Arranged Marriage tradition? I think my parents will be able trick a poor, unsuspecting female into marrying me.) “But what if you aren’t compatible… what if it doesn’t work out the way it should?” (That will be sad, won’t it? But guess whose conscience it will be on!) At this point my interrogator generally gawked at me with an incredulous look on his/her face and trailed off, mumbling something about “all that work pressure getting to the poor souls” and I returned to the succulence of the chicken tikka on my plate.

Other than that (hell, including that) I had a pretty good time, thank you. Of course, this was more than a month and a half ago and since then I’ve been too bloody lazy to write a new post. A lot of concerned readers (I swear I’m not making this up!) have been worried about me and have made polite inquiries (“Is he dead? Did you see the body?”, “Are you sure the aliens abducted him? Can’t imagine why!”, and “Gored to death? Pity…I couldn’t see it.”) To them, I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude for taking the pains to continue visiting my blog and I am sorry that they have had to continue breathing.

Frankly, I’ve not had too many ideas about what to write. You will notice, dear reader, that is not exactly a rare scenario and I seem to go through most of my posts without saying too much of consequence. But not this time! A lack of concrete material has rattled me into not writing. What, then, does it mean for you? More importantly, what does it mean for me? Are my days as one of the world’s foremost bullshitter over? Have I finally decided to mend my ways and merge into the mainstream? Have I completely lost it? Has the phenomenal pool of my talent dried up? The answers, dear concerned reader, are available. So despair not and watch in wide-eyed wonder as I spell out the reason: its gas. I probably had too much of cheese over the past few weeks. But rejoice; now I’m back to eating healthy, fibre-rich food and am ready to spew out nonsense at the slightest provocation. Heck I’m ready to spew it out even without provocation. So watch out!

Damn, it feels good to be back...

Immoral Traffic-ing

2007-03-28T00:21:00.000-07:00

Foreword: It has been long since I have actually perpetrated an act that can be denounced as being socially useful or sensitive, probably as long as I have been around on the planet. And if you expect that to change, ha! Not bloody happening, loser!

I’m not an angry guy. Not unless you stand in between the TV and me, in any case. Even if you do, you can hope to get away with minor bullet wounds, unless of course, cricket is on. In which case, you wont know what hit you and consequently, you cant blame me. But there do exist certain phenomena that really enrage me beyond the limits of sane existence. (This is not counting India’s recent performance in the World Cup, which, if you bring up again, I’ll force you to sit through three Karan Johar-Shah Rukh Khan movies, back to back. I can be cruel when I’m pissed off.)

One such thing is the morning traffic. I am amazed at how the universe keeps up its supply of complete morons at driving, despite the high number of casualties in traffic accidents in India. Then, again, it might be because the accident victims are the not so dumb people who do manage to understand and follow traffic rules. It is not as simple as that. Its not just the cerebrally challenged that make driving conditions as horrible as they are. Sure they are retarded but they are also:

Nouveau Riche

I know all about the software industry contributing to the national economy, but another thing it has caused is an increase in the number of people driving. I wouldn’t mind if all those new guys on the car-wagon, could drive but as it turns out most of them cannot even differentiate between a steering wheel and a spare wheel. It’s a common sight to see a brand new car (or bike) in perfect yellow temporary registration number being driven by a perfect idiot. Not only do these guys have no clue about moving through traffic, they make it a point to block (just block, not use) every opening you try to weave through, to the extent that sometimes I wonder if they all belong to the Left Front.

Or,
Women Drivers

Go ahead, brand me a chauvinist, bitch! The fact remains that female drivers are as bad as drunk teenage drivers, only when they drive over you they make it a point to do so extremely slowly, so that you can feel the slow, excruciating pain while reflecting on every time you tipped your hat to one. I remember having a debate with a female friend about gender differences and we agreed that Carly Fiorina may successfully run HP, but she probably still has problems parking. Somehow the concept of driving in one lane seems incredibly boring to them and they would rather explore the “road less traveled” (since it is frequently the wrong lane). If only they would exhibit the same adventurous streak while overtaking. But no, they feel compelled to drive alongside a huge truck which is moving at the speed of a grumpy old tortoise with a back problem, making it impossible for you to reach home in time, unless you have a bazooka handy.

Or,
Taxi Drivers

If they aren’t classified as the scum of the earth, it is probably only because politicians exist. Most taxi drivers are not just bad drivers; they are bad drivers with bad attitude who deserve to be boiled in oil, shredded to pieces and then fed to other taxi drivers. They secretly believe themselves to be illegitimate descendants of Alan Prost, out to reclaim all those records that Shumacher broke. If I had a rupee for every time that I have exhorted one to perform a copulatory act with his close female relative, I’d probably be a threat to Bill Gates.

Or,
Autorickshaw Drivers

The only thing I have to say to them can be said with the aid of an interpreter, like a baseball bat, possibly aluminum. If you have difficulty understanding Brownian motion, I would advise you to observe autos on Hyderabad roads. They also seem to suffer from severe psychological problems for they exhibit distinct suicidal tendencies, as manifested in their overtaking and stopping habits especially in the vicinity of huge trucks and buses. Add to that an extremely annoying “music” system that generally blasts lo-fi reproductions of item numbers in a language that is no longer identifiable, with the tape being nearly stripped of all the magnetic thing. Each time I encounter one, I search around on my belt for a Magnum .33 bore, just in case…

Or,
Pedestrians

Picture this: there’s bumper to bumper traffic and in all that you spot a narrow channel which might let you manoeuvre out. As you make your way to it, there’s this callous chap who’s decided to amble in it ahead of you. And he chooses to do it in the speed at which suggests every step he takes ahead is being rewarded by Chinese torture. At times like these I have a great urge to ram all 160 kilogrammes of my bike into them. I hold back only because of the possibility of bloodstains on my bike. God forbid there comes a day when I’m not too bothered about how clean my bike is.

If I come across as a maladjusted, criminally inclined maniac that’s just because I am one. Keep that in mind when you see me in your rearview mirror.

Gen(d)erally Speaking…

2007-02-04T21:14:00.000-08:00

Foreword: This is another of those topics on which I consider myself an expert. Frankly, if one were to list down the topics I consider myself an expert on, it would give Wikipedia a run for its money. But I digress. In this post, I am going to talk about the sexes and differences thereof.

Tip for budding writers: one of the best ways to make your already arrogant writing seem even more pompous is to use words like “thereof”.

Sometimes, I think it is good that God (or whoever, that’s just an expression anyway) made only two (dominant) sexes. We have enough confusion with those already. Imagine what would have happened if we had not two but four sexes, with any two (or three) ganging up against the other two (or one). From purely an onlooker’s point of view, the entertainment would have been great, no questions about that, but I doubt if the world wars would have been fought between countries as much as between them. Also, three of the four sexes would get accused of not understanding the psychology of the fourth, while, actually, two would have no clue what psychology means, anyway, and one would be too busy thinking about cricket scores and monster trucks to pay any attention.

That reminds me, if you are a woman who wonders about what men think about (apart from sex, which as a recent survey found out men think about once in seven seconds), when you talk of, frankly, I don’t know what, because I’ve never bothered to listen, here is an excellent article on the topic. There is always way too much talk about men not understanding the female psychology (that’s not true, I know what female psychology involves: making disjointed conversation and jumping off to irrelevant topics, suspecting their man of having an affair, being jealous of Aishwarya Rai, feeling sorry for themselves and a lurking fear that they are fat and ugly) but never any about women not understanding the male psychology. Of course most women would probably snort and say, “Men do not have a psychology”, but clearly that is wrong, how else would you explain cricket, monster trucks and Playboy?

I know all those self-smug women who made the snort are now nodding in agreement with as much dignity as it is possible to have while wiping the waste off their noses. Moving further on the topic of gender sensitivity, or the lack of it, one of the most common things women say to men is, in essence, “all you $^#@ men are alike” as if they’ve just worked out a novel solution to Schrodinger’s equation. Of course all of us are alike! Like we are supposed to be, isn’t that the whole purpose of classification?

Let me not get carried away and waste valuable time and space by listing problems. You wouldn’t be reading this if you wanted problems. Instead, you would be talking to your wives, or girlfriends, or both. I am here to provide solutions, and damn good ones at that. Of course, I lack the time to examine and solve all problems plaguing the sex-equation (what with all the cricket being played in the world!) so what I will do is to take a representative situation, an example, if you will, and use it to illustrate the principles of dealing with the opposite sex. You can then apply these principles and lead better, richer and germ-free lives or go back to watching TV (WWE wrestling: “RAW is WAR”) or talking to your friends on the phone, as dictated by your gender.

Right, here’s the example: You and your spouse (its all right if you aren’t married, just pretend that you are, we run a family blog here) are doing your thing (no, not THAT thing, pervert. We are still a family blog.) on a quiet evening at home. Then one of you gets up to go the bathroom or the refrigerator and on the way, stubs a toe on the couch.

Case I: Man stubs toe

The woman drops her book/phone/knitting (I heard that!) and rushes over. Here is the dialogue that ensues.

Woman: Oh God! I knew this would happen. That’s why I asked you to buy those lovely lace curtains.

Man: Owww!

Woman: But you just had to move the TV away from the window and the couch here and look how much your toe has swollen! The nail has come off too and you are bleeding all over the carpet. Oh God! What do I do?

Man: Owww!

Woman: (Gets ice and applies it) I hope it isn’t broken! Even if it is, I hope they don’t have to amputate it. Even if they do, I want you to know that I’ll still love you no matter what happens to your big toe. (Applies a bandage)

Man: Grrrr.

Analysis:

Frankly, the woman’s approach, if the victim had been female, was bang on target. Except in this case, the victim wasn’t female. Men are not conditioned to receive this kind of pep-talk, especially if their toe hurts and more importantly, they are missing the match. The ideal approach to this situation, if you are a woman who really wants to help, is to have your man sit in a nice comfortable chair in front of the TV (where he was sitting before he got up) and while taking care to keep your head out of his line of sight, apply the ice, medication or whatever. Please make sure that you talk, if you must, in a low voice so as to not drown out the commentary. Then get him a nice chilled beer. All right, maybe the beer isn’t strictly necessary, but it’s a nice touch.

Case II: Woman stubs toe

The man lets out a loud whoop, since Sachin Tendulkar has just smashed one through the covers. The woman glares at the man and sees that he hasn’t noticed her scream. She has to cross the TV to get to the medicine cabinet. This conversation follows:

Man: Get off my face, woman! What if he hits a four?

Woman: I just broke my foot and all you can think about is the match?

Man: Hmmm. Do you want ice?

Woman: NO!

Man returns to his match.

Analysis:

The man’s approach is again a guy thing. Women, on the contrary, aren’t used to being asked if they “want” ice, if their toe-nail has just come off. The correct approach for the man would have been to switch off the TV (20 points), rush over to the woman and carry her to the couch (25 points), apply the ice and bandage (15 points) and blame himself for the injury (500 points).

Cases III & IV: We don’t deal with those. We are a family blog, remember?

All right, so that’s the solved example. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go think about something men generally think about once in seven seconds. Of course, that’s bullshit. Its more like once in four seconds.

DNA Testing Faith

2007-01-07T02:41:00.000-08:00

Foreword: I have been catching up on my reading in the recent past. Over the past month I've read, among other insignificant pieces, a biography of Dr. Richard P. Feynman (a rather intriguing kind of a biography, since its written in the first person but is not an autobiography), Kafka's immortal work, "The Metamorphosis", and the text of an amazing impromptu speech by DNA, titled "Is there an Artificial God?". As you might have noticed, I've been on the quieter side, vis-a-vis my blogging. I attribute this to the works I have recently read.
Lesser men, on reading such an eclectic and awe inspiring collection, would have had a "humbling" experience, but not I. In fact, I've never had a humbling experience in all my life. I will go on record and say that humility is not one of my faults, and indeed, if I had any, that would be it. So what I'm going to do here is to share the stage with DNA and let him weave his magic.

Is there an Artificial God?
Douglas Noel Adams, at Digital Biota 2, held at Magdelene College Cambridge, in September 1998

This was originally billed as a debate only because I was a bit anxious coming here. I didn't think I was going to have time to prepare anything and also, in a room full of such luminaries, I thought 'what could I, as an amateur, possibly have to say'? So I thought I would settle for a debate. But after having been here for a couple of days, I realised you're just a bunch of guys! It's been rife with ideas and I've had so many myself through talking with and listening to people that I'd thought what I'd do was stand up and have an argument and debate with myself. I'll talk for a while and hope sufficiently to provoke and inflame opinion that there'll be an outburst of chair- throwing at the end.

Before I embark on what I want to try and tackle, may I warn you that things may get a little bit lost from time to time, because there's a lot of stuff that's just come in from what we've been hearing today, so if I occasionally sort of go… I was telling somebody earlier today that I have a four-year-old daughter and was very, very interested watching her face when she was in her first 2 or 3 weeks of life and suddenly realising what nobody would have realised in previous ages—she was rebooting!

I just want to mention one thing, which is completely meaningless, but I am terribly proud of—I was born in Cambridge in 1952 and my initials are D N A!

The topic I want to introduce to you this evening, the subject of the debate that we are about to sort of not have, is a slightly facetious one (you'll be surprised to hear, but we'll see where we go with it)— ''Is there an Artificial God?'' I'm sure most of the people in this room will share the same view, but even as an out-and-out atheist one can't help noticing that the role of a god has had an enormously profound impact on human history over many, many centuries. It's very interesting to figure out where this came from and what, in the modern scientific world we sometimes hope against hope that we live in, it actually means.

I was thinking about this earlier today when Larry Yaeger was talking about 'what is life?' and mentioned at the end something I didn't know, about a special field of handwriting recognition. The following strange thought went through my mind: that trying to figure out what is life and what isn't and where the boundary is has an interesting relationship with how you recognise handwriting. We all know, when presented with any particular entity, whether it's a bit of mould from the fridge or whatever; we instinctively know when something is an example of life and when it isn't. But it turns out to be tremendously hard exactly to define it. I remember once, a long time ago, needing a definition of life for a speech I was giving. Assuming there was a simple one and looking around the Internet, I was astonished at how diverse the definitions were and how very, very detailed each one had to be in order to include 'this' but not include 'that'. If you think about it, a collection that includes a fruit fly and Richard Dawkins and the Great Barrier Reef is an awkward set of objects to try and compare. When we try and figure out what the rules are that we are looking for, trying to find a rule that's self-evidently true, that turns out to be very, very hard.

Compare this with the business of recognising whether something is an A or a B or a C. It's a similar kind of process, but it's also a very, very different process, because you may say of something that you're 'not quite certain whether it counts as life or not life, it's kind of there on the edge isn't it, it's probably a very low example of what you might call life, it's maybe just about alive or maybe it isn't'. Or maybe you might say about something that's an example of Digital life, 'does that count as being alive?' Is it something, to coin someone's earlier phrase, that'll go squish if you step on it? Think about the controversial Gaia hypothesis; people say 'is the planet alive?', 'is the ecosphere alive or not?' In the end it depends on how you define such things.

Compare that with handwriting recognition. In the end you are trying to say “is this an A or is it a B?” People write As and Bs in many different ways; floridly, sloppily or whatever. It's no good saying 'well, it's sort of A-ish but there's a bit of B in there', because you can't write the word 'apple' with such a thing. It is either an A or a B. How do you judge? If you're doing handwriting recognition, what you are trying to do is not to assess the relative degrees of A-ness or B-ness of the letter, but trying to define the intention of the person who wrote it. It's very clear in the end—is it an A or a B?—ah! it's an A, because the person writing it was writing the word apple and that's clearly what it means. So, in the end, in the absence of an intentional creator, you cannot say what life is, because it simply depends on what set of definitions you include in your overall definition. Without a god, life is only a matter of opinion.

