Just another attempt at beating Writer’s Block

I leave in the afternoon for a location that shall remain unnamed. All I can say is I’m dressing warm. I’m pretty paranoid about saying stuff online that might be in someway linked to my professional identity. The US is not India; one wrong move without realizing it, and you can be the target of a lawsuit. So as is usual, the folks who sign off my paycheck shall remain anonymous on this blog.

Oh, it snowed today. My first proper snow. There was a couple of inches on Christmas Eve when I visited my cousin in Dallas two years ago, but that melted rather quickly. I was however stricken by a most horrible bout of inflamed sinuses that I couldn’t bear to step out. I just opened my window and made a tiny snowman out of the five inches of snow on my window sill. And guess what, it’s just like the frost that covered the freezers of the ’90s.

I have been stuck in the most horrible location. High rent, matchbox-sized accommodation, and kitchen space with no place to unpack the meagre set of utensils you have accumulated over three years. And a shark of a woman who rented this space to me. All I can say is I’m superglad she is in India and I never had to meet her face to face. Sample this.. one day me and the other subleasee come home to no Internet. I didn’t bother much beyond checking the router and modem and checking if everything is plugged in; I had a series of phonecalls to make to family and friends I hadn’t talked much to. But the following morning, I was at the end of my tether. Asked the other girl if she knew who the ISP was. She said she didn’t know. So after a lot of number-getting from Tuna Fish, I called every ISP Tuna could think of, to ask if they provided Internet to our house. Finally, it turned out that our Internet had been turned off as the bills were not paid. Oh, well, how much could it be… I asked for the bill so that I could make a payment. I was quoted an astronomical amount which I assumed was in Zimbabwean currency. But no, no such luck. When I asked the other girl about it, she said how could that be, the Shark has been taking money from all of us every month to pay for the Internet. Turns out, the Shark hadn’t done so for three months. When we called her, she was firm in saying she had paid. After a lot of cold glares, I woke up the following morning to the bills paid.

Thankfully, I soon found another place to move to, with significantly lower rent and larger space and heck, larger closet space. And a room that can house both a table and a bed, unlike where I’m living now. Such a relief.

I’ve started yet another fulltime job. I’ve rather liked my time there till now. And that’s all I shall say about it here.

I work in Midtown Manhattan. That’s home to some of the most awesome restaurants I’ve eaten at till now. The Indian food tastes Indian. The Mongolian food is amazing. You find vegan Korean food, how amazing is that! Oh, and a fully vegetarian Indian restaurant! The Mexican is not bad, and the Italian is simply subtle as it should be. The street vendors have simply amazing falafel-on-rice. Why, even something as lame as the tofu sandwiches at the delis here are amazing. This seems to be the best place to be vegetarian. Or foodie.

I’m also quite impressed by how easy Manhattan is to navigate around. And how busy the subway is at all hours. Even the folks busking seem amazing at their music. Some of them are unimaginably bad, but most of those I’ve heard for a few minutes at Grand Central and Times Square are really good. Their music is a good start to the day, be it gangsta rap or smooth jazz.

I’ve also gotten quite interested in improvisational comedy or Improv. The sort of stuff Whose Line Is It Anyway is all about…. you’re given a random suggestion, mostly from the audience and you and the others on stage just make a scene up as you go along. Also because Tina Fey started off as an improv’er. I’ve found quite a few spaces with tons of free and cheap improv and standup shows. The one closest to where I work is The Pit (People’s Improv Theater). I hang around there as much as I can and watch everything I can. They also have quite a fine bar slash coffee shop. The folks are friendly and the bartenders and staff are rather fun. They also have improv jams. So many different people come for those, and take part, from fourteen-year-old fresh-faced children to pervy senior citizens to really funny Pam Anderson lookalikes to a Lankan couple visiting from Beijing.

I too join in. I like the anonymity of it all, being in a city where hardly anyone knows me, and can be anyone I want, make as weird jokes as I like fully knowing no one will remember me two acts hence. I like just blending in and having fun, irrespective of how the emcee trips over my name, irrespective of all the other brown men (haven’t found any brown women) play only Achmed-type roles far as I’ve seen. Half my time on stage, I can’t think of what to say, and the remaining half, I’m too amazed by the kickass stuff the others come up with, that I’m giggling hard. I find my pun-type jokes are more suited for being read than heard, but maybe I should try phrasing them better.

There was this rather weird incident last night at the Improv Open Jam. There were two professionals who were sort of driving the whole thing and guiding us along, and doing a rather good job. There were quite a lot of group skits that were getting done, most if not all of it really funny. After all of us were done, there were still a few minutes left. So they started this game, where two people start on a scene, preferably doing something with exaggerated actions, when one of the others on stage says ‘Freeze’, when the two in the scene freeze, and then that person takes over the pose of one of the frozen folk, and continues the scene, hopefully with something completely different.

A Pam Anderson-lookalike woman got stuck in a position where there was another player standing behind her, his arms around her waist. And everyone began saying ‘Freeze’, taking over the other player’s position, not really attempting to change position all that much. It was just a little uncomfortable until this lecherous old man came onto the scene. Within a few seconds, the professionals realized he was being a jerk, and froze him, and asked me to take his place. Just as I was attempting to switch to a position facing the lady, I got frozen out. Thankfully the game ended soon. Ick. Gross.

I need to check out the Magnet Theater and Upright Citizens Brigade as well. I’d love to try classes for improv. They are sort of pricey, but not totally unaffordably so. There are quite a few free classes, too.

There’s plenty more to do. Especially if you have some sort of disposable income. But even otherwise, there’s plenty of free stuff that happens.  There’s so much that goes on in New York City. It is truly a wonderful place to live in. The people aren’t as stylish on average compared to Southern California. The pollution and weather are downright horrible. But NYC has soul oozing out of its every bit. I hated this place when I landed here,  but I think I’ll grow to like it.

I always love the anonymity that comes with a new place, before I slot myself into doing only certain things and develop mental blocks against some things and people. I love this initial stage where I’m just drifting along. But I’d also love to find one place for the next year or so at the very least and feel comfortable enough to buy heavy furniture…. that gives some sort of mental peace and a feeling of settling down. I’d love to find my own house which I don’t have to share with anyone except maybe close family and friends when they come a-visitin’, when I won’t have to ask roommates for permission to have people over, or when I don’t have to worry about all my kitchen accidents because I’ll clean up eventually anyway.

It’s also great to work with people who know the same Reddit memes as you do, and who also share the passion for the same technologies as you do. It’s even better to be able to learn from brilliant people, be it by asking them questions or even just listening in on their conversations with each other.

I have big plans professionally, and also with my personal and social lives, and about the whole work-life balance thing. If there was one thing gradschool taught me, it is about how important it is to live a little so that you don’t lose perspective on life.

I miss friends from my old life. Everything fun feels like it would have been that much better had this or that person been enjoying it with me. When I pass by a random bar or a restaurant, I want to just whip out my phone and call a friend and say “Maga, ee jaaga sakkathagidiyansatte, bartiya?”… but that will take a while longer, probably.

I don’t feel much nostalgia for my past. I don’t frankly care anymore. You know all those people who told you your undergrad days are the best ever days of your life? They are dead wrong. Life only gets way better. With a little more money and experience, it’s hard to believe things don’t get better. Backpacking never turned less fun with a few extra bucks. Drinking sessions don’t get any less crazy with better quality non-hangover-inducing alcohol, that you can drink all night even if you have a meeting with the team the next morning. True, you don’t have the wide variety of experiences you shared in the hostel, but you also don’t have to put up with heavy metal playing in the next room the night before an exam. The people your age start dressing way better and more elegant, and suddenly become easier on the eyes. It’s harder to find friends, but the ones you have already are tried-and-tested in giving their lives for you. There’s some sort of respect people give you as an adult, and they respect your time and space more. The heartbreaks become easier to tolerate because you aren’t anymore dating the jerks you dated in college; you’re seeing men and women mostly capable of rational thought, not boys and girls who have weird ideas about the opposite sex and delusions about themselves.

If you told me four years ago that I would be saying this or living this life, I wouldn’t have believed you. Things haven’t always gone my way since then, but I think I can safely say at this point that I have done quite well for myself, whether or not you compare the current me to the gawky kid that came out of NITK in 2008. I can say the same for most of my pals from college… everyone seems to have come into their own.

This turned out to be longer than I expected but guess what, I don’t have writer’s block anymore!

Wester Hogi, Easter Bunny

I’m moving to New York City. And after three years, Tuna Fish and I will be on the same timezone, and we’ll be in the same state for the first time since we started our first jobs after graduation.

I’ll be starting on a fulltime job real soon. From what they’ve told me and what I’ve read online, it seems to be a fulfilling workplace which will give me fun work to do and still manage to leave enough time for other fun stuff. And I’ll be by myself in a big city, and hope to find enough fun activities to fill my time. Then I have a 30-minute travel to and from work, for which I’ll in all probability be using public transport. I’m hoping big city life and crowded streets bring back the color to my cheeks, so what if it’s a smoky gray from all the pollution. And all this is supreme blogging fodder, so I’ll probably break the writer’s block that has plagued me since October.

I’ve had a lot of life-changing stuff happening to me in the months between summer and now. I hope to blog about some of the bloggable ones. There are plenty of untended drafts, and I’ll publish a few of them soon.

It’s late now and I need to sleep; I’ll be flying from the southwest tip of the US (well, nearly… just a couple of hours from the Mexican border) to the northeast (see title! translate from kannada!), and that’s going to be a long long flight for which I need to be well-rested. I find myself unable to sleep because of the overpowering waves of nostalgia washing over me, and the excitement that tomorrow and the weeks that follow will bring.