I want to pick up on a few other things that came around today. I was fascinated by Larry (again), talking about tautology, because there's an argument that I remember being stumped by once, to which I couldn't come up with a reply, because I was so puzzled by the challenge and couldn't quite figure it out. A guy said to me, 'yes, but the whole theory of evolution is based on a tautology: that which survives, survives' This is tautological, therefore it doesn't mean anything. I thought about that for a while and it finally occurred to me that a tautology is something that if it means nothing, not only that no information has gone into it but that no consequence has come out of it. So, we may have accidentally stumbled upon the ultimate answer; it's the only thing, the only force, arguably the most powerful of which we are aware, which requires no other input, no other support from any other place, is self evident, hence tautological, but nevertheless astonishingly powerful in its effects. It's hard to find anything that corresponds to that and I therefore put it at the beginning of one of my books. I reduced it to what I thought were the bare essentials, which are very similar to the ones you came up with earlier, which were “anything that happens happens, anything that in happening causes something else to happen causes something else to happen and anything that in happening causes itself to happen again, happens again”. In fact you don't even need the second two because they flow from the first one, which is self-evident and there's nothing else you need to say; everything else flows from that. So, I think we have in our grasp here a fundamental, ultimate truth, against which there is no gain-saying. It was spotted by the guy who said this is a tautology. Yes, it is, but it's a unique tautology in that it requires no information to go in but an infinite amount of information comes out of it. So I think that it is arguably therefore the prime cause of everything in the Universe. Big claim, but I feel I'm talking to a sympathetic audience.

Where does the idea of God come from? Well, I think we have a very skewed point of view on an awful lot of things, but let's try and see where our point of view comes from. Imagine early man. Early man is, like everything else, an evolved creature and he finds himself in a world that he's begun to take a little charge of; he's begun to be a tool-maker, a changer of his environment with the tools that he's made and he makes tools, when he does, in order to make changes in his environment. To give an example of the way man operates compared to other animals, consider speciation, which, as we know, tends to occur when a small group of animals gets separated from the rest of the herd by some geological upheaval, population pressure, food shortage or whatever and finds itself in a new environment with maybe something different going on. Take a very simple example; maybe a bunch of animals suddenly finds itself in a place where the weather is rather colder. We know that in a few generations those genes which favour a thicker coat will have come to the fore and we'll come and we'll find that the animals have now got thicker coats. Early man, who's a tool maker, doesn't have to do this: he can inhabit an extraordinarily wide range of habitats on earth, from tundra to the Gobi Desert—he even manages to live in New York for heaven's sake—and the reason is that when he arrives in a new environment he doesn't have to wait for several generations; if he arrives in a colder environment and sees an animal that has those genes which favour a thicker coat, he says “I'll have it off him”. Tools have enabled us to think intentionally, to make things and to do things to create a world that fits us better. Now imagine an early man surveying his surroundings at the end of a happy day's tool making. He looks around and he sees a world which pleases him mightily: behind him are mountains with caves in—mountains are great because you can go and hide in the caves and you are out of the rain and the bears can't get you; in front of him there's the forest—it's got nuts and berries and delicious food; there's a stream going by, which is full of water—water's delicious to drink, you can float your boats in it and do all sorts of stuff with it; here's cousin Ug and he's caught a mammoth—mammoth's are great, you can eat them, you can wear their coats, you can use their bones to create weapons to catch other mammoths. I mean this is a great world, it's fantastic. But our early man has a moment to reflect and he thinks to himself, 'well, this is an interesting world that I find myself in' and then he asks himself a very treacherous question, a question which is totally meaningless and fallacious, but only comes about because of the nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks at his world and says 'So who made this then?' Who made this? — you can see why it's a treacherous question. Early man thinks, 'Well, because there's only one sort of being I know about who makes things, whoever made all this must therefore be a much bigger, much more powerful and necessarily invisible, one of me and because I tend to be the strong one who does all the stuff, he's probably male'. And so we have the idea of a god. Then, because when we make things we do it with the intention of doing something with them, early man asks himself , 'If he made it, what did he make it for?' Now the real trap springs, because early man is thinking, 'This world fits me very well. Here are all these things that support me and feed me and look after me; yes, this world fits me nicely' and he reaches the inescapable conclusion that whoever made it, made it for him.

This is rather as if you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in—an interesting hole I find myself in—fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there's plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that's a very dangerous thing to say. Look at what's supposed to be going to happen on the 1st of January 2000—let's not pretend that we didn't have a warning that the century was going to end! I think that we need to take a larger perspective on who we are and what we are doing here if we are going to survive in the long term.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be, but we have done various things over intellectual history to slowly correct some of our misapprehensions. Curiously enough, quite a lot of these have come from sand, so let's talk about the four ages of sand.

From sand we make glass, from glass we make lenses and from lenses we make telescopes. When the great early astronomers, Copernicus, Gallileo and others turned their telescopes on the heavens and discovered that the Universe was an astonishingly different place than we expected and that, far from the world being most of the Universe, with just a few little bright lights going around it, it turned out—and this took a long, long, long time to sink in—that it is just one tiny little speck going round a little nuclear fireball, which is one of millions and millions and millions that make up this particular galaxy and our galaxy is one of millions or billions that make up the Universe and that then we are also faced with the possibility that there may be billions of universes, that applied a little bit of a corrective to the perspective that the Universe was ours.

I rather love that notion and, as I was discussing with someone earlier today, there's a book I thoroughly enjoyed recently by David Deutsch, who is an advocate of the multiple universe view of the Universe, called 'The Fabric of Reality', in which he explores the notion of a quantum multiple universe view of the Universe. This came from the famous wave particle dichotomy about the behaviour of light—that you couldn't measure it as a wave when it behaves as a wave, or as a particle when it behaves as a particle. How does this come to be? David Deutsch points out that if you imagine that our Universe is simply one layer and that there is an infinite multiplicity of universes spreading out on either side, not only does it solve the problem, but the problem simply goes away. This is exactly how you expect light to behave under those circumstances. Quantum mechanics has claims to be predicated on the notion that the Universe behaves as if there was a multiplicity of universes, but it rather strains our credulity to think that there actually would be.

This goes straight back to Gallileo and the Vatican. In fact, what the Vatican said to Gallileo was, “We don't dispute your readings, we just dispute the explanation you put on them. It's all very well for you to say that the planets sort of do that as they go round and it is as if we were a planet and those planets were all going round the sun; it's alright to say it's as if that were happening, but you're not allowed to say that's what is happening, because we have a total lockhold on universal truth and also it simply strains our personal credulity”. Just so, I think that the idea that there are multiple universes currently strains our credulity but it may well be that it's simply one more strain that we have to learn to live with, just as we've had to learn to live with a whole bunch of them in the past.

The other thing that comes out of that vision of the Universe is that it turns out to be composed almost entirely and rather worryingly, of nothing. Wherever you look there is nothing, with occasional tiny, tiny little specks of rock or light. But nevertheless, by watching the way these tiny little specks behave in the vast nothingness, we begin to divine certain principles, certain laws, like gravity and so forth. So that was, if you like, the macroscopic view of the universe, which came from the first age of sand.

The next age of sand is the microscopic one. We put glass lenses into microscopes and started to look down at the microscopic view of the Universe. Then we began to understand that when we get down to the sub-atomic level, the solid world we live in also consists, again rather worryingly, of almost nothing and that wherever we do find something it turns out not to be actually something, but only the probability that there may be something there.

One way or another, this is a deeply misleading Universe. Wherever we look it's beginning to be extremely alarming and extremely upsetting to our sense of who we are—great, strapping, physical people living in a Universe that exists almost entirely for us—that it just isn't the case. At this point we are still divining from this all sorts of fundamental principles, recognising the way that gravity works, the way that strong and weak nuclear forces work, recognising the nature of matter, the nature of particles and so on, but having got those fundamentals, we're still not very good at figuring out how it works, because the maths is really rather tricky. So, we tend to come up with almost a clockwork view of the way it all works, because that's the best our maths can manage. I don't mean in any way to disparage Newton, because I guess he was the first person who saw that there were principles at work that were different from anything we actually saw around us. His first law of motion—that something will remain in its position of either rest or motion until some other force works on it—is something that none of us, living in a gravity well, in a gas envelope, had ever seen, because everything we move comes to a halt. It was only through very, very careful watching and observing and measuring and divining the principles underlying what we could all see happening that he came up with the principles that we all know and recognise as being the laws of motion, but nevertheless it is by modern terms, still a somewhat clockwork view of the Universe. As I say, I don't mean that to sound disparaging in any way at all, because his achievements, as we all know, were absolutely monumental, but it still kind of doesn't make sense to us.

Now there are all sorts of entities we are also aware of, as well as particles, forces, tables, chairs, rocks and so on, that are almost invisible to science; almost invisible, because science has almost nothing to say about them whatsoever. I'm talking about dogs and cats and cows and each other. We living things are, so far, beyond the purview of anything science can actually say, almost beyond even recognising ourselves as things that science might be expected to have something to say about.

I can imagine Newton sitting down and working out his laws of motion and figuring out the way the Universe works and with him, a cat wandering around. The reason we had no idea how cats worked was because, since Newton, we had proceeded by the very simple principle that essentially, to see how things work, we took them apart. If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have in your hands is a non-working cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; 'life', something that had a mysterious essence about it, was god given—and that's the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes 'On the Origin of Species'. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it's yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we're not made of anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn't read well. But also, we have no opportunity to see this stuff at work. In a sense Darwin was like Newton, in that he was the first person to see underlying principles, that really were not at all obvious, from the everyday world in which he lived. We had to think very hard to understand the nature of what was happening around us and we had no clear, obvious everyday examples of evolution to point to. Even today that persists as a slightly tricky problem if you're trying to persuade somebody who doesn't believe in all this evolution stuff and wants you to show him an example—they are hard to find in terms of everyday observation.

So we come to the third age of sand. In the third age of sand we discover something else we can make out of sand—silicon. We make the silicon chip—and suddenly, what opens up to us is a Universe not of fundamental particles and fundamental forces, but of the things that were missing in that picture that told us how they work; what the silicon chip revealed to us was the process. The silicon chip enables us to do mathematics tremendously fast, to model the, as it turns out, very very simple processes that are analogous to life in terms of their simplicity; iteration, looping, branching, the feedback loop which lies at the heart of everything you do on a computer and at the heart of everything that happens in evolution—that is, the output stage of one generation becomes the input stage of the next. Suddenly we have a working model, not for a while because early machines are terribly slow and clunky, but gradually we accumulate a working model of this thing that previously we could only guess at or deduce—and you had to be a pretty sharp and a pretty clear thinker even to divine it happening when it was far from obvious and indeed counter-intuitive, particularly to as proud a species as we.

The computer forms a third age of perspective, because suddenly it enables us to see how life works. Now that is an extraordinarily important point because it becomes self-evident that life, that all forms of complexity, do not flow downwards, they flow upwards and there's a whole grammar that anybody who is used to using computers is now familiar with, which means that evolution is no longer a particular thing, because anybody who's ever looked at the way a computer program works, knows that very, very simple iterative pieces of code, each line of which is tremendously straightforward, give rise to enormously complex phenomena in a computer—and by enormously complex phenomena, I mean a word processing program just as much as I mean Tierra or Creatures.

I can remember the first time I ever read a programming manual, many many years ago. I'd first started to encounter computers about 1983 and I wanted to know a little bit more about them, so I decided to learn something about programming. I bought a C manual and I read through the first two or three chapters, which took me about a week. At the end it said 'Congratulations, you have now written the letter A on the screen!' I thought, 'Well, I must have misunderstood something here, because it was a huge, huge amount of work to do that, so what if I now want to write a B?' The process of programming, the speed and the means by which enormous simplicity gives rise to enormously complex results, was not part of my mental grammar at that point. It is now—and it is increasingly part of all our mental grammars, because we are used to the way computers work.

So, suddenly, evolution ceases to be such a real problem to get hold of. It's rather like this: imagine, if you will, the following scenario. One Tuesday, a person is spotted in a street in London, doing something criminal. Two detectives are investigating, trying to work out what happened. One of them is a 20th Century detective and the other, by the marvels of science fiction, is a 19th Century detective. The problem is this: the person who was clearly seen and identified on the street in London on Tuesday was seen by someone else, an equally reliable witness, on the street in Santa Fe on the same Tuesday—how could that possibly be? The 19th Century detective could only think it was by some sort of magical intervention. Now the 20th Century detective may not be able to say, “He took BA flight this and then United flight that”—he may not be able to figure out exactly which way he did it, or by which route he travelled, but it's not a problem. It doesn't bother him; he just says, 'He got there by plane. I don't know which plane and it may be a little tricky to find out, but there's no essential mystery.' We're used to the idea of jet travel. We don't know whether the criminal flew BA 178, or UA270, or whatever, but we know roughly how it was done. I suspect that as we become more and more conversant with the role a computer plays and the way in which the computer models the process of enormously simple elements giving rise to enormously complex results, then the idea of life being an emergent phenomenon will become easier and easier to swallow. We may never know precisely what steps life took in the very early stages of this planet, but it's not a mystery.

So what we have arrived at here—and although the first shock wave of this arrival was in 1859, it's really the arrival of the computer that demonstrates it unarguably to us—is 'Is there really a Universe that is not designed from the top downwards but from the bottom upwards? Can complexity emerge from lower levels of simplicity?' It has always struck me as being bizarre that the idea of God as a creator was considered sufficient explanation for the complexity we see around us, because it simply doesn't explain where he came from. If we imagine a designer, that implies a design and that therefore each thing he designs or causes to be designed is a level simpler than him or her, then you have to ask 'What is the level above the designer?' There is one peculiar model of the Universe that has turtles all the way down, but here we have gods all the way up. It really isn't a very good answer, but a bottom-up solution, on the other hand, which rests on the incredibly powerful tautology of anything that happens, happens, clearly gives you a very simple and powerful answer that needs no other explanation whatsoever.

But here's the interesting thing. I said I wanted to ask 'Is there an artificial god?' and this is where I want to address the question of why the idea of a god is so persuasive. I've already explained where I feel this kind of illusion comes from in the first place; it comes from a falseness in our perspective, because we are not taking into account that we are evolved beings, beings who have evolved into a particular landscape, into a particular environment with a particular set of skills and views of the world that have enabled us to survive and thrive rather successfully. But there seems to be an even more powerful idea than that, and this is the idea I want to propose, which is that the spot at the top of the pyramid that we previously said was whence everything flowed, may not actually be vacant just because we say the flow doesn't go that way.

Let me explain what I mean by this. We have created in the world in which we live all kinds of things; we have changed our world in all kinds of ways. That's very very clear. We have built the room we're in and we've built all sorts of complex stuff, like computers and so on, but we've also constructed all kinds of fictitious entities that are enormously powerful. So do we say, 'That's a bad idea; it's stupid—we should simply get rid of it?' Well, here's another fictitious entity—money. Money is a completely fictitious entity, but it's very powerful in our world; we each have wallets, which have got notes in them, but what can those notes do? You can't breed them, you can't stir fry them, you can't live in them, there's absolutely nothing you can do with them that's any use, other than exchange them with each other—and as soon as we exchange them with each other all sots of powerful things happen, because it's a fiction that we've all subscribed to. We don't think this is wrong or right, good or bad; but the thing is that if money vanished the entire co-operative structure that we have would implode, but if we were all to vanish, money would simply vanish too. Money has no meaning outside ourselves, it is something that we have created that has a powerful shaping effect on the world, because its something we all subscribe to.