I couldn’t have gotten over the past few months without people here – My advisor Prof. Alex Ihler who’s supported me through my crazy travails and helped me do my first bit of solid research work, my pals Ishwar, Meghana and Shobhit who’ve made the past few months real fun for me, and my wonderful wonderful roommates Shanaz, Anu, Vidya and Shamita who’ve seriously been the nicest, funnest, most helpful bunch of people to live with. And of course, my aunts Uma and Usha who over the past couple of years have given me the solidest advice I’ve ever taken, my akka and athimber and darling nephews who’ve kept things so normal and fun for me. Folks who’ve always just been a call away when I’ve walked back from lab at odd hours, and who’ve calmed me down and given me perspective whenever it felt like things have gotten out of hand….. Bigshow, Karthik, Mohan, Abhilash, Logik.. and my gal pals who’ve just been an email away for fun gossip and serious talk and who I trust more than anything else.. Tuna, Shruthi, Swati, Pooney. And it’d be incomplete if I don’t mention the fun set of people that keep me sane… Merin, Siri, Zibsko, Ego, Suresh-sir, Quale.

Note: I’m writing this at darned 2am, with a 9am flight in the morning. If you’re gonna be mad about my not mentioning you here, I’m sorry for forgetting your name in a sleepy nostalgic stupor, but heck, if you really care that much, you’d give me a darned break for that.

And none of this would have even been fathomable if it weren’t for my parents. They’ve brought me up to be self-reliant, ambitious and determined. And they’ve supported me more than they could through every crazy thing I went through all this while so that I could be all of those things with little worries otherwise. There’s this old Mindry.in sketch where some guy is asked in a job interview about his philosophy towards work and he  says ‘Mother is the first teacher’. While it seems obnoxious to quote mindry.in while talking about such a serious thing, I’m so at a loss for words, that it seems the only appropriate thing to say right now, when I feel my parents’ pride in me.

Alrighty. Next blogpost from the East Coast. I’ll whine about the weather, and soon begin to look down on the west coast’s informality, their weird food like avocados, and their utter lack of good public transport.

Over and out.

Disconcerting

In the glory days of my late teens, I could listen to metal. Now however, most of my music-listening happens while reading or coding, and hard rock and classic rock suits that mood better than metal. My ears seem to have grown out of the frequency required to appreciate good heavy metal music. Unless it’s in an environment where everyone is screaming and headbanging. I love headbanging.

That said, Metallica isn’t all that metallic music. It’s been ages since I listened to their music. But had I been in Bangalore, I certainly would have gone to the concert. Simply because I like concerts. The hours of waiting in the baking sun and humidity, the slow dehydration, the rush of large sweaty people, people who can’t sing singing along, the atmosphere thick with the smell of intoxicants, the band pulling random shenanigans, asking you to do things that would in another context seem silly, but you do it anyway, play along with their scripted act… it’s fun. And the artistes are professionals. They know how to make a crowd have fun.

No one’s denying that it’s not an ideal environment. Headbanging can cause acute pains in the neck that can take weeks to recover from. The dehydration is very real… and you can get a fever from the exhaustion. Being a lady in an environment that is possibly 80% male, most of who are intoxicated, is definitely not easy. The food’ll be overpriced. The crowds will be suffocating. It’s going to be a rush to get to the front row, and there’ll always be irksome folks around you who block your view, irritate you with their incessant singing along, conduct random conversations…. the works.

And the event in itself won’t be all that well-organized… there’ll be security lapses… burly drunk jerks all around and not a single security guard in sight.. bottlenecks in the queues… it’s not easy.

We know all this and go to concerts still. It’s an experience in itself. It’s not everyday a big act comes to town. It’s a bit like braving the crowds and queues in a pilgrim town for a few seconds of  darshan. Only a bit, mind you. The inconveniences are brushed aside because the fun holds more significance.

If however, the fun doesn’t hold enough significance to you, you’re going to be one pissed soul. There’s always that one guy who doesn’t really like rock but tags along for the concert coz all his friends are going. Or coz it’s an event where you JUST HAVE TO BE THERE. And this guy enjoys the concert the least, is surprised at the amount of profanity the artistes throw around, and just WHY people all have epileptic fits around him. He makes unintentionally funny comments about the artistes or the performance. He dampens his group’s mood, but usually the “Ohmaaan, it’s Metallica/Maiden/Sabbath/DT/Blackfield” sentiment overshadows and overcomes all else. It’s fine, everyone’s been that guy at one point or the other. After which they cease being that guy coz they either start enjoying the music or they stop going to such concerts altogether. By definition, you don’t see too many such people at concerts, especially not at rock concerts.

The problem in Gurgaon was, judging by posts like this, that there were way too many of These Guys in the crowd.

It would have been nice if the band apologized personally or via video. It would have been even better had the organizers broken the news better, given more details about refunds and the like, and had better security to contain the pandemonium that ensued.

But even then, who the heck vandalizes lakhs worth of equipment that has been procured with great difficulty? How do you just get on stage like that and break apart stuff that has taken days to set up? Seriously, even factoring in possible ‘mob mentality’, it is bad behaviour. And c’mon, it’s an offense to damage property. At any concert, you know there are going to be people with cameras and camcorders or… cellphones! Did they not think even once of the consequences for their own self?

Someone on Facebook said these concert-goers were putting the gaon in Gurgaon. I’m inclined to agree.

Initially I thought the guy I linked above had a point. But thinking about it, it seems like a regular concert venue. I’m not a regular concert-goer, and would be glad for any corrections on that. And heck, nothing justifies vandalizing property.  I don’t know if I should even blame DNA Networks for any glitch, because they have a good track record and it seems unlikely they organized this concert badly.

Anyway, what can I say except what I told someone in her late teens who asked me if she should go.. It’s a metal concert and not a satsang, there’ll be intoxicant drinks, intoxicant smokes, weird people in the crowd, the music is darned metal and not designed to be easy on your ears… that’s kind of the point, there’ll be a zillion bodies pushing you around, all tall and fat and sweaty. Dress sensibly, eat and drink sensibly, make sure your crowd can take care of itself. It can be a great experience if you want it to be. But this is what it is, and it’s not going to be like a Rahman or Sonu Nigam or Kay Kay concert. If you think it’s going to be miserable, just catch the concert live on YouTube or a week later on MTV and everyone is happy. Capiche?

Quirky and Quirkier – Tamil Movies of the ’80s and ’90s.

Life was never the same after the advent of the Sun Network. There was a movie every afternoon on Sun TV! Every afternoon! Previously, movies could be watched only on the weekends, on TV, so this was cause for much joy, especially among those who didn’t have much to do in the afternoons.

Then there was Sun Movies. Three or four movies a day! When I wasn’t burning my skin off in the sun during the summer vacations, or watching Cartoon Network, or fighting with my sister, I’d be glued to these movies.

This love for movies were further kindled by themed movie weeks on Sun TV. So the late evening movies for a particular week would follow some theme. Like ‘Adhiradi vaaram’, where all the movies would be action blockbusters, or ‘Thik-thik vaaram’, where horror movies would be screened the whole week, or even a week full of Vithalacharya movies, or movies where Vishwanathan-Ramamurthy were the composers. There were also other more specific themes like Movies Where Hero And Heroine Cannot Be Together, or Movies Where Love Is Sacrificed For Higher Reason. Apart from Movies Where One Or More Protagonists Are Differently-Abled, or Movies Where One Or More Of The Protagonists Are Dying (Of Cancer). I’m not making any of these up.

This went on for around a year or two, before they filled late evenings with some or the other soap (which all deserve a post or three to themselves… remember Chitthi, anyone?). Then they had a common theme throughout, with every day of the week having one genre. Like there was a comedy movie every Monday, a love story every Tuesday (Kaadhal Sevvaai), a classic old movie every Wednesday (Kaaviya Budhan), an action flick every Thursday (Adhiradi Vyaazhan) and a superhit blockbuster every Friday (Superhit VeLLi). This, apart from two movies, one in the afternoon and another in the evening, every Saturday and Sunday.

And I sat fixated as often as I could. Watched heckuva load of Tamil movies. Amma and I would watch some Kannada movies too, on Chandana, but we stuck to comedies… Anant Nag’s Ganesha ones, or S. Narayan… we both still adore his Oho. Channels would promptly be changed if it was a Kashinath movie. But I hated Kannada movies back then. They seemed too serious and too tragic. When we didn’t still have cable, Amma and Ajji would watch the Sunday evening Kannada movie on DD, and cry and cry and then cry some more. One movie which freaked the heck out of me had Ambarish write a letter in blood to the leading lady. Years later, when a classmate wrote a love letter in blood to another, I felt very very very faint not because it looked like a crazed madman’s handiwork, but because it brought back repressed memories of this movie. And I stopped watching Kannada movies after this one wacko movie where Ambarish gets bitten by a dog and dies of rabies. He barked like a dog, ate food from an aluminum plate not using his hands, frothed at the mouth, and died. I swore to myself I’d never watch a Kannada movie again, and never one with Ambarish in it.

So Tamil movies it was. And God, they weren’t any less gaga. They might be cheerier, more hopeful, better-made and more watchable, but less crazy, they most certainly weren’t.

One of the more tragic ones I watched involved a lower-middleclass family, where the father was presumed dead in a train accident. They get his insurance money, and their standard of living suitably improves. But then, the father comes back, and the rest of the movie is about the shenanigans that result from trying to hide him from the rest of the world. It could have been a nice comedy, but it mainly involved the family politics, grinding poverty, maintaining self-respect, and endless mother-in-law daughter-in-law shenanigans, apart from the mother not being able to wear her mangalsutra and sindoor even though her husband is alive. It sapped the energy out of me.