I would like somebody to write an evolutionary history of religion, because the way in which it has developed seems to me to show all kinds of evolutionary strategies. Think of the arms races that go on between one or two animals living the same environment. For example the race between the Amazonian manatee and a particular type of reed that it eats. The more of the reed the manatee eats, the more the reed develops silica in its cells to attack the teeth of the manatee and the more silica in the reed, the more manatee's teeth get bigger and stronger. One side does one thing and the other counters it. As we know, throughout evolution and history arms races are something that drive evolution in the most powerful ways and in the world of ideas you can see similar kinds of things happening.

Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? — because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'. The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking 'Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?' but I wouldn't have thought 'Maybe there's somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics' when I was making the other points. I just think 'Fine, we have different opinions'. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody's (I'm going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say 'No, we don't attack that; that's an irrational belief but no, we respect it'.

It's rather like, if you think back in terms of animal evolution, an animal that's grown an incredible carapace around it, such as a tortoise—that's a great survival strategy because nothing can get through it; or maybe like a poisonous fish that nothing will come close to, which therefore thrives by keeping away any challenges to what it is it is. In the case of an idea, if we think 'Here is an idea that is protected by holiness or sanctity', what does it mean? Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe, no, that's holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we've just got used to doing so? There's no other reason at all, it's just one of those things that crept into being and once that loop gets going it's very, very powerful. So, we are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting how much of a furore Richard creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.

There's a very interesting book—I don't know if anybody here's read it—called 'Man on Earth' by an anthropologist who use to be at Cambridge, called John Reader, in which he describes the way that… I'm going to back up a little bit and tell you about the whole book. It's a series of studies of different cultures in the world that have developed within somewhat isolated circumstances, either on islands or in a mountain valley or wherever, so it's possible to treat them to a certain extent as a test-tube case. You see therefore exactly the degree to which their environment and their immediate circumstances has affected the way in which their culture has arisen. It's a fascinating series of studies. The one I have in mind at the moment is one that describes the culture and economy of Bali, which is a small, very crowded island that subsists on rice. Now, rice is an incredibly efficient food and you can grow an awful lot in a relatively small space, but it's hugely labour intensive and requires a lot of very, very precise co-operation amongst the people there, particularly when you have a large population on a small island needing to bring its harvest in. People now looking at the way in which rice agriculture works in Bali are rather puzzled by it because it is intensely religious. The society of Bali is such that religion permeates every single aspect of it and everybody in that culture is very, very carefully defined in terms of who they are, what their status is and what their role in life is. It's all defined by the church; they have very peculiar calendars and a very peculiar set of customs and rituals, which are precisely defined and, oddly enough, they are fantastically good at being very, very productive with their rice harvest. In the 70s, people came in and noticed that the rice harvest was determined by the temple calendar. It seemed to be totally nonsensical, so they said, 'Get rid of all this, we can help you make your rice harvest much, much more productive than even you're, very successfully, doing at the moment. Use these pesticides, use this calendar, do this, that and the other'. So they started and for two or three years the rice production went up enormously, but the whole predator/prey/pest balance went completely out of kilter. Very shortly, the rice harvest plummeted again and the Balinese said, 'Screw it, we're going back to the temple calendar!' and they reinstated what was there before and it all worked again absolutely perfectly. It's all very well to say that basing the rice harvest on something as irrational and meaningless as a religion is stupid—they should be able to work it out more logically than that, but they might just as well say to us, 'Your culture and society works on the basis of money and that's a fiction, so why don't you get rid of it and just co-operate with each other'—we know it's not going to work!

So, there is a sense in which we build meta-systems above ourselves to fill in the space that we previously populated with an entity that was supposed to be the intentional designer, the creator (even though there isn't one) and because we—I don't necessarily mean we in this room, but we as a species—design and create one and then allow ourselves to behave as if there was one, all sorts of things begin to happen that otherwise wouldn't happen.

Let me try and illustrate what I mean by something else. This is very speculative; I'm really going out on a limb here, because it's something I know nothing about whatsoever, so think of this more as a thought experiment than a real explanation of something. I want to talk about Feng Shui, which is something I know very little about, but there's been a lot of talk about it recently in terms of figuring out how a building should be designed, built, situated, decorated and so on. Apparently, we need to think about the building being inhabited by dragons and look at it in terms of how a dragon would move around it. So, if a dragon wouldn't be happy in the house, you have to put a red fish bowl here or a window there. This sounds like complete and utter nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be nonsense—there aren't any dragons, so any theory based on how dragons behave is nonsense. What are these silly people doing, imagining that dragons can tell you how to build your house? Nevertheless, it occurs to me if you disregard for a moment the explanation that's actually offered for it, it may be there is something interesting going on that goes like this: we all know from buildings that we've lived in, worked in, been in or stayed in, that some are more comfortable, more pleasant and more agreeable to live in than others. We haven't had a real way of quantifying this, but in this century we've had an awful lot of architects who think they know how to do it, so we've had the horrible idea of the house as a machine for living in, we've had Mies van der Roe and others putting up glass stumps and strangely shaped things that are supposed to form some theory or other. It's all carefully engineered, but nonetheless, their buildings are not actually very nice to live in. An awful lot of theory has been poured into this, but if you sit and work with an architect (and I've been through that stressful time, as I'm sure a lot of people have) then when you are trying to figure out how a room should work you're trying to integrate all kinds of things about lighting, about angles, about how people move and how people live—and an awful lot of other things you don't know about that get left out. You don't know what importance to attach to one thing or another; you're trying to, very consciously, figure out something when you haven't really got much of a clue, but there's this theory and that theory, this bit of engineering practice and that bit of architectural practice; you don't really know what to make of them. Compare that to somebody who tosses a cricket ball at you. You can sit and watch it and say, 'It's going at 17 degrees'; start to work it out on paper, do some calculus, etc. and about a week after the ball's whizzed past you, you may have figured out where it's going to be and how to catch it. On the other hand, you can simply put your hand out and let the ball drop into it, because we have all kinds of faculties built into us, just below the conscious level, able to do all kinds of complex integrations of all kinds of complex phenomena which therefore enables us to say, 'Oh look, there's a ball coming; catch it!'

What I'm suggesting is that Feng Shui and an awful lot of other things are precisely of that kind of problem. There are all sorts of things we know how to do, but don't necessarily know what we do, we just do them. Go back to the issue of how you figure out how a room or a house should be designed and instead of going through all the business of trying to work out the angles and trying to digest which genuine architectural principles you may want to take out of what may be a passing architectural fad, just ask yourself, 'how would a dragon live here?' We are used to thinking in terms of organic creatures; an organic creature may consist of an enormous complexity of all sorts of different variables that are beyond our ability to resolve but we know how organic creatures live. We've never seen a dragon but we've all got an idea of what a dragon is like, so we can say, 'Well if a dragon went through here, he'd get stuck just here and a little bit cross over there because he couldn't see that and he'd wave his tail and knock that vase over'. You figure out how the dragon's going to be happy here and lo and behold! you've suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic creatures, such as ourselves, to live in.

So, my argument is that as we become more and more scientifically literate, it's worth remembering that the fictions with which we previously populated our world may have some function that it's worth trying to understand and preserve the essential components of, rather than throwing out the baby with the bath water; because even though we may not accept the reasons given for them being here in the first place, it may well be that there are good practical reasons for them, or something like them, to be there. I suspect that as we move further and further into the field of digital or artificial life we will find more and more unexpected properties begin to emerge out of what we see happening and that this is a precise parallel to the entities we create around ourselves to inform and shape our lives and enable us to work and live together. Therefore, I would argue that though there isn't an actual god there is an artificial god and we should probably bear that in mind. That is my debating point and you are now free to start hurling the chairs around!

Q – What is the fourth age of sand?

Let me back up for a minute and talk about the way we communicate. Traditionally, we have a bunch of different ways in which we communicate with each other. One way is one-to-one; we talk to each other, have a conversation. Another is one-to-many, which I'm doing at the moment, or someone could stand up and sing a song, or announce we've got to go to war. Then we have many-to-one communication; we have a pretty patchy, clunky, not-really-working version we call democracy, but in a more primitive state I would stand up and say, 'OK, we're going to go to war' and some may shout back 'No we're not!'—and then we have many-to-many communication in the argument that breaks out afterwards!

In this century (and the previous century) we modelled one-to-one communications in the telephone, which I assume we are all familiar with. We have one-to-many communication—boy do we have an awful lot of that; broadcasting, publishing, journalism, etc.—we get information poured at us from all over the place and it's completely indiscriminate as to where it might land. It's curious, but we don't have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that's actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn't have any impact. We're not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that's happened to somebody a world away and something that's happened to someone round the corner. We can't really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it's happened to our sister. We've all become twisted and disconnected and it's not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don't impact the world. Then there's many-to-one; we have that, but not very well yet and there's not much of it about. Essentially, our democratic systems are a model of that and though they're not very good, they will improve dramatically.

But the fourth, the many-to-many, we didn't have at all before the coming of the Internet, which, of course, runs on fibre-optics. It's communication between us that forms the fourth age of sand. Take what I said earlier about the world not reacting to us when we react to it; I remember the first moment, a few years ago, at which I began to take the Internet seriously. It was a very, very silly thing. There was a guy, a computer research student at Carnegie Mellon, who liked to drink Dr Pepper Light. There was a drinks machine a couple of storeys away from him, where he used to regularly go and get his Dr Pepper, but the machine was often out of stock, so he had quite a few wasted journeys. Eventually he figured out, 'Hang on, there's a chip in there and I'm on a computer and there's a network running around the building, so why don't I just put the drinks machine on the network, then I can poll it from my terminal whenever I want and tell if I'm going to have a wasted journey or not?' So he connected the machine to the local network, but the local net was part of the Internet—so suddenly anyone in the world could see what was happening with this drinks machine. Now that may not be vital information but it turned out to be curiously fascinating; everyone started to know what was happening with the drinks machine. It began to develop, because in the chip in the machine didn't just say, 'The slot which has Dr Pepper Light is empty' but had all sorts of information; it said, 'There are 7 Cokes and 3 Diet Cokes, the temperature they are stored at is this and the last time they were loaded was that'. There was a lot of information in there, and there was one really fabulous piece of information: it turned out that if someone had put their 50 cents in and not pressed the button, i.e. if the machine was pregnant, then you could, from your computer terminal wherever you were in the world, log on to the drinks machine and drop that can! Somebody could be walking down the corridor when suddenly, 'bang!' — there was a Coca-Cola can! What caused that? — well obviously somebody 5,000 miles away! Now that was a very, very silly, but fascinating, story and what it said to me was that this was the first time that we could reach back into the world. It may not be terribly important that from 5,000 miles away you can reach into a University corridor and drop a Coca-Cola can but it's the first shot in the war of bringing to us a whole new way of communicating. So that, I think, is the fourth age of sand.

Doomed, too

2006-12-06T03:19:00.000-08:00

Foreword: I have often been accused of being a hedonist. People tell me how I while away my time in mindless pursuits instead of spending it in socially responsible ways. Hence when life handed me a lemon on a super-bike recently, I decided to write this piece as a service to society.

I am not what maybe described as an avid movie watcher, unless the movies are on TV and can be watched without considerable movement from my bed. Yet, I succumbed to the hype surrounding “Dhoom-2” and collected my colleagues and embarked on an experience that lasted for the longest three hours of my life. I take this moment to apologize, once again, to all of my colleagues who were forced to face the ordeal on my insistence.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for mindless action movies, but I like my “Commando” separate from my “Terminator” and certainly different from “Titanic”, which I must say, sucked. A mixture of all of these (and more!) is not to my taste.

Enough of these generalizations, lets get to some straight talk. The story first:

SPOILER WARNING: Plot details follow.

SPOILER END.

Right, now lets take it (apart) character by character:

Abhishek Bachchan: What can I say, it has already been established that aB (note the use of the lower case ‘a’, only one man deserves to be called AB) takes non-acting to its zenith. You can look like an unshaven gorilla, and try to be deadpan with your humour and even have Uday Chopra next to you to make you look good, but it doesn’t always work. Especially, if you stink at everything. I’ve been a Darwinist all my life and I sincerely hope aB does not fall into the hands of the Creationists for he is the perfect argument against genetics. The best thing that I can say about him is that at least he is not Shah Rukh Khan.

Aishwarya Rai: I have said it before and I’ll say it again, that female just takes my breath away. She is HOT, period. Within that scope she excels, but then she makes the (ill-advised) attempt at mouthing some dialogues (why, o why?) and disturbs your concentration in appreciating the wondrous visage. Then it’s all downhill.

Bipasha Basu: If acting involved raising the hormonal activity in the male audience, this babe would get my vote. Fortunately, she has precious little to do (and wear) in the movie. Hence, makes the experience a little more agreeable.

Hrithik Roshan: Never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that I will be forced to proclaim him the better “actor” in a comparison. As it turns out, HR completely outperforms aB (not really a mean feat, if you ask me) forcing me to admit that if a situation should arise where in HR and aB are the last of the alleged actors in the world and the (rather painful) decision to award the Oscar to one of them lies with me, I would award it to HR. This, despite the fact that he swats bullets away with a skateboard and goes on a romantic tangent in the middle of high action. It wasn’t an easy decision.

Uday Chopra: Don’t even get me started.

Final rating: I would compare it with Boom, but Boom had Amitabh Bachchan… and Katrina Kaif...

Of Love, Heartache and Heartburn

2006-11-27T01:16:00.000-08:00

Foreword: I have been irregular in my blog posts: to the extent that I may have slipped from the “Active” status on Manish’s blog to “Dormant” or even “Dead”. Also, it causes some other souls deep angst when they can’t find new material to pinch for their blog from mine. I know most of you guys can’t think of any self-respecting guy who’d stoop to such levels: I mean, copy from me? But such people do exist (though not necessarily in a self-respecting manner) and mark my words, there’s more than just one guy. Now I know the gag about imitation being the sincerest form of flattery and what not, but I could do with just a teeny bit of flattery less, don’t you think? I mean, I must already be the most conceited person on earth, so guys, please don’t overdo it.

I was on vacation for a fortnight, which was spent in a gastronomic frenzy, and it was while stuffing myself with sumptuous roasted chicken stuffed with minced mutton that I came to realize that the ancients had made a crucial mistake. Their proclamation that ‘home is where the heart is’ is probably off target by four letters. The four-letter word, I’m thinking of here, is ‘burn’. Really, one does overeat even beyond the familiar boundaries of the home kitchen, but add a familiar dining table and the old stained tablecloth and the setting threatens to set a new world record of gluttony. Truly, home is where the heartburn is. My mom, like most moms, is a great cook. In fact, she takes the greatness to even greater levels, deep fries it in desi ghee, garnishes it with almonds, pistachios and cashew and generally makes you want to bite off, chew and swallow your fingers in the hope that their might be an extra morsel sticking there.

That being said, let me touch upon the other two subjects in the title: love and heartache. Before I hear the usual voices of contemptuous protests, let me tell you, I do so only on the request of alert reader (forgive me, Mr. Barry, I couldn’t help but pinch that one), Clark Kent*, from London, who I have known since my UG days in BIT Mesra. He wishes to present before my formidable mental prowess the questions, and I quote, “is it possible while being in love with one person...u fall in love with another ?? if you do what does that mean..?… u accept someone's commitment with a fling as short as 4-5 days...& then stay away from that for a year with someone else..whom u fall for...but now what to do...??” (sic).

Well, Clarkie, its entirely possible. And the person who does that does God’s work: after all doesn’t he say, “spread the love and not the virus”; er, maybe not the part about the virus, but I distinctly remember hearing something about spreading the love. At the same time, not spreading the virus finds favour with Him too. And it might give you protection, provided you use some.

One needs to objectively analyze the nature of love. The mistake most men and women (for even they make mistakes, despite what they would have us believe) make is that they think of love, as in the one in a relationship differently from any other form of love, as in the one you have for choco-chip ice-cream, or for your dog, or for your bike. The important thing is to realize that love and its nature in all cases mentioned above (and even in cases not mentioned above) is essentially the same. If they could assign some quantum numbers or some physical attributes to study it, we would have a scientific corroboration of what I’m saying. Of course, if you were reasonably intelligent, you wouldn’t be reading this and therefore you wouldn’t need one. As always, I am aware of the miniature brains provided by our father who art in heaven to the people who make up my audience (sometimes I wonder whether it is because they are my readers that they are bird-brained or is it because they are bird-brained that they are my readers, but we’ll leave such digressive questions to when we have leisure) and so, I will proceed to expostulate in painstaking (and causing) detail.

Your love for ice-cream is partial to one flavour, though you may like more than one. And you are not consistent in your favourite flavour, you might like choco-chip today but you may prefer mocha tomorrow. However, if you have never tried mocha, there are chances that you will be ever loyal to choco-chip. But if you have, it makes your experience richer, and you a more interesting person, in that in the next dinner party you attend (assuming that you do manage to get invited to one), you’ll have not one but two ice-cream flavours to talk about. Moreover, it gives you time to decide whether it is mocha or choco-chip that you really like.

Basically, Clark, what I am trying to say is that just because someone liked mocha once, tried choco-chip for sometime and now wants to go back to mocha, it doesn’t mean that choco-chip is history. Who knows, the same person might develop an allergy to caffeine, and then choco-chip, your time will come. The point, then, is whether you want to melt in the wait or stay chilled (out). Therefore, Clark Kent, look for a phone booth, change into your superhero suit (complete with the underwear on the outside) and fly up, up and away… or to the nearest ice-cream parlour, and while you are there order some choco-chip for me too. No, wait! Make it mocha…

*: Name changed to protect identity (You can’t believe my guts, can you?)

Singled Out!

2006-09-28T02:10:00.001-07:00

Foreword: There comes a time in a man’s life when he has to slow down and take stock of his life. That time hasn’t really come in mine, I just thought it would be a neat way of beginning a post. Anyway, I recently realized that in my circle of friends, bachelors are a fast depleting lot. In fact, I am one of the last few on the list. I would have counted myself as being part of the endangered species, but I got this unbridled laughter from my no-longer-bachelor friends when I proposed it. They are of the opinion that all bachelors, save me, are endangered. I must admit, this appeared very unreasonable to me but they gave me some argument about not meeting the minimum standards to be endangered.

Ordinarily, the attitude of us singles is one of sour grapes. We repeat tasteless jokes about 101 reasons why beer is better than a girlfriend or 101 reasons why a dog is better than a boyfriend. I find those demeaning; to both beer and dogs, that is. That doesn’t mean I’m a maladjusted, misogynistic pig that borders on delinquent behaviour. Hell no! I get along famously with women, almost like a house on fire (note to self: find that dick who coined THAT expression and do extremely unpleasant things to him, like feeding him low-cal cheesecake). As I look back, I realize everybody, but I, knew I was going to remain single. They just kind of assumed that I knew about it. It was like sporting a curry stain on the seat of your trousers- everybody can see it, but you remain blissfully unaware. I distinctly remember that fateful night when I was at home during my college vacations and a female friend called. My dad picked it up and said in an incredulous voice, “its for you. It’s a girl!” He didn’t really say it, but had I been attentive, I would have interpreted his tone to mean, “What female in her right mind would want to call you?” or, maybe, “doesn’t she know the script, she’s not supposed to call him”. But drunk on my youth, I refused to heed those signs and proudly sported signs that said, “Single, ready to mingle” on my chest. Of course, over a period of time, those got kind of re-worded to “single, desperate to mingle”, but we are not discussing that now.

While friends plan honeymoons, I remain lost in the hope that someday my time will come and I will be able to successfully own a pair of matching socks, or some such astronomical expectation. Like it is for most of men’s fortunes and misfortunes, I myself am responsible for my current bachelorhood. At least in part.

In college, when most normal people were in various stages of forging, in all senses of the term, a relationship, somehow my group of friends saw things differently. I now believe, that our subconscious went through the following rather lengthy and possibly specious reasoning (although if you have had any experience at growing up, you will realize that young men in the age group 19-22 do NOT possess a subconscious.): We belong to families that have ingrained certain social mores very deeply in our psyche. Like it or not, we are doomed into being the nice guys in life. We will always stand up for women, literally and metaphorically, not scratch our noses and/or crotches in their presence, open doors for them, and in general be extremely un-cool for the rest of our lives. So we will do the cool stuff now. This necessarily entails being extremely crude of speech, lecherous of conduct and extremely generous with our laboriously accumulated insights about the female anatomy.

When you have, or think you have, a subconscious that can reason like that, you pretty much do what it says. Hence we did just that. We rarely left a female bereft of the benefit of our esteemed opinion of her accent, body, clothes, … I distinctly remember being able to completely evacuate the canteen in a matter of minutes. A few of us like minded souls would saunter in and observe, aloud, the goings on. Of course, we would sprinkle a good deal of honest observation, poetic exaggeration and caustic wit to make our observations easy to remember and repeat and lo! The canteen would be absolutely desolate. The ‘couples’, which so far had been giving meaning to Bryan Adams’ “shadows on the wall and hands everywhere”, would sit rigidly upright and then disappear. Basically, within a few weeks, there was not a female in sight that would walk on the same road as us. And, can you believe it, we LOVED it. It felt so good to be on the wrong side of the established social norms.

It is only now that I realize that my current bachelorhood might be a consequence of the karma in the previous years. When I think about what really made us do all that, two of the most influential guys in the group come to mind. Incidentally, both of them were in relationships outside the college! Villains! While they had the best of both worlds, the lesser mortals, like yours truly, were cursed into a life of singlehood.

But wait, don’t interpret this as a lament about my early life. Hell, if I could re-live my college days, I would do exactly the same thing! We had such a lot of fun, it makes the couples look like dorks!

That being said, if I die a bachelor, I want these guys to be held responsible.

Deranged Marriage

2006-09-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

aka
What Men (should) Want

Foreword: I have always considered myself an expert in most matters. My natural genius lends itself to the cause magnificently. Recently, I was forced to direct my formidable mental faculties to a rather widespread phenomenon popularly known as arranged marriage. It so happened that a colleague, while on vacation, was surprised into “seeing” a girl for the purposes of matrimony. He had been conveniently single all his life and had looked upon marriage and relationships as what the venerable Douglas N. Adams referred to as SEP (Someone Else’s Problem). Hence he was unsure of what he wanted in a first mate in the place, or a mate in the first place, as the case may be. Now, someone once said, “Experience is the name we give to our mistakes”, somebody else said, “We only learn from experience” and yet some other guy said, “Life is too short.” From (1), (2) and (3) we have, “Life is too short to commit all the mistakes oneself, so we must learn from the experiences of others.” To cut a long story short, I took heed from his experience and decided to seriously examine my preferences in a mate. This is an account of my mental meandering.

Lets get the facts right. It is not possible to “know” a person in the time allotted by the Institution of Arranged Marriages. Hell, no amount of time is enough to know another person. How else would you explain the failure of 30-year old marriages? So, in marriage, what you are really subjecting yourself to is the gamble of your life. This is not only about arranged marriages, it is about all kinds! Yes, I’ve known of 8-year old relationships ending with one half catching the other half in bed with the third half (one of the halves once described his life as “my cup runneth over.” I couldn’t agree more) resulting in a few shortened half-lives. I also know of people marrying and staying married for over 40 years after 6 weeks of whirlwind romance. The point is there is no point. In doing too much of research into your partner’s personality, that is. How, then, would I approach the problem? What would I look for (and by extension, what you should look for) in a life partner?

Age: That is the number one factor. Salman Rushdie and Padma Lakshmi’s marriage does not prove that tits can save a marriage. All it does is say that famous men like trophy wives, almost literally, since there aren’t many wild oats left by the time they become famous. Take the thumb rule: 3 years is a generation gap. You cannot connect with a person who is more than 3 years your junior or senior at the same level. Unless you are looking for your marriage to fulfill your needs of a rebellious teenage daughter immediately on solemnization or your wife is looking for a father cum husband rolled into one, I would suggest stay bloody away from the kid, you freaking paedophile!

Interests: Do you know why Einstein did not marry Bachhendri Pal? Because they lived (and Ms Pal still lives) in different times (for all that relativity crap, even Einstein couldn’t travel in time). But even if they were contemporaries and were adventurous enough to marry each other, I doubt if one would have known them as the ideal couple. To break the idea down so that it can be digested by the moronic intellects of my intended audience, make sure you and your partner have similar tastes. Notice, I say similar and not identical. You don’t want to live with a carbon copy of yourself (for the simple reason that there is room for only one asshole in your life), at the same time you do not want to live with your antimatter, either. Leave all that crap about “opposites attract” where it belongs- in the Electromagnetics lab. Opposites attract, and then there’s a lot of fizz and then they go there separate ways with hardly any of the original attraction left. Of course, the entertainment they provide to their fellowmen is superb, so I wouldn’t recommend it, except for purely altruistic artistic reasons. That means that if you are brooding, intellectual type (I know you wouldn’t be reading this if you were, but lets take an example) you don’t want to marry a tennis champ. If you are the tennis champ (then I doubt if much of this would make it past your thick skull, but what the hell), don’t go near the lab. Extrapolate as needed. Note to the champ: call a friend, NOW!

Socio-economic status: I know this isn’t the most politically correct thing to say, but I’ve never been accused of being politically correct, consider the social and economic background of your spouse. By that, I don’t mean start tracing her caste to 1500 B.C. What I do mean is, look at her house, if it has twice the number of rooms in yours, you may have a problem there. Look at her family friends. If her Dad gets invited to Rashtrapati Bhavan on state dinners and yours cant make it to the guest list of the local residential colony’s annual event, you have a problem. Look at her friends. If she is on first names basis with Tom Cruise, stay away. When you’re hungry, love may keep you alive but you need some stuff to keep the love alive. I reiterate, this has nothing to do with her caste or religion. Like someone once said (if they didn’t, they better consider it said now), money is religion enough.

Physical Compatibility: Ahem! Again, this is rather thin ice, morally, but when have I given up in the face of adversity? You and your wife need to be physically compatible. If you are five feet tall and she is six, she wont look up to you for long. If she is shaped like French curves were created using her body as the benchmark, and you like a beanbag full of beer, you have a problem of geometric proportions here. If she looks like she would inspire inferiority complex in Cindy Crawford, and you could cause panic attacks in kindergarten only by smiling, you may not have a very charming ever after. Despite all the modern disregard for physical appearance, at least in public, it remains a prominent criterion and don’t you forget that, shit-face.

Intelligence and Common Sense: This is my favourite! Intelligence goes beyond the apparent in that a tennis champ might, after all, turn out to possess more sense than a college professor in practical matters. It’s a tricky thing, made even more complex by our rather inflated pictures of our cerebral abilities. It can be simple, if she appears in the acknowledgements in an acceptance speech at the Nobel and the closest you have ever been to college is when you took a wrong turn in a locality you’ve been living in for twenty years. It may not be so simple when both are software engineers. If you are gifted with my incisive ability to spot retards, this presents no problem; otherwise you want to watch out! This becomes even more important since ultimately marriage increases the number or parameters (people) in the equation (family) and the idea is to balance it and keep it that way. One false step and your paradise is as good as lost. If the person you are dealing with thinks “Coz I said so” is a perfectly reasonable explanation for you to shoot your mom, marry her and take her out of circulation before she spoils someone’s life. On the other hand, if she thinks “Coz your mom said so” is good enough for her to stand in a tub of boiling oil, marry her before you wake up.

Sense of Humour: A sense of humour saves lives, families and face. If that is the one quality that your wife to be has and fails on all other counts mentioned above, marry her and you’ll at least laugh for the time that it lasts. If she can manage to show you the funny part in your getting kicked out from your job, your dog or your in-laws dying or her walking out on you, note down her number and send it to me once she’s dumped you. Again, you have to be in the upper echelons of the intelligentsia to really judge a sense of humour, so keep a few things in mind:
Her laughing her guts out when you spill ketchup on yourself does not constitute a sense of humour. Her laughing when you spill ketchup on the seven-footer on the next table does.
If she finds a Mr. Bean episode funny, stay away from her. If she watches “Snatch” through tears in her eyes, she gets extra points.
If she finds your boss’s accent funny, she IS the one, period.

Those are the qualities one should look for in a “marriage material”. But while we are on the subject of what men want, I might as well tell you a story.

There was this rather rich and lonely man who was sick of women scheming to marry him for the money. So he places an ad in a local newspaper inviting women to participate in a competition to win him (Sick, but bear with me here). Three women make it past the screening. He gives each of them a certain amount of money and asks them to see him after a week. When he meets the first one, she’s got a nose job, a boob job and a botox job done and is looking smashing. She tells him that she got more beautiful for him. The guy is impressed. Then he meets the second one and finds that she’s bought him a load of stuff- a lifetime subscription to Playboy, a Sony VAIO laptop (powered by Intel Duo) and a Harley Davidson Fatboy. She tells him that she did all that to make him happy and nothing makes her happier than his being happy. The guy is speechless. Then he meets the third female, who hands him an envelope of hand made paper. He opens it to find a statement of accounts of how she’s invested the sum that he had given her. It has grown ten times in a week and is extremely liquid. The guy is completely blown away.

Then he goes home and announces his marriage to one of the women in the same newspaper the next day. The question is, which of the three did he marry?

The answer, if you’ve been paying any attention to what I’ve been yapping about so far, should be obvious. He married the one with the biggest breasts.

Abridged too far?

2006-08-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

Foreword: As a kid, I read lots of abridged versions of classics. They left me with a rather poor impression of the originals. Here’s my opinion…

Reading is often hyped way too much. I mean, look at all those parents shoving spoonfuls of illustrated Oliver Twist into their kids’ reluctant brains. Is it worth it? The bigger question is, does it serve the end they hope it serves? Having fed, rather voraciously, (and voluntarily, for my mother realized the futility of making me do anything against my will pretty early. Fast learner, my mom.) on lots of illustrated, “adapted” versions of popular novels, I do happen to have an opinion about them. Most of you realize that the previous statement, seeking to justify my qualification for commenting on the subject, is rather uncharacteristic. Have I finally seen light and decided to add a dollop of humility to my otherwise formidable arsenal of arrogant assumption? Actually, no, it is just that this has been a personal experience that has affected me rather deeply.

A couple of weeks ago, I finished reading the original version of “Great Expectations”, a classic by Charles Dickens. I had read an adapted (thoroughly mutilated, in my opinion) version as a part of curriculum at school. I think I was in the eighth standard then. I distinctly remember hating the story. The thing was so horribly presented, the plot so simplified, the characters so innocuous that it failed to leave a lasting impression. Wait; let me correct that. It did leave a lasting impression. I decided that Charles Dickens was hugely over-rated. And to this date I have not read another of his books. Of course, I had read my Oliver Twist and David Copperfield way before Orient Longman caused me to think that the last three letters in Dickens’ name were probably meant to disguise a crucial fact.