Then there was this seemingly normal movie where a boy with a widowed mother falls in love with a girl with a widower father. The girl’s father suitably opposed the match like all movie dads, but then he went one step further. He spoke to the boy’s mother, saying there’s only one way we can stop them from marrying and making the biggest mistake of their lives. And the mother agrees. They both get married, and then he snidely tells the boy, now since I’m married to your mother, Heroine is your….? . Mindblown, simply mindblown.

And I saw this one clip of a movie and couldn’t bear to watch it any more. So this guy has a rather cold wife who’s not being intimate with him. He takes her to a movie one evening. And from her horrified shrieks on watching it, we infer that it was an adult movie, and she is thoroughly disgusted and limp from shock. He tells her in a confrontational tone that he did that just to loosen her inhibitions after which she’d fall limp into his arms. Oh. My. God.

On the other end of the spectrum, there was this sweet movie on Young Love called Panneer Pushpangal. The western world (and the Star World-watching world) may have had its Wonder Years, and Kollywood had Panneer Pushpangal. It starred Prathap, who I used to confuse for Kokila Mohan, as a cool and with-it teacher at an Ooty boarding school, where the lead pair were students and fell in love. Of course, the girl’s mom was a witch and locked her daughter up, but the ragtag bunch of friends help her escape. She meets the boy, and then everyone wonders what to do. And then the movie ends. I rather liked this movie, I’ll admit, and wished my school had a teacher like Prathap. And I mention that movie here mainly because it has this wonderful, wonderful song.

Radhika (of Chitthi, Annamalai and Arasi fame) starred in a few more mindblerg movies I watched. First was this one where she woos Sivakumar as a village girl, going as far as getting each others’ names tattoed on their arms, after which he is transferred to the city, where he meets another Radhika who is a modern-dressing rich daughter of his boss. She keeps aggressively pursuing him, and he never gives in because he loves only the villager Radhika. He goes back to the village to find her, but she isn’t there and the whole village blames him for her disappearance. And then comes the shocker. Both the Radhikas are the same! It was an experiment where the rich girl was testing a potential suitor to see if he was only after her money. Oh, what problems rich girls have. Anyway he takes offense and spurns her, and her own father says while he supported her through this endeavour, he feels this sort of test insults any self-respecting man. Then both Sivakumar and Radhika down sleeping pills separately. After appropriate edge-of-seat shenanigans, the director makes sure both lives are saved and that they live happily ever after.

Another one was Meendum Oru Kaadhal Kadhai with Radhika and Prathap. They are two mentally-ill kids in an asylum, and are supervised by a progressive doctor played by Charuhaasan. Radhika is from a rich family who all don’t really like her, especially her scheming brother and brother’s wife, while Prathap has no one. They fall in love, get married and move to some new village with the doctor to have a new life. The village had a slew of quirky characters I don’t really recall, but most of the movie was pitiful while not being slapstick. Radhika ends up pregnant, and dies when Prathap is making her laugh or something…. most mindblerging natal death EVER. I didn’t follow what happened after that, but it might have involved the doctor dying after killing Prathap.

And then. This is the first mindblerging movie I watched, and the one which I was thinking about and then remembered all these movies I’ve talked about. I saw it first on DD one Sunday afternoon when they’d show regional-language movies, which meant this movie had subtitles. It starred Mohan as a Hindu boy, who falls for his sister’s Christian friend. She keeps away at first, actively asking him to get lost, but he persists and they end up in love [Aside: it never fails to blow my mind how easily couples before the Noughties fell in love in movies so quickly and based on so little! He saved my life, so I'm going to spend it with him! Or, she loves animals, so I'll love her]. His mother and her father can simply not submit to this match. They chain Mohan to a small room in their terrace, while the girl (who could have been called Julie and could have been played by Radha) is locked in her room, while presumably her wedding to a Christian boy was being planned. The separation proves too much for her, and as Christ is the reason she can’t be with her love, she hammers a nail through her palm, like was done to Christ. And obviously dies. He escapes from his shackles and comes to help her escape, but he only sees her little neighbour boy (every heroine in every movie before the late ’90s had one) standing in line for her funeral. He runs to the graveyard as they are reading out hymns before burying her, sees her dead, kisses her prone body and dies right there. Lovers dying, okay, fine, but nail through palm? That made my eight-year-old self squirm a whole lot when I saw a crucifix after that, and I took special care to never hold a nail in my hand, and was very edgy around hammers.

I’ve been wondering what the name of this movie is. Does anyone know? Please please tell me… I want to watch it again, this time with new eyes that are cynical about such dated movies.

But…. that might be jumping the gun. These movies were definitely cheesy. But they were gritty. And original. And had an honesty and creativity to them which is missing in later suave movies without bright lights and item dancers in shiny costumes. They had some really good music, and I don’t know how popular they turned out in their time, but their actors gave really wonderful performances in these movies.

The themes were bold and original. The filmmakers might have been wacko jerks with too many rich uncles, or they might have been thinkers, I’ll never know. But I’m glad these crude movies that lack even an ounce of finesse and subtlety got made.  They were like alcohol experiments in undergrad where you experiment with a wide range of quality and quantity of drink before you figure out what works for you. The makers of these movies might have hit bull’s eye with exploring early-teenage love and jealousy with a Panneer Pushpangal, and I might be glad for that, but I’m also glad that they got the scenario of ‘What if a guy likes a girl but his mother marries her father?’ out of their systems so that none of us needs to explore that again.

An open letter to the girls and boys of India from a Bangalorean aka Different People Are Different aka You All Equally Suck.

Yeah, so we saw an Open Letter by a Mallu-Marathi gal to all Delhi guys. Then we saw a Delhi boy respond. Somehow in the midst of all this, I feel the larger issue is being missed. And this, I can spot by virtue of being a proud Bangalorean who looks down on anyone who’s not from the Garden City, which, well, is the rest of India, and half of Bangalore, not to forget the pseud-Bangaloreans.

And it’s Open Letter day, I want to throw my hat in the ring as well, get some hits.

And being from NITK, I did see National Integration in some form. So I’m not entirely biased against those from the north of Hebbal Flyover irrespective of the number of times I call them Amit or Isha. The point I make this this: All of you suck equally.

The Mallu akka there might blab about her matrilineal tradition, but others from that same tradition, more notably the female M.Tech candidates of NITK from Kerala, do not believe in the concept of women stepping out after dark. They also ask their husbands’ permission before each and every outing. And also, articles like this one. Not exactly bra-burning shining beacons of womanhood and women’s lib, are we?

And well, I must admit there’s something about Northie fellas, or I wouldn’t have spent a good proportion of my teens sighing over them. It’s probably the self-confidence they ooze. That said, the hooters and whistlers at NITK seemed to have a large proportion of folks from the other side of the Vindhyas. But then, I can’t deny that scary incident during semi-Pro night at Incident ’07 where my friend and I got harassed by a bunch of Gults.  Cheapness seems to be a universal trait. And I’m not sure the gender-segregated Sathyabhama types are any less despo and creepy. The point is, it’s not like these folks all end up Forever Alone. There are several million Northie and Sathyabhama girls who find these sorts of displays of affection attractive and will probably say I overreact or I don’t know to deal with it. There’s a market for these guys, and while it might not include me or the Mallu-Marathi akka, how does it matter, since we’re not in the target audience anyway?

And yes, I cringe at the English. I used to cringe even more seven years ago. But that was until I attended a Freshers party at NITK. Everyone introducing themselves. Entire class, with significant representation from the Northeast to the Southwest. You know what I realized? What I’d previously considered a ‘neutral’ accent or a ‘normal’ accent or a ‘good’ English accent was actually just a Bangalorean accent, and it was ‘good’ because it was what I was used to. And it could be replicated and parodied. It could also be just another stereotype. Probably not as popular as a Mallu stereotype, but it’s only a matter of time till Lingo Leela goes mainstream.

Then, the food. You know what, everyone liked well-cooked food, irrespective of cuisine. Or maybe that’s what happens when you survive for months on horrible North-South mishmash food which pisses everybody off, and then one day they make really really awesome Pongal and Bisi Bele Bath in the mess and even the most Chapati-oriented gal wishes they made this every darn day. Point is, every cuisine has quirks. Like this one time, my friends and I were lunching, most of us Southie, one a fresh-off-the-train Northie. We were having our curd rice, and curiously regarding this fella eating jalebi with curd. And then he pipes up with “How can you people eat curd with rice?!!”. There’s no such thing as weird, only unfamiliar.

I don’t know where the stereotype of the ‘Fair North-Indian’ or ‘Dark South-Indian’ comes from. I know way too many counter-examples of Northies who are dark despite not being exposed to Sun TV, and southies who are fair enough to be racist about it.

You can rant about all the Northies reading Chetan Bhagat. But you know what that’s better than? Not reading.

Plus, not everyone reads only C-Bag. There’s a thriving Hindi literature scene. Also, most of India doesn’t really have libraries well-stocked with the latest and the greatest in Literature, and not too many bookstores like Blossoms or Nagasree either. Start with adding Chetan Bhagat, then, I dunno, add a few similar authors, one of who might be, say, Lavanya Sankaran, and maybe someone’ll make a few mistakes and stock Sivasankari’s translated works… well, we need to start somewhere.

I’m snobbish about reading, and judge non-readers harshly. I find myself judging people across the country, and even in my own bookstore-rich city. The hatred of books is a general human trait, and every ethnic, religious and cultural group has some people who don’t read, don’t like to read, and need to be hung, drawn and quartered.

And, I don’t know, I seem to be mistaken about the whole judge-people-by-accent-and-reading-habit thingie. You can be an AynRand-tard in any of the 14 official languages it turns out. You can be snobbish about your heritage or denounce it in 14 languages and 486 dialects. You can put forth polished sophisticated-sounding arguments about why women should stay home and take care of the kids in a sexy neutral English accent. And um, do you know what we call people who speak flawless English? Call center employee.