Lets look at the logic behind the practice of abridgement. “Adaptation” has traditionally meant the act of becoming more suitable and aligned with, one’s environment. In the context of juvenile minds and classic novels, it may probably mean reducing the complexity of the characters and removing references its dated aspect, thereby making it more palatable for immature minds. Try as I may, I completely fail to see the rationale behind this exercise. A context, a society, a theme, a dialect may well be the entire fabric of the novel. Fiddling with it will irreparably damage the narrative. Far from creating an interest in young minds, it will create an aversion. The only people it will manage to interest will be the dull sort. I wouldn’t pin my hopes on them for writing the next Nobel winner. Another crucial flaw I see is in the intent. If a book in its original form is deemed unfit for children, why do we need to force it upon them in an even more unpalatable form? Also, it brings to question the ability of the person who seeks to bridge the divide between the author’s intention and the reception by the children. Instead of letting the unfettered minds soak in what a great writer has written, we force them to consume the distillate produced by a person who is apparently not good enough to create anything original, and may in all probability, lack the ability to understand the original author’s intention.

One is forced to wonder, then, if it would not be better to let the target audience reach sufficient maturity before they deal with complex subjects in the original form, rather than force some imbecile’s half-baked interpretation of it upon them.

PS: Sincere thanks to Selva and Geetha for presenting the original "Great Expectations". I loved it and I cannot thank you guys enough! It made me realize that in the past there might, after all, have been a few authors who could write almost as well as I.

Ummm…Reeker!

2006-07-21T23:23:00.000-07:00

Foreword: I have recently returned from a 4-week trip to the US of A. This is an account of my impressions of the land of opportunities.

Life is strange in the US. At least that’s what you’d call it if you were from India. Like a friendly taxi-driver described it, it is much bigger there: the roads, the cars, the people, the sun, the moon everything. It is like wearing magnifying lenses. People seem overly polite, carelessly spewing “sorry”s and “thank you”s all over. They hold doors open for you, like you are some sort of aristocrat and smile at you like you are an old chum. They give you way and rarely brush past you, occasionally honking on the freeway when you are too slow for them. Contrast this with what would happen in apna des. You hold a door open for someone, and you’ll probably end up standing behind it for the rest of the day as people flood in, with each one managing to carefully step on your toes on exactly the same corn. Turn to the roads and you’ll probably be deafened before you can manage to get out of your house. So far so good.

Look a little deeper, though, and you’ll realize that the smile behind open door is a little plastic and any routine enquiry would be politely turned down with an apologetic shrug: “Sorry, why don’t you dial the helpline from the pay-phone out there?” The saccharine sweetness is just that, it leaves a bitter after-taste.

While I was there, I continued the rather brainless habit of watching the customary hours of television. In doing so, I happened to watch a number of advertisements (which are extremely lacking in originality, they are all copied from Indian ads) and came upon one for the Ford Motor Company. One Bill Ford appeared on screen to pledge his company’s commitment to “reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil”. Now, if that isn’t an exercise in futility, I don’t know what is! With Mr. George W. Bush taking care of the problem so well, I wonder what old Bill is doing talking about foreign oil in the first place. Isn’t all the oil in the world legitimately America’s? What? You don’t think so? You bloody suicide-bombing fundamentalist terrorist! With Mr. Bush’s vision of the global village essentially comprising of bringing all oil wells under the aegis of the star spangled banner, or Mobil-Exxon (isn’t that the same thing?) I think Mr. Bill Ford could continue making his gas-guzzlers and leave that innovating to the bad Arabs. They are going to need it now.

When I was not watching the idiot box, I was interacting with someone more intelligent, or so you would think. Frankly, I found the average television more intelligent than the average American. But hey, this is not meant to be a jealous lament: if there is someone to be ridiculed, it will be me or mine, in keeping with the traditions of the blog. Speaking of which, I must touch upon the subject of the Indian-Americans. The first thing that strikes you is the similarity of their lives to the so-called crossover movies. Save the odd song sequence and probably the closeted paedophilic tendencies.

When you look closely though, their lives are not all that rosy, between visa expiration dates and the impossibility of getting a green card processed to attending pre-parenthood classes and seeking advice on whether or not they should go in for a second child. The confusion among the kids is even more apparent. I had the opportunity of attending a few family gatherings of the pan-Indians and I found them a singularly entertaining experience. From the typical Indian game of one-up-woman ship (“I like this dish better the way I cook it.”) to the American paediatric psychology (which consists, primarily, of saying, “Good job!” at every act of a toddler) the spectrum of entertainment provided would impress the most seasoned cynic. In one instance, a kid wailed for his mother when a guest’s kid snatched, rather violently, a toy from him. The mother of the wronged kid promptly appeared on the scene and patted the miscreant on his head and scolded the victim for not “sharing” with his friend.

Then there is that rather universal phenomenon of planning for the weekend as if it were some sort of galactic event occurring once in 7000 years. Most weekend plans begin to be made on Monday mornings, in the office. The day itself starts by an announcement to all who care to be in earshot, of the time by which the speaker needs to be home for some work of earth shaking importance, like taking the kid to the park. Not that I’m against this family feeling. By all means, continue with the attitude, its good for the Indian economy. To sum up, I must paraphrase Bill Watterson: Sure, the roads are wider there, but beyond that, I do not recommend it.

Lest I be branded a sour cynic, I should mention the similarities between India and the US that I saw. The one common observation I made was in the taste of orange juice. In neither of the countries, does it taste anything like a real orange. I think this last vestige of the mysteries of modern civilization finally does prove Darwin right. We must have had common ancestors who managed to prepare orange juice without using oranges. And they might well have been monkeys…

In the beginning there was the Command Line

2006-07-07T13:38:00.000-07:00

Foreword: I have been thinking of doing this for a long time: almost 3 months now. Finally here it is, http://www.cryptonomicon.com/command.zip. Right click on the link and save the zip file on your pc, then open it up read the txt file. It contains the most amazing insight on computers, philosophy, life and everything (sorry, DNA).

Enjoy.

What is in a mane?

2006-06-30T18:17:00.000-07:00

Foreword: As the world is gripped by the Football World Cup fever, I found the time to sit througha short presentation on Wimbledon. Particularly, about the (then) up coming match between Andre Agassi and Rafael Nadal. This is about what I saw.

Picture a young, muscular youth with a flowing mane of hair on a tennis court, sending down thunderous volleys with disdain. A rebellious attitude that borders on contempt, which is clearly visible for the power serves of the players around him. Had this been written a decade and a half ago, we would be talking about Ande Agassi. As it turns out, today, Rafael Nadal answers to the same sobriquet. I now know that Agassi lost to Nadal in what was a no-contest. I just hope Nadal is man enough to carry the burden of the tradition he has unwittinlgy taken from Agassi.

What’s love got to do with it?

2006-06-20T03:32:00.000-07:00

Foreword: No, I have not relegated my cynicism; and no I am not going to launch into a laboured diatribe for or against relationships. Also, I am not going to dole out advice for the broken hearted. I’m going to tell you a story and I’ll let you draw your own conclusions. If you know me, you wont expect it to be saccharine sweet and it will not be, trust me. But then again, this will perhaps be less caustic than most of what I write. Am I mellowing down? Hell, no! This is just the exception that proves the rule.

A couple of days ago, I met a friend who got married recently. Lets call the couple ‘He’ and ‘She’, for the purposes of discussion. He is a friend from college, a true genius, an uber geek, if there ever was one. He is the kind of person who can talk to a single flip-flop within the memory, cajole the hard disk to voluntarily disclose some piece of information it is zealously guarding, and cause the computer to generally behave like an intelligent, faithful dog. However, beyond the virtual world, his obvious poise and panache begin to falter. He is not the best person to give you a minute-by-minute account of the Brazil vs. Croatia game. He cannot even locate his newly rented house, without first knocking on every door in the locality.

She is a software engineer too. She knows which game is on when, and who are the favourites and why it is completely stupid. By self-admission, she can execute any allotted task at work in a zillionth of the allotted time frame. She is worldly-wise too, at least she can locate the newly rented apartment, monitor his replies and translate them for lesser mortals, in between juggling armfuls of sudoku and other such intellectual pursuits.

They are more ‘need each other’ than made for each other. While he fulfills the creative, motive aspect of the couple, she takes charge of the practical. While he explains the DCOM based communication framework he has been designing, only to be interrupted by the driver to ask whether they would like to go left or right at a busy intersection, and immediately gives a perfect geometric idea of the directions he would like him to take, she patiently says, “Left”. You can see the pride in her eyes when he is explaining something like that, and you can see it in his when she skillfully answers the waiter’s questions at the restaurant.

I have had the chance to have dinner with them, and watched him order with aplomb (he is a major foodie) and get completely confused about the quantities and the dishes he has ordered. I have seen her rescue him from the situation with equal zeal. Between all this, they did not hold hands, or gaze into each others’ eyes, or even sigh. Yet, I could see that they were plainly in love.

Sometimes I think love is more about respecting the other person for what (s)he is and compensating for their shortcomings than anything else, but then I watch “Sex and the City” and go “nah!”.

Despite all that, Mrs. and Mr. Baba, take a bow! I think you guys make a wonderful couple. I’m sure you will have a beautiful life together in between numerous communication frameworks and sudoku challenges and traffic directions. Let chaos (theory) reign.

The Hero

2006-06-06T02:02:00.000-07:00

Acknowledgement: A heartfelt thanks to Gaurav Nanda for planting the seeds of this idea in my imagination.

Foreword: Heroism is perhaps the second most popular attribute that the masses look for in a public figure, the first, of course, being an ability to make a comprehensive ass of oneself. The teeming millions lie in wait for the next sacrificial lamb to come along and do what he does best, provide a momentary respite from the boredom of existence. Perhaps it is towards this end that we have mythology and comic book superheroes. What, then, is this crap about? Well, since most mammals on the organic computer designed by Deep Thought have had some kind of representation in the inter-galactic assembly of the supremely stupid, I feel it is my duty, as a bonafide member of the community of software engineers a.k.a. geeks a.k., somewhat less charitably, a. nerds, to start a fable about a superhero of our own. Hence, ladies and gentlemen, I present, the man of meal…

Despite what the immortal bard of Avon said about the importance of names or the lack thereof, I find it necessary to name our hero appropriately. After all, he is going to be a celebrity of sorts and what celebrity worth his, er, name is nameless? Hence the urgency to find a suitable name for our man, one that is both awe-inspiring and pertinent. After profound portentous thought, I have settled on the name “GCMan”. Those who belong to the Java programmers community will promptly realize the relevance of this name, for the others, let me elaborate. ‘GC’, or more correctly, ‘gc’ is short for garbage collector, which is really a process that does the house keeping stuff for all Java programs. Likewise GCMan will help us clean up our house, figuratively and literally.

Before we launch into the heroic deeds that GCMan is destined to do (by design), it is important to give him a personality. Since it has been my privilege to bring him to existence in a Barahma-esque sort of way, it must be my responsibility to give him a personality too. As I look around, I find no one more suitable to model him on than, of course, myself. Hence GCMan turns out to be myopic to the extent of being semi blind, has a bad digestion and an incredibly caustic wit, spiky hair and is developing a paunch. His love life is a disaster and consists of murmuring sweet nothings to a hard disk with lots of bad sectors on it, which remains as frigid as ever in response. The closest he’s ever come to having sex has been on a fateful bus journey*. For the record, he wears his underpants inside his trousers.

Having firmly established his personality (or the lack, thereof), let us now turn our attention to building a legend around the man. A word about political correctness here, it can be argued that GCMan could as well have been "GCPerson" or even "GCWoman", and still be as effective (and with regard to the Java gc, "GCWoman"would be more accurate, since you can ask the gc to clean up but you cant make it do anything). However, the argument is clearly wrong since in the course of his adventures, GCMan is likely to meet bugs, both the software and the real varieties, and it does not inspire a lot of confidence in the poor developer to have GCWoman standing atop his desk, both feet firmly on the keyboard shrieking like a beetle on steroids at the first mention of a bug.

The beneficiaries of GCMan’s acts of selfless bravado are his brothers in arms, the programmers. His sightings are as awe inspiring as those of Big Foot or Yeti, the abominable snowman, punctuated by gasps of good-natured disbelief (“It’s the pantry boy, no, it’s the printer repair guy, oh no, its GCMan!”), eager anticipation (“I wish somebody would bomb this building”, it being a Monday morning) and most commonly with aggressive passiveness (“Eh?”). Among his many acts of magnanimity are inducing an exceptionally long, loud and odoriferous bout of flatulence in the boss while he was warming to the point of dropping developer productivity, rescuing a brand new coffee machine from a different wing (it had a neat row of LEDs), causing the QA manager’s hard disk to blow up when he was in the middle of detecting a potentially crippling bug and refilling the coffee pot.

This is just the beginning. Pretty soon the entire developer community will be leading richer, fuller and more satisfying lives because the testing community is going extinct. Though GCMan has nothing to do with this (I wouldn’t be too sure of that, his body odour has amazing powers) we will celebrate this as another victory of the spectacled crusader.

Rejoice and watch out, for coming soon to a cubicle near you is GCMan!

(Watch this space for all the dirt on his latest exploits.)

*On that fateful bus journey, he sat next to a girl and accidentally spilled hot coffee on her. The girl screamed, “Fuck you!”

Reservations about the Reservations

2006-04-11T22:20:00.000-07:00

Foreword: When the Mandal Commission’s recommendations were enforced, I was just a naïve schoolboy, way too happy at the unscheduled “holidays” to notice the grim reality. The mass self-immolation, the smuggled copies of “Newsweek”, the excited discussions of parents, everything told me that all was not right with the world. Now, as I look back, the piece of news that had created the stir was that certain opportunities were deemed beyond the scope of certain individuals simply because of their family name. With the recent decisions of the Ministry of HRD, time has come a full circle, and this time there is no school break to cloud out my sight.

India has always been a demographers nightmare: a veritable medley of humankind, practising unfathomable customs, following innumerable creeds and belonging to different castes. One common factor that unites us all is the stupidity that is associated with the masses. Perhaps, the one characteristic that sets Indians apart from the rest of the world is how individual brilliance translates into collective imbecility. The average Indian is genetically disposed towards an above average intelligence and the Indian populace has a predisposition towards being annoyingly foolish. Amidst all this, there is widespread economic inequity. And there in lies our biggest vulnerability.

One of the parameters of measuring the development a nation is making is the diversity in the economic status of the citizens. The narrower the gap, the closer the nation is to “social justice”. One way of doing this was aptly demonstrated by the USSR where most of the citizens crowded at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. The same model seems to have inspired the government to frame the new set of reservation policies. Lets take the facts first. The union government is planning to increase the percentage of reserved seats in all central universities to 49.5%. The increase will be of 27 percentage points over the existing 22.5%, the beneficiaries in this case being the OBCs who make up 52% of the population in India.

Now lets examine these facts under the light of logic. By definition, the most backward classes are “scheduled” and no other section should be given more reservation than them. In such a case, if the quantum of proposed reservation is “explained” by the population of a certain section, it can only point to politics of votes. What these regulations mean is that now of all the seats available to the section of the population handicapped by not having (perceived) social handicaps, a touch over one third will disappear. They will go to the single largest section of the voting public: enough to grant an absolute majority to any political party that can gain their sympathies. Obviously, no party would want to let a chance like this go. Consequently, from now on, there will be students in what are arguably the world’s best academic institutions who have neither the mettle that is required to be there nor the talent required to complete the courses they have been pushed into. Obviously these candidates with their half-baked intellects will not be able to keep pace with the curriculum, which strains the brightest talent in the country. This will lead to frustration among them and may even cause them to drop out. In that case, through the new policies, we have succeeded in: a) keeping out genuine talent from the institutes, b) forced some others to do something their intellects are not prepared for, causing them needless distress and wasting a significant portion of their lifetime. One needs to understand here that these don’t only apply to candidates from the reserved categories. Any candidate who gets admitted to an academy that demands extremely high levels of proficiency without possessing it in the right amounts can only look forward to a bitter experience. That is the exact reason that these institutions have an entrance examination in the first place. Diluting this quality will eventually cause the standards of these institutes to dip, and we will have yet another set of mediocre institutions.