And when it comes to the melting pot of the 21st century which is Bangalore, we find people from everywhere are jerks. None of you bother learning Kannada, all of you act aggressive everywhere, totally changing the mild-mannered politeness of my beloved city. You all live in your own ghettoized crowd. None of you have a family life and slog at work all day, ruining it for those of us locals who can’t help but have a family life (and heck, everyone should have a life outside of work which is not just movies and malls), making us look bad in the eyes of the Boss who in all probability belongs to your part of the country and has a similar lifestyle. All of you drive like retards, all of you litter like retards. None of you bother to contribute much to the culture of the city other than asking DJs city-wide to play Sheila Ki Jawani all the time.

Yes, we Bangaloreans are way better than all that. Everything is just about right all the time, always. Right from the weather to the amount of concern people on the street show you, to the grinning helpful policemen, to the zillion restaurants to the list of places and events you can go to on a free weekend.

And um, am I saying Bangalore boys are better than the rest? I’d love to agree based on personal experience, but then, shit happens.

Like we say in Kannada, every house’s dosa has holes in it.

How wouldyu like your sub?

Some cold afternoon, existential questions like “Nand ell idli?” pops into your mind and you look around for the nearest Tim Horton’s cafe around. Your friend says “You are too hungry and the day is too long for just a tall cup of hot chocolate”. You accept your fate and get dragged along to the nearest Subway Joint. “Half a sub should do”.

“They also serve those who stand and wait”.

Half an hour later, the woman on the counter goes, “Hi there! How are you today?”

“Good! How are you?”

“I’m  good too!” “How wouldyu like your sub?”

Me: “I’ll have a 6 inch veggie delight please”

CWoman: “The veggie patties are not done yet. Is it okay if I don’t put one of those?”

Me: “Whatever! no problem”

Friend goes “You guys have such few options. No tuna for you!”

Me “Gah! I hate the smell”

CWoman: “The bread?”

Me: “Italian please”

CWoman: “ohh! sorry we don’t have those! would you like something else?”

Me: “Oh! thats okay! Gimme some wheat bread!”

CWoman: “And the veggies?”

Me “Some Jalapenoes, Onions, Banana Peppers, Tomatoes, and some green pepper”

Friend: “Ewww, Banana Peppers? Take Olives instead”

Me ” Ok, take it out and throw some olives in there! Like I know how the rest taste together anyway!”

CWoman “Let me get your dressing and you are good to go!”

Me “I have no idea, what should I take?”

Friend “I have no idea, but surely lots of mayo!”

Me “mmm, lots of mayo, and honey mustard? and I don’t know, hot sauce”

CWoman raises her eyebrow, “ok!” “Here you go! and that would be 4 99″ “Would you like a drink?”

Me: “No thank you!” “Have a nice day!”

CWoman: “You too!”

And before I start, something else turns up and I leave. When I come back, half of it is gone, I have no interest in it anymore.

Hmph! How long do I need to wait to feel full?

 

 

Corruption, Young Blood In Politics, and the like

The whole Jan Lokpal agitation brings me to write about politics after a long, long time.

It was partly intentional, this hiatus. There was a point when I was intensely political, but I discovered I was getting my blood pressure up every morning when I read the paper or the zillion rabble-rousing political blogs I was subscribed to, and even more so when I discussed the stuff I read with like-minded friends over lunch. Then more interesting things came along, and I thought I should give those things a fair try, and all I did with politics was to make jokes about current or past events.

But Anna Hazare drags me back.

Not just me, but various others are newly politically conscious. People who didn’t used to watch the news now watch the tamasha. People read newspapers more avidly now. More people talked about Rule 184 than about Rule 34 over the past couple of weeks.

I want to try and make sense of this craziness that has gripped the country.

It’s not a matter of surprise that a Gandhian with a rather universal single-point agenda gathers so much of a mob-like fan following… Gandhian, Fasting, Saying No To Corruption… predictable outcome. Why, even the famed dabbawalas of Mumbai struck work in a show of solidarity with him! It’s also not much of a surprise that the media are all gaga about him…. this is the guy who decided to break his fast in the past because the media couldn’t get to his village, and he has rather astute media advisors now, I’d imagine.

The real wonder here was that people don’t seem to have just a ‘Let’s what the tamasha’ sort of an attitude to this. You can give a movement all the publicity in the world, but the sort of attention it draws can only depend on its content. This is not one of those candlelight march sort of things, nor is it the ‘change your Facebook profile pic to Anna Hazare’ sort of thing. People seem genuinely into this. A friend of my sister’s wanted to go to Freedom Park and fast on her birthday. A seventeen-year-old. Fasting. On her birthday. Freedom Park. That’s some serious shite.

I really wonder why.

Every twenty or so years, some or the other movement seems to come to the forefront, mobilize youth and grown folk alike, throw up a few heroes and induct many more workers, who all go on to be the next generation of politicians. There was the Freedom movement at first, then the Jayaprakash Narayan one, where a lot of people who are at the forefront in politics today cut their teeth – Arun Jaitley, Sushma Swaraj, Laloo Yadav, George Fernandes, Subramanian Swamy… and various others. Then we had Mandal and Ayodhya. Now, this.

I wonder what’s behind this phenomenon (If it can be judged as one.. I think I’m concluding too much from too little, but given that people conclude so much more from so much less usually, bear with me). I assume it has something to do with there being a whole new generation of youth with no political moorings every twenty years. Now I have my rightist political moorings, I’ve done my share of taking politics seriously and general rabble-mongering, even if it was only on numerous Orkut communities and this blog… if I had been a part of something bigger when I was in that phase, say, in the 2009 elections, there’s a good chance I’d've been interning with a political party… but that didn’t happen. The point is, I know where to direct my greviances now. I know who to vote for. Reading works of politicians and watching people like Subramanian Swamy use the system well has reinforced my faith in the system. It isn’t so for a lot of youth. They don’t know what to do, who to address with their ‘It’s the system, man!’ frustrations. I guess the glut in the number of such youth has peaked around now or something, due to which so many of them seem to identify with India Against Corruption. Right place, right time.

If the glut had occurred two years back, Lok Paritran or some such Youth-y party would have been the beneficiary of this largesse of political feeling. And if the glut was a few years away, Anna Hazare would have just been a joke and everyone would have dismissed Kejriwal as the guy in the last bench who thinks he’s going against the system whenever he back-talks a teacher.

What I’m saying is, the movement doesn’t find the people, the people find the movement. It is inevitable that we have some mass movement every now and then that the country needs to cool off all the latent political emotion.

So what can we do with this? This is just a hunch… more empirical study would be a good thing to have on this. If this hypothesis is indeed found to be true, political parties should watch for signs and then make sure to capitalize on this feeling of ‘revolution’ by recruiting heavily in colleges and urban centers. They can also fan this feeling of insecurity and make the country go to the poll just when this seems to be boiling over, and capitalize on it. A nice tool to have in their arsenal.

And now the more important question. Corruption? Seriously? What’s the deal? Aren’t we all corrupt at some level? Don’t the bribe-takers also come from the same places as we do? Do we really need an ombudsman?

I did used to think that there’s no point of a LokPal. Any ombudsman can be easily compromised, every man has a price. There’s no way this could stop big-ticket corruption. Why then, are people supporting this bill, apart from that they are all Sheeple?

I get reminded of the Jayanagar 4th Block RTO and the Registrar’s office. You couldn’t for the heck of you get anything done in either of those places without paying a bribe. The areas outside of these places used to be overrun with touts. Everyone there was corrupt, head to toe, end to end. I remember telling my mother about a classmate whose father worked at the RTO, following which my mother gave a look of disgust and said “Yeah, plenty of bribe money”.

And then the LokAyukta struck. They suspended a ton of people (or recommended for them to be suspended, and those recommendations were implemented), got in newer people from elsewhere, and those places remained clean for, I’d like to think, atleast a few years.

The allure of an independent entity is that they have few, if any, vested interests in that place, and are immune to influence because they aren’t in the system. It is easier for them to view these instances of corruption as just cases to be solved or people to be apprehended, and go about their job without worrying about interference. This is the side of an Independent Entity that people want to see. And these ‘new officers without vested interest’ have been successful in more than a few places, including movies, that people really want to give it a try.

Of course, not all is hunky-dory with getting a LokPal… those folks are human too, and they too can succumb to cold hard cash offered, and no way can they be very useful to counter big-ticket corruption.

And petty corruption is not something that takes place only with the bureaucrats… a couple of hundred when you’re speeding, a couple more to move files a little bit more faster, a few here and there because you’re lazy to get that document done and you need to get that government office work done today… that’s not new to any of us, is it? Especially since we know as well as the civil servants we bribe that it’s hard to sustain a family on that kind of a salary.

I’m ambivalent on the Lokpal thing, but I do know that automating things can go a long way in checking corruption. Take the human element out of everything, let everything just be a form you need to fill online, let every ration shop be a bunch of vending machines where you swipe your card, enter your PIN and get your dole. If you jump a red light, let the ticket come to your house after finding out your address from your license plate. Let there be emission test gates where you swipe your emission test certificate, failing which you need to pay a fine. Or have these police station kiosks where you have a videoconference sort of a thing with some police officer somewhere in the country who takes down your complaint, to use which you need your biometric ID.  If there’s no human who controls what you get, neither can you bribe him, nor can he ask you for a bribe. And if you have any problems, you’ll be interacting with a call center guy somewhere who you have no clue about, and which call will possibly be monitored for quality control purposes.

There’s no way you can pass a couple of hundred under the table there. I’m sure people will find kickass ways to send and receive bribes, but we’ll deal with those when we get there.

What’s more, this will create a new generation of people who have no clue about how to go about bribing officers, and a bunch of officers who have no way to take bribes and are unfamiliar with the practice. It’d take a ton of stepping out of their comfort zone to do either of those things. So there.

And systemic reforms too. There’s CET which makes sure the meritorious get into a good college, but what about the ones with bad luck in the exams, who feel entitled to more because they had a perfect track record, but screwed up their math paper? They’ll obviously book seats in colleges, pay touts a heck load of money… unless you make a KSIT the same level as RVCE, unless there’s no steep gradient in the quality of institutions, this will definitely happen. There will obviously be a bunch of people who feel the system has screwed them over. The point of a well-designed system is to keep the proportion of such people low, because if they gain substantial strength, they will find extra-systemic means to gain what they want.

That apart, Kiran Bedi seems hormonal. I feel sorry for her having come to this point. It was so ironic that she was on the other side of the bars in Tihar. She’s one of those unfortunate people who have been totally screwed over by the system. Stay positive, Ms. Bedi, you still have a lot of spunk left in you.

And yeah, I’m a newly-minted fan of Dr. Subramanian Swamy, after his efforts in the 2G case. He seems totally badass and Machiavellian, an inspiring example of someone who uses the system to achieve his ends instead of simply ranting about it.

And his older daughter Gitanjali Swamy seems super inspiring in her own right… IITK Compsci, Berkeley PhD, Prof at Columbia and Harvard, and a string of startups… what’s not to admire?

Happiness is….

…covering close to 8000 kilometres in 36 hours, and it being totally worth every sleepless minute, every can of orange juice, every condescending look from a second-gen Desi, every dab of pain balm to numb the shoulder pain caused by lugging along laptops, every spammy mail in your inbox you’ve subscribed to, every cringe at someone’s jingchak Facebook/Linkedin profile, every data preprocessing script you’ve written, every ounce of self-doubt you’ve faced, every shloka your mother has chanted, every prayer your roommate named you in, every No you’ve ever heard, every TSA grope, every drop of faith everyone who’s ever loved you has put into you.

More in a few weeks.

Nostalgic ’90s Bleg – What Happened to The Boys Of Rockford?

I watched Rockford a day after I turned 14 and loved it. It was cheesy, it had hammy acting and dialogue delivery, the lead protagonist seems foolhardy now that I think of it, and Nagesh Kukunoor was a jerk teacher who I’d now never let near a tween. And the drama in that hostel there dwarfs all the drama I have in my life right now. The movie doesn’t age well.

Still, it was one of the many coming-of-age dramas we watched, and it was refreshing to see Nandita Das in a vaguely glam role, given that all she did before that was Art cinema. [Imagine, this movie's most glam component was Nandita Das]. It felt good to see kids on screen your age and having crushes on people twice and thrice their age. You knew people like that, you thought it was cute in a stupid way. And at that age, I was blissfully unaware of the more-suitable-for-adults disgusting bits in the movie, so it thankfully wasn’t where I ‘grew up’ out of disgust.

The girls in the movie were totally nothing compared to the ‘hottie’ kinds from Bishop Cottons and Frank Anthony and Sophia’s who your male classmates drooled over at Paulfest, SEEK, Manav and the other zillion fests you attended (while you passed snide remarks to them and teased them to no end while you and your group of girls sneakily checked out the college-age fest organizers) that you didn’t believe someone’d buy a rose off them, and you wondered where Nagesh Kukunoor had picked them. Surely it can’t have been for their acting abilities… they hammed their way through the few lines they had, and their expressions were as convincing as a Congressman.

Anyway I looked up the girl who played Malathi in the movie. Her name is Ulrika Krishnamurthy and she seems to have a lot more about her on the Net now, including model-looking pics… just goes on to show ‘beauty’ is something made, not what you’re born with.

But heck, I’ve not been able to find anything about the two boys who played the leads – Rohan Dey who played Rajesh Naidu, and Kailash Atmanathan who played Selva. Their names are not as unique as Ulrika’s, and Google’s results for them are swamped with ‘actor profiles’ for them on various websites which don’t have anything apart from their names. There seems no tangible results for them on social networking sites either. No news articles, neither from back then nor recent ones where they’ve done something like, say, act in a play and the reporter covering the event points to them as ‘that kid who acted in Rockford‘. What, did they just disappear?

So, um, any idea what happened to these lads? Did they get busy with JEE prep soon after the movie and become Industrial Engineers? Or, like Josh Saviano who played Paul Pfeiffer in The Wonder Years was rumoured to have grown up to be Marilyn Manson, did they lead wild crazy lives which for some weird reason escaped media scrutiny? Did they go into pure sciences due to which they don’t have and don’t need LinkedIn profiles? Or was there a mistake in their 10th standard CBSE admit cards due to which they are now known by different names? [True story, happened to someone a friend of mine knows]. Or did they get famous under a different name now?

If you who are reading this are Rohan Dey or Kailash Atmanathan or someone who knows them, please please leave a comment… I’m really curious and interested to know what’s up with them!

Google Plus, San Francisco and everything else

The past couple of weeks have been quite eventful. For one thing, Google released its Facebook-killer in a very very swift and well-planned move. For another, I finally got to see San Francisco thanks to this very nice cousin of mine.

First, on San Francisco. I find I’m a big-city girl at heart. I can simply not live in suburbia or anything like that… not in India, not anywhere else. Closer to nature and all is fine, but not for more than a few days. The city simply pulsates with people, with spirit, with soul.

Los Angeles does, too. But it feels very…. different. Like, most people you find taking the Metro from Union Station would be tourists or working-class folk, or the elderly and disabled. But when you take the VTA from San Jose Diridon, you find the light rail has Wifi inside, and is filled with a really much wider variety of people, and a more uniform distribution. The Bay Area feels much less stratified socially than Los Angeles or anywhere else in Southern California. Or maybe I’ve not been there long enough to see the stratification. LA somewhat reminds me of New Delhi, while San Francisco reminds me of Bangalore. (And Sunnyvale reminds me of Chennai so much that I suspect it’ll be renamed Sakthivel soon).

San Francisco seems very, very easy on the feet. It’s a pleasure to walk its streets, the narrow lanes with tall buildings which shade you from the harsh summer sun. I find it funny that in the USA, people in cities walk much, much more than people in smaller towns and rural areas… in her memoir, Tina Fey recounts this incident where she had her nieces and nephews from the Midwest visit her in New York, and were extremely tired when they were done with the day because getting around New York involved so much walking! I thought that was an outlier, there must be some quirky way to explain that off, and that that won’t generalize…. but tramping around SF makes me want to strongly believe that is indeed the case.

I haven’t really travelled around the US much, just a little here and there, but every place seems to be a clone of every other place, with only a few old places preserving their character… while being inundated with big brands everywhere. Urbanization in the US seems to be done with no soul to it. But San Francisco turned that on its head for me. Every building is different from every other building. When you look at the city from a high vantage point (like, say, Lombard Street), when you look at the rows of mismatched houses, it might probably not be as easy on the eyes as, say, looking at a street in Irvine where all the houses are uniform and prettified, but when you walk down the same street, the riot of clashing colours, the tall orange house next to the even taller red-brick pub next to the tiny bright purple art-supplies store makes such a refreshing relief from living in a StepfordWife-esque town.

And the art galleries and the art supply stores! I’m no artist, but I do like looking at pretty things that are pleasant on the senses. And while I didn’t buy any art supplies there, I got inspired enough by all the colour and hippie-ness (and even the hippies struck me as being very square hippies, the sort with a lecturership at Berkeley) to get very quirky-coloured yarn for crocheting.

There’s plenty of graffiti covering every single surface in the Bay Area. Some of it seems to be related to gangs and their territory claims or whatever, but heck, most of it looks so artsy! I wonder if people use stencils to spraypaint the walls? The graffiti has inspired me to want to do a photo-essay on the city, and call it Funky Freedom (after the song by Colonial Cousins, which is about very different things, but the title suits this so aptly). In the struggle to try and stick it to The Man, San Francisco seems to be the city in the US that’s most likely to taste success, far as I’ve seen.

What I liked best about the Bay Area however was the radio stations there. There are plenty that serve Southern California, too… in English, Spanish and Japanese. I used to be mildly annoyed with the profusion of ads on KRTH or KUCI or KALI or KLOS, and the only ad-free one was KUSC which played only classical music, and the radio jockeys on KUCI were incompetent, and the ones on KRTH were borderline sleazy. The programming and music just about passed muster…. and then I come across the Bay Area stations. They are very geared to listening during your workday. And most importantly, they seem to know exactly the sort of music I want to listen to!!

******

And now for Google Plus.

Clean, nice, Google-style interface. High marks for the privacy settings… I share more on it now than I used to on Facebook. I find it especially more conducive to share images. And the traffic is not so high that I’m very wary of addiction. I liked the way the hype built up. I liked how they executed it, making privacy a high priority…. they had seemingly learnt from their mistakes on Buzz, where they forced sharing down everyone’s throats. One rather hilarious incident in the early days of Buzz involved a friend changing his status message to something about someone on his chat list when that person was offline, and it got posted on Buzz automatically. It wasn’t until said person-on-chatlist logged into Buzz and saw the 40-odd responses to that update and began acting funny with him did he realize his Buzz was on. No such slip-ups on Google+… you don’t share something with someone unless and until you want to.

And Hangout has to be the single most awesome thing since sliced bread. The harate sessions so far have been nothing short of fun, and the randomness progresses quicker than on group chat. It’s heavy on memory and processing, not to mention bandwidth, and hopefully they’ll find ways of bringing it down even more soon.