I remember reading a couplet in junior school years in which a gardener was advised to water the roots of his plants and not their leaves. Apparently someone in the government has not been to primary school, but then again, that is not exactly news. No clear thinking person can disagree with the fact that the downtrodden need to be accorded special privileges to bring them up to a reasonable standard of living. But the way in which these privileges are decided certainly merits closer inspection. Reserving seats for higher education for a particular community, ostensibly to uplift it, while primary education remains neglected is obviously not the right approach. If the government had been interested in anything but the votes, they would have made better primary and secondary schooling arrangements, so that at the end of their schooling students from these communities could qualify for these institutions in the regular way. Agreed, this approach is more difficult and requires more changes, but substituting an easy option for the right one does not make too much sense. An analogy comes to mind. Say, a certain portion of the engine of a rocket needs to be made of titanium, since it can withstand much higher temperatures. Now the same property renders its forging quite difficult. In this case if some wise guy comes up with the idea of using wood since its more workable, his intelligence cannot be appreciated enough.

One place where these knee-jerk reservations do make sense is the Parliament. If a large section of the country remains underdeveloped despite putting in special plans for them, it is time to seek that section’s participation in the policies governing them. Hence the only place where these reservations make sense is in the ministries. Besides, that is the only job that can be done with abysmal levels of education.

Blank Noise Project

2006-03-06T02:02:00.000-08:00

Foreword:
This is in support of the Blank Noise Project. Despite being the (self-acknowledged) MCP that I am, I completely agree with whatever these guys (girls, mostly, and this is not a stunt to score with them) say.
I lack the time to actually participate, but cheer for them. Great going, people!

Here's a rather well written entry to their event, Blog-a-thon 2006.

Cleaning out my Closet

2006-03-03T07:41:00.000-08:00

Foreword: If you haven’t seen it already, don’t bother. You are never going to see it. Its never been plainer, more in-your-face. There is something happening to the collective consciousness (or the lack of it) even as you read this (or don’t). The last couple of weeks have had interesting, and I might add, important developments. Two of these have been “Rang De Basanti” the movie and the second, the slightly better directed, though more clichéd, Jessica Lall murder trial. Here is an attempt to conciliate the two, through the minds of two typical Indians of the age: the Optimist and the Cynic. What follows is a dialogue that often goes through in my mind, I don’t expect anybody to agree or disagree with it, its purely a selfish act of expurgating my mind.

(The scene is set in a typical coffee shop of today, complete with pretty girls, loud, ridiculous music, and of course, software professionals. The Cynic (C) and the Optimist (O) are with a mixed group, talking about the serious matters in life, namely salaries and the “system”. There are contributions to the dialogue from the others as well, but they are in support of one of the protagonists. Hence they have been clubbed together with what our leads have to say.

The current discussion is about the movie, “Rang De Basanti” and O is hopeful about more students emulating the movie’s actors while C can only offer a derisive laugh…)

O: Why do you laugh? Don’t you feel the same?

C: No. In case you haven’t noticed, I am not insane.

(The group guffaws)

O(agitated): On the contrary, you are insane! It is plainer than ever before. I am not saying that the movie will start churning out responsible citizens from our campuses like rabbits breeding in overdrive. Just that I expect some positive change from it. For, the movie is realistic and the events in it relevant. They will certainly strike a chord with people.

C: Listen dude, stop living in a freaking fairy tale. You know as well as I do, that nothing like that is going to happen. What will happen is that people like you and me will debate about the effect the movie will have. We’ll all collect in a bloody coffee shop drink exorbitantly expensive coffee, throw idealism around and go home and sleep, thinking tomorrow we’ll wake up in a bloody paradise.

O: That’s the trouble with you. You don’t want things to change. You’d rather go home and sleep. And no-one expects to wake up in a paradise. All I’m saying is it is possible, provided people have the right attitude. And yours is exactly the kind of attitude we do not need.

C: Yeah, given that an essential ingredient of my attitude involves a certain degree of intelligence. When you step out of those romantic novels you have been living in, you’ll realize that what I’m saying is true. How many people, do you think, would stop chasing their dreams, which incidentally, involve a comfortable life and three squares a day, to start this revolution of yours?

O: I am not talking about a damned revolution! I’m talking about a change that is needed: a gradual attitudinal shift. A shift whereby people take responsibility for their actions. Where they understand that they are being fooled by the politicians, that it is in their interest to protest, to take charge. I don’t want to start an armed revolution to bring the government to its knees and slaughter millions of innocents in the process. That will just set us back a few years. What I am talking about is people beginning to see through the political gimmicks of the so-called servants of the masses.

C: That’s all bullshit. You know for sure that is not going to happen. Why go far, take an example right here. You are going to leave this place and take a wrong turn at the traffic signal down the road and when the traffic policeman stops you, you are going to offer him Rs. 50 to not write you a challan. Don’t bloody talk about politicians and changing the world when you, yourself, are contributing to the corruption.

O: Good that you brought it up. That is another thing that will have to change and I’m sure people will be willing to forego such “privileges”.

C: Right, and Israel and Palestine will take to amiable co-existence and US, Iran, Iraq and Osama will sit together, playing monopoly. Don’t be so damn naïve. This isn’t a fucking beauty pageant. We will always continue to be corrupt if that offers the convenient way out. We will always denounce politicians and government servants but not cease to approach them for getting a wait-listed ticket confirmed or some tender awarded, illegally. And, guess what, this is not going to change, unless satyug loses its way and ends up here. Quite frankly, that’s not bloody likely.

O: I think you are being too fucking pessimistic. Things are changing and they’ll continue to do so. Corruption and related depravity is just an offshoot of poor economic conditions. With the current improvements in the economic indicators, that is going to change. Look at the changes. For instance, take the recent decision for a re-trial of the Jessica Lall case. The people involved are extremely powerful and they nearly succeeded in getting an acquittal. In the end, though, the High Court stepped in and the case is going to be reopened and I’m sure the guilty will be punished.

C: The last time the case took 7 years to be decided. This time it might take 17, who knows? Besides, I am not too sure I would want to testify against a guy who pulls out a gun in a freaking bar and then walks away from the courts, scot free!

O: That’s because all you want to do is criticize from a safe distance. You are too chicken to actually do something to make a difference. Its because of people like you that we are in this mess.

C: The only difference between you and me is that you go around sermonizing in public and I don’t. In all probability, the next time the case comes up for hearing, the judge will be offered an obscene amount of money for ruling in favour of the defendant. In that case, no matter how many witnesses you parade in front of him, I’m sure he’ll be able to think of some “reasonable doubt”.

O: So what you are effectively saying is that there is no way out. We are doomed to this hell for eternity?

C: Precisement, as Poirot would have observed. But wait, there is a way out. Desperate situations, remarked Captain Nemo of the Nautilus, warrant desperate measures. I can only offer one way of cleaning the system, as we call it. And that is to go to the electoral commission, get the results out for the last general elections, and identify the top five candidates in each constituency. Take each of them to a public square in the constituency and execute them. That will certainly put the fear of God in every single person that takes to politics.

O: Forget it! I never should have asked you for a solution. I knew you’d come up with something dumb, but failed to anticipate the colossus of your stupidity. Cant you bloody think of something constructive, for a change?

C: Dude, this is constructive! Think of the people who will then be left in politics. Agreed, by my mechanism, we’ll end up killing a percentage of innocent people, but then, that’s the price you pay for a clean house.

O: And how about the people who go about executing them? Wont they become the tyrants they have helped remove? It just changes the names, doesn’t eliminate the problem.

C: No, it does. Hear me out. This will be done by a group of extremely daring and selfless people, quite like the revolutionaries of our war of independence. Each of these will voluntarily join the “revolution” and a part of their duties towards it would be commit suicide once their job is over, thus eliminating the power centres that might have formed. The entire setup would have to just vanish from the face of the earth. Though they will be the biggest heroes the country has ever seen.

O: These daring people, where do you expect them to come from? Descend from the mountains in white clothing?

C: That’s the beauty: the “system” is already in the process of making them. So far it has been churning out beta-versions, which have not served the intent. But once things are right, such people will come from amongst us and, God willing, within us.

O: “In that heaven of freedom, My father, let my country awake”. And for the intermediate millennia before that happens, we’ll just get by thinking of the heroes that are to come. But till then, what are we going to do? Sit on our haunches, waiting for the avatars to some? I think we need to wake up and start changing ourselves to change the country. If each one of us starts to eschew corruption, however small, I am sure we wont need to wait for your Titans. We’ll have a self-adjusting system pretty soon.

(I got too sleepy after this. I don’t know if those guys reached a solution. My views? I’ll have to meet you in person to discuss those…)

Epilogue:

Quite frankly, I have no idea which of the two voices in my mind is right. I even don’t know which one I support. The only thing I know is that if these voices don’t stop soon enough, I am going to stop drinking coffee.

What Women Want

2006-01-15T04:33:00.000-08:00

Foreword: I am writing this piece after speaking to a female friend whose parents are looking for a match for her. She is an intelligent, witty and pretty girl with a mind of her own. Naturally, she is not very happy at the prospect of being married off to a “dumb Bong”, as she very eloquently described a suitor. Now, ordinarily, I would have chosen a time like this to remark, “I wish Bong men were half the men that Bong women are.” Despite being a Bong herself, I am sure she’d have shared the opinion. Now you know the kind of girl I am talking about. Lets call her Venus, for the purposes of this write-up. Being the friendly, helpful character that I am, I suggested that she discuss with me the kind of man she would like to get married to and I would compile it into this piece. I am writing here not only what she told me, but also what I could gather by her choice of words, tone, my knowledge of her personality and other non-verbal communication that it is possible to perceive over a BSNL/Reliance cell connection. Again, to make this piece more palatable and more "in league" with my writings, I have taken the liberty to add what I perceive as humour to it.

I have known Venus for around twelve years now and when she told me about her fear of getting married to the wrong guy, we drew up a list of what would really impress her in a guy. Though this sounds like a very personal preference, I am sure the ladies will be able to say “Me too” to most of what she likes. The gentlemen may treat this as another of those relationship essays and switch on the TV. In any case, this is what she had to say:

1. “Marriage is not about the wife donning the chef’s hat.” I have known some other girls to have this concern as well. They feel (and quite rightly, in my opinion) that a man should not consider his wife to be a five-star chef on call. The particular example that Venus gave me was being asked to prepare “Paneer Pakoras” at 11:00 in the night. She promised me that her response to that would be to throw the Yellow Pages at the guy and ask him to order some and while he was at it, order some Chicken Tikka for her too.

2. “Caring for the wife goes beyond buying her jewelry.” I am not too sure too many women will agree with her here. Anyway, the conclusion is that women want a relationship to extend as much in the intellectual plane as the materialistic, if not more. I have been told orchids can generally take a guy far with the right girl. Roughly translated, a new piece of jewelry does not compensate for your ogling at the dame on the next table on your anniversary.

3. “Intelligent conversation is a must.” I think I would not be way off the mark to suggest that this comes high on the list of any woman. Most modern women, who can use their heads for other purposes than merely as an object to poke under the hair dryer, would appreciate a well-rounded conversation laced with sparkling wit. Wit or no wit, a man who does not have a mind of his own is pretty much in a soup, because most women have an opinion about everything (and its mother-in-law).

4. “Being a wife is not a full time job.” It is important to allow personal space in any relationship. I have gathered that women need some personal time to unwind and just be themselves. This is a time when they would want their husbands to be supportive by disappearing from the face of the earth. At least temporarily. Venus put it as “He should know when to just let me be.” Very succinctly put.

5.“An uptight guy is a major turn-off.” Overly traditional, if orthodox, guys are certainly not welcome. If you are the kind of guy that has different standards for a wife and a girlfriend (i.e., if you are a regular guy), you had better not tell your wife that. This also includes consistency of outlook. It is all very well to talk about female empowerment and gender equality, but if you want to keep your married life happy, you better believe all of that.

These might look like just a list of five qualities that women want. Look closely and you will find that if you try to be all that, your wife may love you a lot, but other than that, life won't be much fun. But then again, that just might be the XY chromosome in me talking. I leave you with your free will, in case you want to get doomed.

On a more serious note, Indian men need to appreciate the fact their wives will never be the women their mothers were simply because they will never be the men that their fathers were. Times have changed and the family is no longer the responsibility of one person. It takes two to make this thing work. Unless, of course, you are Don Corleone.

So, if you are a man who uses his head for purposes other than as an object to shove under a helmet, before you marry the girl of your choice, you might want to thrash these notions out of her. Or you could just be a sissy and be all that…

Coming soon, "What Men Want", or that might well be a single 3-letter word.

Time, the Great Stealer

2005-11-20T04:56:00.000-08:00

Foreword
This piece is my tribute to life's sense of irony and humour, described quite succinctly by a certain Mr. Shakespeare, William:
"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me".

There comes a time in the life of a performer, when he realizes that despite being on stage, he is really an observer, and it is actually in the rings that the circus is going on. This realization does not come easily; it comes after great periods of intense reflection, when the Buddha manifests himself in his simple trick. A trick that he had conjured innumerable times, yet which now appears entirely novel to him. He begins to see the sleaziness of life as opposed to its perceived portentousness. And amongst all this, he realizes that the true villain is time. It is time that gives life its initial flightiness and quickly conceals it in a veil of all encompassing darkness. Not that either impression is correct: both, really, are projections from the observer's mind, on the screen of time.

How do I know this? Did the Buddha appear before me? Did he give me The Knowledge? To answer, I will have to tell you a story...
(To those who are wondering if I'm schizophrenic, let me put your fears to rest: most people who know me are of the opinion that I don’t even have enough of one personality, let alone multiple personalities.)

The story begins when I was involved in an unusually weighty intellectual exercise, viz., watching television. I was engrossed in watching the haphazard fractals of advertisements, which, quite irritatingly, were interrupted by regular features. Suddenly, the room turned fragrant, the lights grew soft and a gentle breeze started blowing in my 5th storey apartment with common walls on 3 sides. For Aishwarya Rai had appeared on screen, for a French cosmetic company, detailing the benefits of a particular hair colour. She ended her eulogy to the dye by saying, "And not a single gray". Snap! The air wasn't fragrant anymore, the midday sun was harsh and the gentle breeze just died. "Gray???" Aishwarya Rai, the epitome of beauty, timeless, ageless is now campaigning for hair dyes! It was then that I realized that time had struck. Ash was now 32, which is a perfectly ignoble age for any woman to be, more so if she looks like Aishwarya Rai and is single.