While I’m very glad for circles, I really wish they allowed set operations on circles. Sometimes more than specifying who I want to share a post with, I’d like to say I want to share it with everyone in my circles with the exception of one bunch of people. Like if my extended family are organizing a surprise party using G+ for my cousin, it’d be easier for me to share a post with (Family – VidyaAkka) instead of (Amma, Appa, Sandy-mama, Suji-mami, Radhika-chithi, Viju-perima, Seenu-mama, Sriram-chitappa, Ashok-anna, Karthik-anna, Chintu, Pinky and Bubbly), (and what a pain it is to keep track of all the names).

That said, it throws up more questions about social networking. It becomes apparent that you need to have two set of circles – one for sharing with and another for reading. Both your cool cousin and your ageing uncle fall into Family, the circle with whom you share photos of the pongal you made for Pongal along with sidenotes about how you missed saying Pongalo Pongal with the whole clan, but your cousin’s set of Wilbur Sargunaraj links go better with the same thread as the one your co-internet-addict friends sharing GultRage/KannadaRage comics than your uncle’s desperately-in-need-of-a-Snopes-check email forwards. And your being specific about what you share with who removes the random component of things completely. Like, if some friends get forgotten, they stay forgotten. Unlike on Facebook where all of a sudden you get back in touch with an old friend because they see your location updated to Melbourne and comment saying hey, I’ve lived in Melbourne for two years now, maybe we should catch up. And another thing is I want to filter posts by topic than by who shared it. Like, I probably don’t care about the finance-related posts my schoolfriend shares and would rather not have them on my timeline, but I’d really really want my attention drawn to his announcing the birth of his first child. I probably don’t care for a researcher’s sharing his karaoke night photos, but I do care for when he updates his blog with a Scala tutorial. It seems a daunting task off-hand to build a system that does that automatically, but that notion needs to get out there.

Also, with privacy, the notion of being able to see who all a certain post you might comment on is going to be shared with does have a significant need. But heck, I don’t want people trying to infer what sort of circles I have by keenly observing the also-shared-with list. I want there to be a distinction I can choose to make, like a CC and a BCC in email.

And heck, when I’m on someone’s profile page, I want to be able to send them a Direct Message or an Email or something similar. I don’t want to have to add them to a circle, go back to my homepage, create a post that is shared with just them. I’d like to be able to message anyone from their profile page. It’ll I guess be just a simple few lines of code where you share an update with just them at a click of a button, but that goes a long way.

This one might come as a bit of nitpicking, but trust me, it makes a huge difference to me and possibly a lot of others. There is just too much wasted space on the G+ screen. I prefer my Facebook or Twitter timeline to this. There’s more I can take in at one glance on those screens whereas with G+, I need to scroll up and down a lot. The middle column is too narrow comparatively and the font sizes are by default too large. This is perfect when you have only a few updates everyday like I do now, but the same thing for a posting volume like the folks I follow on Twitter or on Facebook wouldn’t hold up. It would involve an unholy amount of scrolling. It’s fine when I want to read every single thing shared, but then, I don’t want to. There should be a more comfortable way of skimming past updates. And one thing I really really would like to see is to combine the same link shared by different people into just one update, like Facebook does.

All said and done, it’s not yet as wildly addictive as Facebook was when it started. The updates to my inbox are more irksome than the sort that get me going to my Plus homepage. I wouldn’t for the heck of me call it a Facebook-killer, but it sure is a great alternative, like how Chrome is to Internet Explorer. I have mostly positive feelings towards it. It feels like the mutated offspring of Facebook and Twitter midwifed by Google, and I really really wonder what it’s going to grow up to be.

Pun-Arabism

As is usual for me these days, I was babysitting some code, and with nothing to do, I had this delightful exchange with a rather biting punster grad student of my university who is referred to here as Z. Others  chimed in occasionally. As Kannada seems to flow naturally, a good number of the jokes and references are in Kannada… so if you don’t follow, kindly excuse. If you don’t follow and you live in Karnataka, get off your seat and buy that Learn Kannada In 30 days book!

And it’s for humor only. Obviously no offense is intended. Your trolly comments will be deleted unless they happen to be pun-tastic.

Z: Dubai is short for Dhirubhai.
Me: And Ye(s)men is short for his assistants.
Z: When pissed, he would say Oman.
Me: When the skies got overcast and prevented him from stepping out, he’d say Bah! Rain!
Z: Heh. Just what i had in mind. bahar rain, it was in my mind though. His favourite actor is Arjun Sharjah
Me: He eats at Abu Dhaba?
Z: Illa, addikkinta Qatarnaak jaaga ide, tinnakke.
Me: Oh god, who’s sane in that country?
Z: Musk cat owners
Me: He hopes it rains gold… and then he looks skyward and says ‘Manna, ma’.
Z: He loves Annavru’s movies esp Jeddahra bale.
Me: When he gets impatient, his wife soothes him saying ‘coo, wait’.
Udupa: And not ‘aap qatar main hain’?
Z: ..But he decides to go to his sauti arabia
Me: He negotiates with the House of Saud, and hence he is called sauda-ghar.
Z: And his wife sings Mecca karoon Ram mujhe buddha mil gaya
K: Kuwait, both of you!
Me: Is she very orthodox? Madi-na?
Z: Eh, yen madi. Avlappa mane inda oDhogiddaga ivalu huttiddu (She was born when her father had run away from home). Baghdad.
Udupa: Ninn Yemen, Saak nilso ninn PJgaLu
Z: Amman is only there no?
Me: When asked to describe that, will she say I-ran?
Z: Yea, Iran and Basra alli hendathi basradlu (And in Basra his wife hit him)

Z: But are we allowed to stop? Tehrana mana hai.
Q: Neevu Turkey bagge talking taane?
Z: NinahAnkarakke udaaseenave maddu

Me: You started it, so that makes you the Pehla-vi.
Z: Wokay, let’s give a Haifa and stop.
Me: That aswan-san is very reassuring.
Me: Stopping now, we don’t widen the Gulf between us and the others
Me: Jaasti aadre, everyone will Suez for damages.
Z: Sari ya, as you say. but I dont see why them ask us to stop.
Me: Threats seem Constantin this thread.
Z: Ella pun-galu khali aago tanka Cairo

Me: Ambani fought tooth and Nile with the Government, alva?
Z: Hoon, gas price jasti maadiddikke. Anila.
Me: The rise was due to agitation in the Middle Yeast, no?
Q: IsRail ko bandh karo.
Z: Hoon but north, south, west – aa Morocco affect aytu
Me: That’s a very clean country antare… kasaa blank-aa?
Z: Yeah, surprising though. Madi-terrain-ian jana. DuDD bere illa. Kaasu blanku.
Me: And corrupt also. Wonder how many palms you’ve to Greece there to get work done.
Z: Aamdani Athena Kharcha Rupaiya
Me: Is Greece named so coz it’s close to oil deposits?
Me: Total law-and-order breakdown will happen. Law enforcers wont have much authority. They’ll just be per-se-police.
Me: And they can’t have any more fun. Party-none.
Z: They had an annual groundnut fair – kadlekai parshepolis
Me: Putting peanuts (aka flirting) is very different there. They have lovestories called Hejab We Met.
Q: Awrah louvvu amara.
Z: But right across the sea, Tripolis do that well.
Me: Do they believe in Women’s Lib, ya?
Z: Don’t think so. They give lot of Bengazhis
Me: There’s a penalty for not having a beard. Gadda-fees.
Z: Haha. That’s it. Done.
Me: Phew. was going to say the same thing. Looking at the thread, WOW.
Z: Haifa!
Me: Haifa!

Whoa. Longest live marathon punning I’ve been part of. Mind=Blown.

In the Minestrone Soup

It’s close to dawn, and my code’s still running. I’m not in bed because I’m babysitting it. Not to worry  (I know some of my kinsmen and kinswomen who read this blog do worry… much thanks ), I’ll wake up late in the morning… I’ve – or rather, my body has – become fanatic about getting seven hours downtime every 24 hours.

I plan to go on a Disney movie watching spree once I’m done with all that I’m currently doing. Yeah you can accuse the movies of promoting unhealthy body images in girls, Princess complexes, being racist, and a ton of other things, but they do bring the Magic alive. I was down low last week, and what made me fly again was Lightning McQueen and Mater from Cars. I totally loved Schumacher’s cameo in Cars… though I don’t much know about F1 racing, I couldn’t help but be impressed when Schumacher visits Luigi and Guido and asks them for tyres.

Cars2 was a fun watch, too. I don’t understand why it has been panned so badly by critics. Why should an animated movie always have some sort of a message, about how we are polluting the environment or how we should switch to cleaner energy sources, or how we should eat healthier? Or about inner peace and discovering yourself. Or family values. Why can’t it just be plain fun, where we are awed by the awesomeness of the animators in anthropomorphising cars, planes, trains and boats, and getting and chuckling at all the references they make? It was fun watching a kiddie spy movie, with all the jingjang gadgets and parodies and tributes. The story might probably have required a lot more work, but the dialogues were spot on, the animation topnotch,  and the overall execution great. In particular, I liked the scene where Mater gets knighted by the Queen, and she calls him Sir Tow Mater, when he says nope, it’s okay, you can just call me Mater, none of this Sir business, and oh, by the way, have you met my friend McQueen? McQueen, Queen, Queen, McQueen.

Kung Fu Panda 1 and 2 were quite impressive too. Yeah, it’s not really China there, and it’s way too Americanized, but heck, it’s a fun escapist watch.

*****

And I’m still having a girl-crush (Womance? Sisfatuation?) on Tina Fey. No, I’m not asserting she’s perfect… I’m pretty sure to get to where she is, she should have been a jerk at one point or the other, presumably a ton of times, and listening to the way she insults people in public makes me wonder how she insults them when not on camera… she called Paris Hilton a tranny on Prime Time TV. But the thing is, she’s disciplined, works hard, lets her strong personality shine through… screw all the oh-she’s-a-lady-broke-the-glass-ceiling… she’s there because she worked hard for it, and that’s something I need to emulate.

I don’t know about other fields of science and technology, but Computer Science is pretty objective in terms of evaluation; I came across a study that says there’s less dissatisfaction and disparity in terms of pay and position among women in Engineering and Computer Science than the more women-dominated fields like the Humanities. No matter what everyone says, I don’t think there’s an active campaign to diss and keep downtrodden women in computer science. It feels like a boys’ club sometimes, especially when you are in a new area and everyone around you seems male and genius, quite the opposite of female and clueless which you are. But half the problem is the perception – the whole getting psyched about ‘OMG, I’m the only brown girl in the ring’, which brings down your morale and boldness. It takes only a couple of google searches to reach out to more people like you. And all you need to do is ask for help… people are nice. Sure there are the demoralizing jerks, but they are not everyone. None of this is easy or intuitive, but you need to just keep at it, keep these in mind. Yes, some bimbo will screw you over some time. Yes, some jerkofellow will take credit for your work at one point. Things will happen. But you’ve got to keep in mind hard work and smart work and dedication always pay off. They do, no matter how much life tries to convince you otherwise. You just need to take into account the fact that life is not fair.

*****

Thanks to my wonderful friends, I saw Blackfield live in concert a few weeks back. They were wonderful. And Steven Wilson signed my ticket for me, but sadly was not posing for pics. Still… yippie-ki-yay.

I watched Guna last week. It’s one of the (many) movies where Kamal Haasan plays a deranged character. The first ten minutes of the movie creeped the hell out of me, and is still haunting me. I wonder very hard if people like Kamal Haasan and Ryu Murakami are sane in real life. Is their view of the world PG-13 for the most part? Do they view everyone in terms of neuroses and psychoses? Do they visualize dastardly acts of violence happening around them? Sometimes, when I people-watch, I start wondering about people’s backstories. They’d seem very Swami and Friends if I write them down… but what sort of backstories do Kamal and Murakami think of? When Kamal is pissed in real life, does he get poetic? When he cries in real life, does he do it Mahanadi-style or does he just sob quietly? I remember some talk of his where he says it’s like he leases out his mind to a character he’s playing, and makes the character vacate his mind once the lease period – his workday – is over. What was he like before he figured this simple thing out? Does he follow this to the T always?

*****

I now see NITK has jumped on to the TEDx bandwagon and will host talks that’ll come under TEDx this Incident/Engineer. Since it’s a trend they are following (after NSIT and BITS and possibly others I’m not as such aware of), I wouldn’t say good job, great move or anything…. this was inevitable. And it’ll be a great experience for the students (and possibly faculty) organizing it. It’ll give NITK some very good press, and wider coverage. We should have been putting out Inci-Engi stuff on an official Youtube channel so far atleast, but this will catalyze all that, make all of it happen sooner than expected.

That said, what’s with the proliferation of these? Sure, it’s a good thing and all, but there seems to be no form of quality control. The few talks I’ve seen all seem to be put together on the way to the venue. One talk by RK Misra however seemed much godawesome, as did the one by the Faking News guy. What’s the point of the brand name if it doesn’t stand for quality? I was mildly irked by the frivolity of some of the topics, but more than that by the lack of dedication shown by some of the speakers. I can only hope the ones picked for TEDxNITSurathkal are folks showcasing good ideas and more importantly folks who speak well, and inspire NITKians and everyone else.

*****

I’ll leave you with the third installment of Everything Is A Remix that came out in the past couple of weeks. I liked this one a heckuva lot. It’s about the nature of innovation and copying and standing on the shoulders of giants. In particular, I liked this quote by Henry Ford which summed it all up:

I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work… Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready, and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense.

Watch it.

as u lyk it

i dun knw y i wnt 2 englis clss. i dnt knw y i trd to scr mrks.i shda nvr hv rd mny bks. it klld ma ri8g.

i cnt knw wht ma frnds wrt on ma fb wll. i cnt rd wht ma frnds wrt on ma phtos. i cnt rd wht ma frnds wrt n ma gml. i cnt cht wth ne1 srly. i cn nvr fin ma lines n twtr n 140 char ……..!!!! :X :X :X

ma phn bll r high! ma inbx hs no spc lyk ma cpbrd. sry ma, pa 4r spndng all ur mny ….. i fl lyk lsr.

i feel lyk ma brain hs gn dumb. i cn do intgrtn n 2 sec. i cnt rd ths ln n 10 min. i tk 20 min to wrt ths ln. ………..

ma frnds mk fn syng i m fl 2 wrk so hrd 2 wrt 1 sen. i m fl 2 tlk cz no1 knws wrds i use. :’(

i knw ill  lrn hw 2 n nw lngge i wrk hrd lyk ma englis exms. i kw ma nxt pst wnt be grmtccly strctred.

bt i wnt gv up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111

Ramdev, Yoga and aiming for the moon to get to Houston

I didn’t know about Baba Ramdev until I came back to NITK after second year break to find my roommate expertly doing Yoga routines every morning. She had learnt it from Aastha TV, apparently. I was transfixed, and quite skeptical.
I was (and am) deeply skeptical of anyone who promises instant moksha or teaches everything in ‘easy ways’…. and I react sharply to people learning life-changing stuff from someone on TV. One reason is because one size doesn’t fit all, especially with respect to things that are supposed to influence your health, or belief systems. So while I’d seen Baba Ramdev on Aastha while changing channels, I’d not paid much attention to him.
It took me that long to find out just how much influence he had on the Hindi-speaking parts of the country. And from what I saw and heard, he didn’t seem the selfish charlatan sorts or a fly-by-night operator, both of which I’ve come across quite often.
I’ve not come across such good use of the mass media which actually works. There are these science lessons on some obscure radio station I’ve come across in Bangalore, and radio doctor programmes, but I’ve not seen any equivalent for television. And for just that, the Baba has my *respect* .
His views on homosexuality are unfortunate and questionable to say the least, and deserve much ridicule, but are not uncommon; I’m willing to bet over half of the urban educated folk who ridicule those views of his are homophobic to some (great) degree.
Going over his asking for death penalties for corruption and stuff, I fully agree he doesn’t know what he’s going on about. There are tons of articles lampooning his seemingly unreasonable demands, and it’s pretty easy to come up with a www.ramdevwants.com on the lines of chucknorrisfacts or schneierfacts, ['item #23416: Baba Ramdev wants a One Macbook Per Child project subsidized by the government'], but I strangely don’t want to do that [But if you do, please do credit me on the website]. There’s a saying by Tina Fey that if you aim for the moon, you’ll atleast get to Houston. [No, she didn't say that, I did, yesterday when I was discussing politics in a state of half-sleep]. If you want a bicycle, you need to ask for an Activa.
You need to put forth unreasonable demands so that the majority of the nation feels ‘OMG, that’s crazy, he should be asking for [list of more reasonable demands]‘. If you put forth just [list of reasonable demands], no one, least of all, the media, is going to notice it. And in this era of information explosion, I can personally testify that you don’t hear about stuff unless it is very good or very bad. If you want to capture the imagination of the nation, you have to be outrageous. You have to out-crazy the craziness the media generally follows.
Additionally, even in spite of demands that completely make no sense, he has such a lot of support. That is because it provides a lot of people a way to channel the outrage they feel, especially since those areas are where the government and bureaucracy matters and corruption affects whom much more than it matters to those of us in big cities. Such a grassroots-level mass uprising hasn’t happened in a long while, and it’s long overdue especially given what the center is doing to us in its UPA-II avatar.  Such a public show of support for an idea is essential to nudge the middle class out of its complacence.
Now I certainly don’t support death penalty for corrupt people. But I also don’t support all the outrage that was spilled when Ram Jethmalani agreed to be Manu Sharma’s lawyer. The defining bit of a democracy is that people have liberty to go wrong, and be assumed innocent till they are proven guilty. To err is human and everyone could do with a chance to better themselves, and every punishment should fit the crime. In that way, the trial-by-media that ensued after Jessica Lall’s murder was no different from a lynch mob or a khap.
There’s got to be these incidents that let a democracy blow off steam and let them know what they feel deep inside. It’ll be crazy, it’ll be asking too much, it’ll be completely unreal. But it needs to happen. You need the crazy ideas and exaggerations to drive home the points, to soften people up to listening to the saner ideas. Like in Stranger in a Strange land, to get the nurse to put a single bug on the alien’s door, the reporter gives a chapter-long list of possible doomsday-ish scenarios.

Now I’ll sincerely hope the Baba doesn’t take to standing in elections or anything like that; the last thing we want is the anti-Congress votes being split. But we certainly require incidents like this to serve as our wake up calls, especially at a time when people think their duty is over when they ‘Like’ a Facebook community against corruption. Maybe one day it’ll strike us all that when we say “Yeah, the Lokpal proposals are outrageous, but they can certainly be improved’, that we can also similarly ‘improve’ existing laws and provisions against corruption and other things, such that a Lokpal Bill won’t even be necessary. Maybe it’ll dawn upon us that we can have a Uniform Civil Code. Or a stronger anti-terrorism law. Or make it easier for entrepreneurs to set up new businesses. Or build newer and better roads. Or strengthen primary education.

PS: What happened to that Lead India guy, RK Misra? He seemed to be one of those street-smart fellas who knew to play to the gallery while making his points heard… I totally enjoyed him on a panel discussion at NITK. He joined BJP I know, but we haven’t heard a peep out of him since then…. what’s he doing now?

PPS: I wonder what Dr. Rajeev Gowda’s opinions on Jairam Ramesh’s ‘IIMs Suck’ comments are. I ask for Dr. Rajeev Gowda because he’s a Congress guy, while also being a prof at IIMB (and an excellent quizzer too).. his perspective would be an interesting and enlightening one. Did no mediapersons think of posing this question to him?