I thought I heard the villain laugh his hollow laugh and realization set in. The present would wilt, curl up and die, giving way to the future, which would really be the present of some arrogant young people. These, in turn, would be completely drunk on the power of their youth or illusions of it, before they lost hair and gained weight. It is a vicious circle! I could almost see the day when, as a pensioner on a park bench I hear the youngsters call to each other, "Watched a really crappy movie last night, some "Mohabbatein" or something, and guess what, my grandma says that Shahrukh Khan was a heartthrob!" and watch them roll on the ground, convulsed with laughter. I recall doing the same when my mom told me that Rajesh Khanna had been a superstar. This is the lone silver lining: the kids in the future (at least in my reverie) have excellent taste, for Shahrukh's popularity is certainly the only thing in the present I would like to conceal from the snobbish Martian lady, when she comes. Think about the irony of life, having ridiculed mom's generation for making Rajesh Khanna a superstar, I have to bear the cross of Shahrukh Khan's being a heartthrob.

All that would have been fine, had it been in the domain of SEP (Someone Else's Problem, originally defined by Douglas Adams in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'). In that case, like all self-respecting Indians who do not interfere in others' affairs, unless it involves a cheap story about their daughters, I would have stayed away from it. It was only when time started making my life miserable that I started perceiving its tortures. I had once been an innocent, good looking and intelligent young guy with a blossoming love life and a full head of hair. (Ok, stop the sniggering, I may not have been the other things, but I definitely had a full head of hair.) And today, time has tricked me into being, lets say, a person with not so full a head of hair and a paunch. I expect the entire intelligent fraction of the human race (which according to a recent estimate by Standard and Poor is .013%) to comprehend the magnitude of the blow dealt to me by time.

I have stoically borne a host of time's brutalities: some painful and some very painful. Most of you are already aware of the affair (or the lack of it) with Katrina and, on a separate occasion, Aishwarya; those being among the more painful ones. Despite all this, I do not have any hard feelings for time. I reckon you cannot afford to be belligerent, especially when time is not on your side.

Gifting (in) the Present

2005-11-15T03:38:00.000-08:00

Foreword: The huge populace that is a regular audience of my discourses has often accused me of escapism. I have been chastised, and quite rightly at that, for being frivolous in my writings. My formidable abilities which could have served the higher purposes of spreading consciousness in the youth of the nation and solve some really complicated problems like unemployment, female infanticide and baldness, are being frittered away in vulgar hedonism. Suitably admonished, I shall now endeavour to produce a piece of work to fulfill my social responsibilities.

In view of the festive season, with Diwali just having passed and my birthday and the new year coming up, here is a guide to help you buy gifts for me, er, your loved ones. (A couple of words about guides here- Any general guide that claims to help you deal with a problem and does not begin with a foreword ought to be avoided like a Leonardo Di Caprio movie. Also, a guide that attempts to provide a generic solution without severely qualifying its applicability is, unless authored by yours truly, pure and unadulterated bilge.)

Let me begin by first identifying the different kinds of people buying gifts for (Aha!!). Writers of insufficient intellect have often qualified gift recipients into two classes: those that gave you gifts and those that didn’t. Obviously, only one kind should make it to your recipient list! The correct classification, and this has been arrived at after reading millions of intellect building magazines like "The Penthouse: Annual Collectors' Edition" and "Hustler", is: Men and Women. Yes, the word is out and it has been established, to the degree of certainty allowed by quantum mechanics, that the sexes are in fact different and have different preferences.

Let us begin (as is customary if you intend to be politically correct and avoid being branded an MCP, a misogynist, an uncivilized brute and other terms that correctly describe the modern male, metrosexual men: you are not counted) with the women. What is it that the true woman of substance likes to receive as a gift? This is a question that has puzzled mankind for centuries, ever since Eve chose a flower over Adam’s Smooth Round Stone Attached to a Piece of String. What practical purpose does a flower serve as opposed to the said device of unprecedented genius? Nothing. And that is the answer! A gift to a woman must necessarily be useless: completely devoid of any intrinsic value, never lending itself to any chore that you might need help to perform. This is why a new microwave, while perfectly sensible, scores far below the Queer Shaped Fragile Glass Tumbler Containing Vaguely Coloured Liquids as an anniversary gift.

Now, if you are a male who has tried to gift a woman a scale model of a monster truck, or a battery powered double chain chainsaw, or a flamethrower, you are probably shaking your head so hard, you’ll get spondilitis. I once read an article somewhere that had found out after a global survey that the most loved gifts one festive season had been: a) Scented handmade bees wax candles with visible portions of bee poop still in them and b) Godzilla sized shears with serrated blades and bakelite handles. If you can correctly identify which set of people from the classification above loved which gift, you are beginning to get the hang of the thing.

If you thought figuring out what to gift women is simple, hang on. Its even simpler gifting things to men. Step one would be to choose anything that has the words, "Assembly Required" in the name. Other hot phrases include "Magnum", "Outdoor use only", "Personal Injury Hazard", "Telescopic Rifle" and "Playboy". Once you have these items lying in front of you (and are receiving appreciative glances from the men in the store, who, in turn, are wondering how lucky your boyfriend/husband is and if murdering him will make you theirs) you need to think like a man, which involves salivating at the sight of anything with blades, triggers, wheels and breasts, and pick ALL of the items in front of you.

If you are skeptical about it, let me allay your fears. I once got invited to a colleague's one year old son's birthday party. Since there was a woman in the group invited, we decided to get a gift for him. We drove to a toy store and while the lady in question looked for stuff that either threatened to be intellectually stimulating (alphabet pianos, lettered blocks and the like) or were plain dumb (suitable for nine months or older), I picked up the best gift possible. A radio controlled Red Ferrari with a cannon on top(5 years or older) and a toy rifle(9 years or older, Personal Injury Hazard). Of course, she was horrified but the kid loved it and I am the only one from office he still remembers. His mother (and my colleague) has often seen me and a couple of like minded friends gushing about the Harley Davidson S1600 and fails to understand the powerful emotions it inspires in us. But, like I said, the kid got the point.

If you are thinking the gift I chose for the kid was suitable for one year olds, you got it wrong lady! Those are things any male outside the womb and the grave will absolutely LOVE. And while we are at it, adding a Lara Croft figurine (carrying an Uzi submachine gun, a Kalashnikov and a missile launcher) to the sports car and rifle will make it even better received. Of course, if all of those, Lara Croft included, could be for real...

Physiology of a Love Affair

2005-11-02T06:17:00.000-08:00

Foreword
In keeping with the tradition started with my last post, I will now have forewords to all my posts. Since I didn't have anything more concrete to say, I'll end the foreword with that. And yes, while I am at it, I'll be trying out a new style of writing, quite like ventriloquism, where a sock puppet "talks" to the performer, comments, criticizes etc. Here, the sock-puppet-speak is mentioned as asides (in parentheses).

Prologue
Most people who know me are already on the floor, laughing and rolling, possibly in vomit. They laugh at my arrogance, of trying to write a piece titled "P. of a L.A." They feel that I am perhaps ill-equipped to discuss the topic. They feel I do not have the required experience. But the trained mind laughs at such obvious logical fallacies. The t. m. discerns the fault in the very foundation that this reasoning is based on. For the lesser mortals, let me vault into an unnecessarily verbose and excruciatingly boring explanation. To be a heart surgeon, one need not necessarily have undergone a cardiac-bypass, or a valve replacement, or an angioplasty, or something equally horrendous sounding. To be a veterinary doctor, one need not be a dog: whether neutered or otherwise, a cat, a canary, or any other animal it is now fashionable to domesticate. Likewise, one need not ever have had a love affair to write about one with absolute certainty. It is here that individuals with extremely high intellectual capacities(similar to those of retarded dodos), such as yours truly, utilize their brilliance to serve mankind. They "think out" the actual mechanics involved, assuming that there are, infact, mechanics involved. Even if there are no mechanics involved, we still think of something. You don't expect the crème de la crème of human intelligence to falter because of such laughable problems, do you?
(Of course there are no asides yet. The sock puppet(SP) speaks only in the real stuff, moron)

The Real Stuff
Let me start off by specifying the immediate need for this article. Following my immensely popular (SP: yeah, right!) "The Complete Idiot's...." I was inundated (SP: blasphemy!) with calls from damsels in distress. They wanted something similar for womankind. Also, there were the usual feminist associations who, having never been picked up(SP: Lesbians!), completely hated the idea of someone else having fun(SP: Typical feminine jealousy.) and therefore asked me to take the stuff off my blog and issue heartfelt apologies for having insulted:
1. Womankind
2. Morons
3. Metrosexual men
4. The Red-Assed Baboon
5. The Republic of Dyspepsia
Of course this is only a representative list, the real thing contained some really obnoxious entries, like "Intelligent Men". Finally, after some careful persuasion (SP: And an impromptu pamphlet on "The Extremely Intelligent Woman's Guide to Hooking Obscenely Wealthy and Equally Dim-witted Men"), they relented and let the modern classic reside on my blog. But not before they made me promise to write a piece on honourable love affairs(SP: He got Community Service, actually). Ergo, I am writing perhaps the first treatise on the physiology of love affairs.

Most affairs of the heart begin with a rather funny kind of feeling in the solar plexus, quite like heartburn, actually. Particularly, the kind of heartburn that you get after consuming rather large portions of dairy products. The trick lies in identifying this feeling. Most learned men go, "This is not acidity. This is not gastroenteritis. This is not dysentery. It must be love!" (SP: Bring on the Nobel!) Following the ingenious diagnosis, it is time to take steps to further the cause of the epidemic. The first step would be to determine the causative: a cure for Tuberculosis could never have been found had it not been known that the disease is caused by Streptococcus. Likewise, in matters of the heart, one must take the pains of ascertaining the accurate cause of the ailment. Having established the real reason, the next step is to communicate to it the effect that it has been producing. Usually this is done through a mutual friend. Fate has a way of dropping mutual friends by the dozen on unsuspecting people. They would best be advised to keep the number of said mutual f's to a minimum. Selecting the least moronic m. f., one then endeavours to convey to the object of interest the state of one's internals and the effect it has been having on them. Or, in some cases, one waits for the pathogen to initiate the contact. This is particularly true of all the love affairs of yore which have not succeeded. Once a communication channel has been established, it is generally seen that one of the parties quickly expresses inability of continued interaction owing to censorship by progenitors. At this stage, the other party, equally quickly, makes vague threats of self-mutilation in response to which one or both parties exercise their vocal chords and/or tear ducts. By now the affair has probably matured enough to withstand each others dietary habits and therefore progresses from fungus lined nooks to deserted food plazas in terms of location. It remains in this stage for quite some time, gestating till one or both parties get accustomed to the stimulus provided by the other and a state of ennui sets in. If the boredom is enough, the love affair ends immediately, in marriage. Otherwise, if the parties are not barbaric enough, they simply part ways and agree never to see each other again. They then move on till they experience the next case of heartburn. Statistics reveal that the people in the second group are avid followers of “The Complete Idiot’s….”
(SP: Bravo!)

The Complete Idiot's Guide to Picking Up Women

2005-08-11T07:13:00.000-07:00

a.k.a.
Womanizing for Dummies

Foreword
None of my writings have ever had a foreword. This departure from the trend is only a last ditch effort to be taken as a writer of serious capabilities. That being said, most forewords actually provide some insight into the material at hand. Likewise, this one will, too. The discerning reader will realize (and the impolite one will interrupt, vocalizing the realization) what a tough task this is. For, when the entire text contains hardly a whit of information, impregnating the foreword with copious meaning is arduous, at best. Fortunately, yours truly rises to the occasion (as always) to make a momentous fool of himself.

I will cut the verbiage there and come straight to the heart of the matter. My foreword will discuss the title: Why did I choose to call this piece "The Complete....aka...Dummies"? (Frankly, I did that because I wanted to and didnt give a hoot in hell what anyone thought but I cant put that in a foreword, can I?) This modern classic (forgive me for being presumptuous, but genius must have its licenses) is aimed at Complete Idiots. Do I hear a "Why?"? Hell, I dont; but that doesnt stop me from acting like one of those "exalted" beings who can hear the cosmos fart. Okay, so this is aimed at complete idiots otherwise known as dummies because I dont expect anyone with an IQ in the high 2-digits to take tips on womanizing from me. Lets not go into the details(since I have always maitained a dignified silence about my amorous adventures and the objects thereof): suffice it to say that I have not tested these out well. With that, O audacious traveller, I bid thee good luck.

Chapter I: Drawing the lines

This tome being targeted at section of the population that doesnt quite figure on the intellectual number line, I'll begin with the basics. For a successful pickup, the most important ingredient is the person you want to pick up; the quarry, to use a politically incorrect expression. I must warn all readers that is the single most important requisite. Without a target, even the most acurate shooters in the world miss the, well, target. So please ensure that the object of your moronic affection is indeed in earshot, when you deliver the killer pickup line. Corollarily, please ensure that the woman understands the language you speak. A note, here, to the BPO industry employees: please lose that ridiculous accent your company forced you to put on. Also, bury those ear rings, bangles (whatever), get a haircut and shave (including that thing on your chin you think makes you look like David Beckham. Why anyone would want to look like David Beckham, completely beats me.).
Secondly, it is imperative to focus on the task at hand. It is not opportune to ogle at the girl on the next table whose nipples are poking out through her dress while serenading your "catch". You should postpone the serenading till you've had an eyeful - no point being so damn stuck up about it.

Chapter II: Lining Up the Troops

Read Chapter I first, moron! (God, one really cant be too careful when dealing with these dimwits.) This chapter will explain the niceties associated with actually making the kill, throwing the dice, sil vou plait.
The primary consideration in springing it on her is the choice of venue. Choose the wrong venue and all is lost, much like the horse (the one that was lost for the kingdom or the other way round, I forget which.). Most battles in history have been lost because of a poor choice of venue. Had Napolean avoided Waterloo would it have proved to be his Waterloo? Besides, what self respecting general chooses to fight in a place called Waterloo?
The working rules would, then, be:
1. Avoid all places that have Water or Loo in the ir names. (One cant be too careful, with history having a tendency to repeat itself.)
2. No, the Dentist's waiting room, the printer room at office and the queue outside a public toilet are not good venues.
3. A moderately populated coffee house gets my vote. You dont want too many people watch you make an ass of yourself.

Chapter III: The Charge

This is a very sensitive area. A good pickup line almost always ensures a smooth pick up. Successful pickup lines have but one characteristic: they are successful. So, do NOT try to be original. If you had the faculties necessary, you wouldnt be reading this crap. Every time you see a friend who got lucky, ask him for his line. Watch out for a devilish gleam in his eye while he gives it to you. If you see the gleam, forget the line. Otherwise, remember to use it in its entirety.
Note: You cannot make one line by combining the funny parts of two lines.
Note 2: Invoke all your gods while actually delivering it.

Chapter IV: The Retreat(to be read only after an attempt has been made)

All right, at least you had some good food/coffee/fun, right? Dont lose heart or interest, it happens to the best of us. Tomorrow, we start from Chapter I again.

Note: You do this EVEN if you nail your quarry.

Thats when I carried you...

2005-08-09T22:14:00.000-07:00

(Not original, got it from a friend)
Software version of famous footprint quote...

Another day a S/w Programmer was having a similar conversation with his PM when his whole project flashed before his eyes as a series of
footsteps on the sands of time. He saw that there were two pairs of footprints, but during the most difficult times in the project there were only one set of footprints.

He asked his PM "You said you will be with me throughout the project, but why have you deserted me during the most critical times of the project??" to which the PM answered "Son, I did not desert you, I was always with you...you see only one set of footprints because during those difficult times, I was sitting on your head!!"

Reminiscing...

2005-07-22T09:46:00.000-07:00

Its been two years since I entered the workforce. Yes, on 3rd July 2003, I started on the bottom rung of the corporate ladder and have been there for two whole years. As I look back now, it doesnt seem that big a deal anymore, its just a job! But I would be lying if I said I haven't learned anything in this time. I certainly have! Here are my "learnings" (which is manager-speak for the valuable insignt one gains the hard way):

1. Work place stress is real. Somehow, I believed that "Stress" is really a monster that thrives only in the US of A. That it cannot survive in India. I acknowledge my folly now. Yes, like it or not, stress is indeed real! And no if you are not in a job, dont even bother trying to understand, you wont.

2. Road rage is real. Every morning, when ideally, one should be at peace, I think the most violent thoughts about the bloody buggers on the road. The shuttle service drivers receive regular requests to perform dangerous gynnaecological feats with their mothers from me and I begin my day with murder on my mind.

3. There are no good people and no bad people in the world. Every body is a shade of gray. Sure, I had been told that before, but you dont really believe it unless you see it for yourself. Quite like not believing your mom when she tells you that you get burnt when you play with matches.

4. Work sucks. No matter how advanced the technology you work on. It falls prey to the monotony of routine.

5. There is no such thing as a mature man, or woman for that matter. It just that some are not openly childish.

6. Experience at a job is way more important than natural ability. That is why a mule is better at carrying load than an Olympic powerlifter.

7. The world is full of idiots. I dont need to go into that one, do I?

8. Having a support system is important. You need family and friends you can turn to for support. They may not understand the technicalities of a problem, but they can help you cope. No online chat relationships do not make it to this category.

9. There is nothing you cannot do. Absolutely nothing. Being pigheaded certainly helps in this way.

10. Office politics is almost always ineffectual in any reasonable organization. But it sure is entertaining.

11. Nobody at office cares about you as a person. Its only the job you do. So dont expect any miracles because of your "personal" relations. You are only a job code.

12. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone. The important thing is to conceal or transfigure it well enough to make it sound either like a systemic failure or a freak accident. Still, acknowledge your mistakes to yourself and learn a lesson.

13. Always be honest to yourself. Put on an act in public, project yourself as the next Jack Welch/Bill Gates/Warren Buffet, but remember that inside, you are only yourself.

14. Its either interesting or its work. It cannot be both. Dont kid yourself into looking for that mix. Do your job and get the hell out of there.

Well, thats it. I may have missed a few but this will have to do. I dont expect anybody to take a lesson from these (for I wouldnt have, either) but you'll find that you agree with most of what I say.

What do you want to do in life?

2005-06-26T05:57:00.000-07:00

Pretty deep, eh? Actually, I was watching tv the other day when a sitcom trailer came up: for a show called "Zoe" (pronounced Zoe-y). From what I could gather from the trailer, its about this young female called, surprise, Zoe. Zoe wants to go to a top university and major in Psychology, after which she wants to marry and underwear model.
Pretty well thought out, what? Just got me thinking, dont we all want that? Personally, I would settle for a PhD in Psychology, followed by a holy union with Giselle Bundchen/Heidi Klum/Elle Macpherson...How about you?

Irregular? Huh, me?

2005-06-16T23:43:00.000-07:00

Have been irregular and will be till 25th June. See ya then

Steve Jobs' speech

2005-06-16T23:38:00.000-07:00

Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.

This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

My Articles (contd...)

2005-06-12T04:27:00.000-07:00

Midnight’s Children?

Some lives are connected in a way that scarcely meets the eye. Infact these ways rarely see the light of the day or are seen by those not directly connected to the lives in question. The connection is not as complex as the last sentence suggests. It is actually far more complex than that. At times the connection is so peculiar that one of the parties concerned: a connectee, himself is unaware of the bond.

But the tie is very much there, intertwining the two destinies like a twisted pair cable: one around the other and the other round the one. This was a good opporunity for using some of my newly acquired(?) French: but having had the thought after putting that down (an afterthought?), I will say it now- one around the other and vice-versa. Voila!! (That’s two!!!). Take for example, your run of the mill The Prince and the Pauper kind of stories. This is the case of a bilateral, bidirectional and hence bijective kind of a connection where each is influenced by the other. Such cases are full of poetic justice in the sense that both parties have the consolation of having caused exactly the same amount of distress to the other. Being such a hideous concept and above all having a romantic edge to it, the subject has been dealt with in considerable and- one might add- laboured detail by Bollywood and other sources of infallible knowledge.

Carrying the sense of poetic justice, described at the beginning of this article, a little forward, we shall discuss the other twin of the bijective connection. Decidedly distressing and poignantly picturesque, such a connection is not the comfortable symbiosis characterized by its twin. It is quite a parasitic relationship in which the carrier is always under attack by the vector. And the sinister part is that the vector has no idea of what it is doing to the carrier. Usually the vector is unaware of the existence of the carrier.

I hear voices questioning the veracity of the above statement. The objective “How can A exploit B and be unaware of B’s existence?”, the intellectual “This is clearly a contradiction: check your premises”, the factual “The guys hopping mad”, the sympathetic, “One would have thought such diseases affect only the genius. Poor guy, he could barely scrape past being classified a retard.” Voices as these frequently cloud out the truth, but not this time. Truth shall prevail. It will come out like the sun before or after the storm, I forget which. Not that it has any bearing on the fact that truth will infact be known.

Somebody once said, “A picture is worth a thousand words” (my art teacher did have a couple of thousands of not so glowing words about the pictures I used to draw: but that’s beside the point) and accordingly I am going to give you a picture where such a relationship does exist. Yes, ye of little faith, open your eyes and see the light. As a perfect example of this relatoinship where one party while being unaware of the other’s existence, not only harms it but almost drives it to the point of extinction, I present Salman “Shirtless” Khan and your truly. Hush! Followed by guffaws. Now indignation. “I never heard such rot before.” “Salman wouldn’t even know if this bugger exists.” “Bloody name droppping @#$#@$.” To this I only have to say Q.E.D. This is exactly the point I was trying to make. I do not contest the fact that bare bodied Khan is not aware of the entry in the municipal records that announces the arrival of my being in God’s world. (It would seem not being a black buck or a pedestrian on the streets of Mumbai has its advantages.) I merely state that despite his apparent and obvious ignorance of the existence of the apple of my mother’s eye, S.K. spares no trouble- including blank calls, black eyes, and dire consequences, to ruin my love life. Silence, stunned but shorter this time, and laughter, much louder than before. “Salman! Does he have a dearth of women that he would consider inrerfering with this non-entity’s life?” “I am waiting…” “Yeah right! And my Dad’s superman: only he wears the underwear inside.” Giggle giggle, hem hem, haw haw, ha ha, HA HA…

To this, like before, I can only say, exactly my point! Does that pedestrian crushing, shirt tearing black buck shooting, obscene mass of muscle have a dearth of silly women? Why the hell does he have to go woo every single female I have eyes on? Sorry about the outburst: just a case of pent up fury forcing its way out.

Lets look at it objectively. Perhaps some explanation is in order too.

Cut to circa 1994. The year when Indian beauty stepped out from behind the veils and into the limelight to dazzle the world with its sparkling display. The year when yours truly entered his teens. The year when Aishwarya Rai became the queen of the world and and my heart. Not that her newfound kingdom had me enchanted, for I was smitten from the days of “Hi, I am Sanjana. Got another Pepsi?” Slowly but steadily she had come to occupy most of the space in my heart, the rest being devoted to its unromantic circulatory obligations.

I watched with an avid interest as she rejected a whole bunch of suitors, led my Mr Hot Male Sabir Bhatia himself. I knew then, that this was the genuine woman of substance, the lady who was the lamp- of my life. With each passing day I grew more and more confident that she wouldn’t fall for the male equivalent of a brainless bimbo. And then it happened. My goddess fell, and for the worst specimen of the male of the species. You guessed it right, she said “hum dil de chuke sanam” to the simian Salman Khan! The guy who cant talk, cant act, cant do anything right- apart from, may be, take off his shirt (I wouldn’t be too sure of this either, who knows why he doesn’t wear one?), is a disgrace to the human race in general and the male sex in particular.

How could she? My tender heart broke. I cleaned up the space she had once occupied and returned it to its erstwhile owners: the aorta and the cross pulmonary artery. I had loved and lost- and lost to the most hopeless competitor in human history, someone I would consider eligible for a ‘Doodh Bhaat’ in an IQ test.

I put that down to the eccentricities of women. Thought she would have felt protective towards such an obvious moron and hence had taken on the responsibility to help him grow some wits. Of course I was quite off the mark there, as history tells us, and the bugger went on not only to break up with her but also most of her. Since I had already decided to have nothing to do with the affair anymore, I did just that: nothing.

Meanwhile, insignificant developments kept occurring in my life. I had, by this time, successfully cleared the tenth and the twelfth standards and was at the receiving end of a technical education when ‘she’ decided to enter my life. Well she didn’t exactly walk in to my life like the night, to take a cue from Lord Byron, she kind of danced her way into it. For the first time that I saw her was in an ad for some television. I don’t think the ad quite achieved the result it would have, had a less enchanting model been used. I can guarantee that right through the ad none of the male viewership would even remotely have cared what product was being sold- let alone what brand. Katrina Kaif had stolen my heart. She was beauty itself, oozed oomph and had just the right amount of brains- not too much and not too little. She was the love of my life, simple. So much so that I sat through the entire two and odd hours of Boom, to show the world how much torture I was willing to undergo- all for her sake.

As she sashayed down the ramps in numerous fashion shows and appeared as ‘Goddess’ on Channel V, I began to give her the same place in my heart that I had once given to Aishwarya. But then, this was not to be. Sadist Salman of the bulging biceps and busted brains had other ideas. After having completely wrecked my previous romance, he came back to play the villain in my current one. I recently learnt from trusted sources that Mr Spoilsport is going to marry Katrina.

Having presented all the evidence, I submit that the only conclusion that can be drawn from these is that Salman Khan has some kind of a connection with my life. And this connection cannot exactly be termed a genial one. Now I am not sure if Salman is aware of this or has the mental faculties necessary for reaching to this conclusion, but it certainly seems to me that he deliberately picks the women I am attracted to.

However, I have thought of the perfect plan to hand out my own bit of justice. Justice that’s so poetic, it should be sung. Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby profess my love for Mayawati…

Articles

2005-06-12T04:26:00.000-07:00

The loves of my life

Life has been pretty kind to me. It has rarely given me a chance to complain. It has quite been a most charming hostess, catering to most of my whims. But finicky as I am, I do manage to notice the lone stain on the tablecloth. The French call it amour (and I am told, they are guys who invented it) and I am sure even the Greeks have a word for it (I mean it would look pretty weird to use your fingers to show what you mean, especially in public.), though I do not remember it. However, learned friends tell me that “Durex” suffices for most languages.

Not that I am a sex starved, wanton male in pursuit of anything that has a slit that drips: in fact, I am quite the gentleman Jeeves would have been proud to serve. But I have had this rather predictable end to most of my amorous endeavours.

I have always been an early starter- what with the healthy doses of Bollywood ‘entertainers’ I have fed on- and consequently, had my first real serious interest in the female of the species at the ripe old age of five. As I enjoyed the company of my beloved and her group, I realized that unless I give them a pretty solid and valid reason for wanting to hang out with me, I might as well count my romance as “having lost the spark”. Being the puniest guy around also didn’t help matters too much. Then there was also the problem of my friends indulging in the “Johnny’s got a girlfriend” chant and I had to make the right noises to please the brotherhood.

Acknowledging, that the subject in question- yours truly, is quite extraordinary and has been called a genius by people other than his mother, one still has to admit that the problems at hand were, shall we say, insurmountable in the wake of his years?

(Purely for the record, so that posterity does not accuse us of misrepresenting facts or concealing evidence, I feel it pertinent to state that I did try to invent some story about a rather dirty looking character called Ali wanting to thrash the living daylights out of my fair maidens. How much of it they bought, I cannot say, but it did provide my sinking ship with a few grammes of M-Seal. This effort sadly bombed when the bugger Ali refused to show any indications of his hideous designs. Having established our sincerity with history, lets move on.)

Then came the time when having reached nine years of age, I found myself another object of affection. This woman (I feel she, at age nine, justified my use of the word, particularly after having watched and admired Al Pacino in “The Scent of a Woman”) was most sought after, though these seekings were hardly advertised. I had a distinct advantage over my competitors in that I had the guts and the opportunity to speak to her. This was due to the fact that (at the risk of sounding immodest) being a reasonable student at school, my homework had a pretty impressive clientele. Even the most dimwitted idiots among you would have figured by now that I supplied my angel with my notes and that it didn’t do my chances any harm. Again, to be fair to history, I will have to mention that it was she who made the first ‘move’. On the covers of one of my notebooks, she wrote a little ‘Thank You’ note. After that, the notes became a regular feature. One of her friends was our sole confidante in the whole business. Not that the notes ever got round to saying anything more than ‘thank you’ (technically, this is incorrect as I distinctly remember a few of her notes mentioning that she was sending her eraser therewith, which I was to use to rub the message of gratefulness off) or I ever managed to pen my feelings in my most romantic fashion for a formal proposal. Like all sweet things, my little affair died of its own accord and was certainly not helped by the fact that my angel was shifted to another section and had no more use of my class notes.

Purely for purposes of maintaining the absolute truthfulness of this account, I wish to state that between the ages of five and nine I did develop an interest in another girl. This female was the class monitor -together with yours truly. This love story ended with her having caught chicken pox (The disease finally caught up with me some 15 years later). Like they say, out of sight, out of mind.

Coming back to my tenth year on the planet, this was to hold the most important learning of my life. This year I got attracted to another girl. The only difference was that she was a better student than I was. By this time I had committed the ultimate childhood sin of wearing high power spectacles which made me look owlish. Now, some people have gone on record to say that I have a predisposition to being owlish and some even say that I have a natural talent for it- but I choose to ignore such malicious comment: after all who the hell is writing this shit? Anyway, so this girl is smarter than I am and she’s the class teacher’s pet and I have fallen terribly out of favour with the same teacher pretty recently- now doesn’t that look good? But wait: now she goes and scores 709 to my 618 in the first term. That should have been enough to make me fall out of love with her but no: love makes us stupid and hence I persisted (I scored 714 to her 715 the next term) and learnt the most valuable lesson of my life. Never fall in love with a girl who’s smarter than you. With that I changed schools and left an entire choir of angels behind who, admittedly, weren’t singing paeans to me.

The new school was quite bigger than the previous one and again, running the risk of sounding immodest, I state –absolutely dispassionately- that I was noticed. Here I lay low for a year before hopelessly falling for a female who, for a change, was also attracted towards me. I know, because there were rumours about ‘us’ in the grapevine and if you cant trust the grapevine, what can you trust? She even paid me a compliment about my (school uniform) shirt (not that there was anything wrong with it: didn’t it have buttons and sleeves?) in the presence of a classmate who later dated her.

That was all about all the times that I have been in love. Having put everything on paper and in perspective, I guess theres no point complaining about the stains on the tablecloth when you’ve been spilling the curry. But let me tell you and you might as well call me an optimist, that theres always a chance of finding a vase of just the right size that covers the stain exactly. Until that day, let me wait in the wings for her to take my breath away.

P.S.: As most of you would notice, this account has no mention of a certain daughter of a certain carpet merchant cum oil baron in Dubai. This is because, she’s already married and pregnant and being the gentleman that I am, I will not let her name pass my lips. But I end the reservation there: at the name. For any other part of her, my lips are ready and waiting.

Lets see....

2005-06-10T07:21:00.000-07:00

What next? Well, since I spend quite a lot of my time yapping like crazy, I decided to put those on paper, figuratively, that is, and hence dished out all the crap that I had written... Feast your eyes.

Let there be my blog...

2005-06-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

And so my blog was born and there was much rejoicing...