CS-boom-de-ah-dah OR I Love Computer Science.

So I chanced up on this Youtube vid of Discovery Channel’s ‘The World is Awesome’.  XKCD had its own lyrics to it. Someone (actually many someones) made videos of it. Given that the original is a camping song called I love the mountains or Boom-de-ah-da, it’s the sort of song to which you MUST add your own lyrics and sing it either while going on a long bus trip or around the campfire. Somewhat like Suraaaaaangani  - no one remembers the original lyrics, so everyone makes up stuff, chorusing only on the ‘maalu maalu maalu‘ bits.

And so I came up with ComputerSciencey words to the original tune. Given that this is all off the top of my head, I’ve not animated it or cartoon’d it (though I have vivid images in my head of what could be done), though I’d be delighted if someone did that and raised me to XKCD-level kvlt-ness.

Here goes. Additions, corrections, animations are all welcome.

I love regression
I love the Bayesian Nets
I love SVMs
I love the convex sets
I love the whole world
And all the ways to learn
Boom-de-yada Boom-de-yada
Boom-de-yada Boom-de-yada

I love XML
I love DBMS
I love big data
I love Open Access
I love the whole world
And all the data tombs
Boom-de-yada Boom-de-yada
Boom-de-yada Boom-de-yada

I love all fractals
I like combinatorics
I love upperbounds
I love a sort that’s quick
I love the whole world
So much complexity
Boom-de-yada Boom-de-yada
Boom-de-yada Boom-de-yada

I love wired networks
And data on the cloud
I love peer-to-peer
And speeds in gigabaud
I love the whole world
So much connectedness
Boom-de-yada Boom-de-yada
Boom-de-yada Boom-de-yada

I’m actually seeing in my head the faces of profs and grad students and labs which could be singing this, possibly in an ad for the Compsci department of some university.

There, my nerd-cred and nerd-karma quotas for life are fulfilled.

Non-Objective Reviews – Bossypants, ChungKing Express, Saat Khoon Maaf, Blue Oranges

I’ve been exceedingly tied up with this and that and god alone knows what else, though I feel like I’ve not gotten any darn thing done. But over the past couple of months, I’ve managed to watch and read stuff.
Most of it has been random shite I wouldn’t rewatch or reread. But some stuff has penetrated my numb skull and made an impression on me. I’m a sucker for small details which I don’t explicitly notice, but which give me a glimpse of a feeling of something, somewhere I want to be. A flick of the wrist, a hint of jealousy in a voice, some microexpression, pastel colour schemes… they don’t even register, but go on to hit me like a ton of bricks, drawing the seemingly arbitrary line between “good” and “godawesome”.
So… here goes.

Blue Oranges
I hunted this one up just for the title. It sounded genuinely hatke. It’s a whodunit, with Rajit Kapoor as the detective, only it’s more Roger Akroyd and Poirot’s Last Case than his well-known Byomkesh Bakshi. It is shot very well, the white balance makes the images very sharp. And the characters apart from Rajit Kapoor and Rati Agnihotri aren’t known faces. Due to this, it genuinely feels like a whodunit… you can’t assume anything about any of the characters, you’ll be willing to go wherever the story takes you.

Saat Khoon Maaf
This movie sort of lived up to expectations, though watching a bad print sort of dilutes the experience. But what I liked the best was not Priyanka Chopra’s performance, though she does do well here. It was the characters of the servants – the butler, Usha Uthup and the dwarf jockey which gave it a real feel for me. When the butler is poisoned, it sort of hit home for me, the evilness of Naseeruddin Shah’s character. Usually the support staff in any movie are either just in the background and nothing happens to them; they are in the same state in the end as in the beginning, or their deaths are inconsequential, some sort of a sideshow. But here, it’s a turning point in the movie. Whoa.
And Vivaan Shah. The character of the narrator was so incredibly well-etched. The dark way in which he talks about each death in a casual way mirrors the sort of feel in the original Susanna’s Seven Husbands story, where the narrator is just a bystander, but the muffled irritation he has to every husband of Susanna’s (and is conveying the same to his wife) earns my empathy, makes the story personal in a way going deeper in to Susanna’s mind couldn’t have.

Bossypants:
Tina Fey’s memoir. It’s not a bodice-ripping tell-all tale or anything. It’s exactly what you expect from a comedy writer. She writes about her early life, her path to SNL, life at SNL, 30Rock, playing Sarah Palin.. and then reflecting on her life, child(ren)…. the stories aren’t spicy or edge-of-seat. But it’s the way she writes them that keeps you glued to the book. Her writing style when she is trying to be funny is reminiscent of Woody Allen. When she’s not being all WoodyAlleny, she has a very conversational, stream-of-consciousness way of writing. You can as well imagine her saying these things on some talk show or the other. Her pragmatic approach to feminism appealed to me, mainly because I haven’t heard these sorts of points of view elsewhere, and it gives my (very similar) points of view some validation.
I’ve always found Tina Fey pretty, and wondered where all those ugly-jokes came from – on 30Rock, everyone makes derisive references to her looks including herself, and she herself talks about her looks in a self-deprecating way. That, mind you, was a little unsettling… it felt like she was just playing the Geek Girl card while being Hollywood-ugly (the sort who only needs to take off her glasses to look like a leading lady), not real-ugly. But only until I saw what she looked like before she began doing Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live… overweight, badly-dressed, with a haircut that didn’t quite suit her… and realized, well, she does know what she’s going on about; it’s not just exploitation.
This gives her a self-deprecating yet mean and nasty sort of a sense of humour, that is enchantingly delightful. She disses Paris Hilton, she disses random people on the Internet who’ve left nasty comments about her… you don’t always want to agree with her, but her insults are fun to hear and file away in memory to use sometime later.

Chungking Express
This is a famous movie, apparently. It’s one of those very few Chinese movies famous outside of China which aren’t about martial arts… here, you must keep in mind that the only Chinese movies I’ve watched are Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and those ones dubbed in Tamil that show on Vijay TV on Sundays.
This one’s made in and set in Hong Kong. It’s got two stories, told one after the other, and they pretty much don’t intersect except for one brief moment.
The stories are normal, usual, whatever you call it…. they didn’t much make an impact on me. What did was the dialogues… my favourite is where one of the protagonists is arguing with the cashier in a departmental store about the feelings of a can of pineapple. The cinematography is good too. It gives me a feeling of deja vu; I seem to have seen this movie before I came to UCI – When I was at Hong Kong airport for my transit, this was one of the first shots I took, and the movie seems to look like that, only much more ’90s-looking and with better white balance and contrast.
Yeah, the dialogues are good, but I think the poignancy in the movie comes from the heckuva lot of stuff that is left unsaid. It’s been ages since I’ve watched a movie with latent emotion portrayed in a believable way. You know that scene in Sarkar where AB senior and AB junior realize that Kay Kay Menon is the one who betrayed them or something? That whole scene passes without a single word, just ominous background score and ‘powerful’ glances exchanged between them. That’s ‘latent emotion’ alright, but I didn’t find it one bit believable…. it came off as too forced.
In the climax of Chungking Express, he asks her if they would accept a boarding pass that looks like the one she gave him a year back, and then she says a very casual ‘maybe’ after which she writes him a new boarding pass on a tissue… that scene to me was pure magic.
And, of course, the strains of California Dreaming playing throughout the second half… I liked very much.

I liked the first story much better than the second one. Maybe because like the protagonist there, my twenty-fifth birthday isn’t all that far away. Maybe because of the pineapple dialogue. Maybe because of the pithy philosophy he spouts while nursing a broken heart, same as I do even when not nursing a broken heart – “Running is good. The body loses so much fluid when you run so that there’s none left for tears”. Maybe because Takeshi Kaneishiro is way better looking than Tony Leung. Maybe because on some days, I feel like Brigette Lin, with the whole world against me and so tired that I want to just sleep, though I might not remember to wish people on their birthdays when I wake up. Maybe because I found Faye Wong’s character in the second half way too creepy and stalkerly… maybe a few years back, I’d've found her character as alluring and enigmatic as the director wants you to think she is, but all I feel now is she is crazy, creepy and needs a restraining order.

After watching this flick, I’ve pretty much made up my mind that I’m going to fly to India the next time transiting at Hong Kong, with a really really really long layover and a transit visa. And take pictures of the streets and neon lights downtown at night. And edit them to make them seem as psychedelic as possible without making it look like Tokyo….thinking of which city gives me the shudders; the ghost of the Ryu Murakami books I’ve read so far still refuse to stop haunting me.

I’ll leave you with a clip of Quentin Tarantino talking about Chungking Express.

Sixer

No, this post is not about cricket. It is instead about this blog turning six years old. It now needs to be enrolled in school, told to not talk too much, and needs to learn how to face the big bad world.

Many people have asked me how this blog started. No, actually not many have, but I like to say so just so that I can fall into more nostalgia. It was first year at NITK, and I was reading The Hindu in Tuhina’s room on a late Sunday afternoon, I think. There was an article about blogging in the supplement – remember this was 2005, people said ‘Wow’ if you said you wrote a blog. We thought it’d be a good idea to have one of those. I don’t know why it seemed like a good idea to do it together, but I’m glad we did. And here we are.

We’ve really come a long way since then. The folks who were the rebels of back then have sold out to the system now. Not us, mind you, I for one didn’t care enough to walk off the beaten path. I doubt I’d spare a glance today for those I considered my heroes and heroines back then – Shashi Tharoor for one, Arundati Roy for another. To use big words, I’d say both of us have found our own voice by now, sort of, and it’s not the crazy ranting voice that says “What’s wrong is the entire SYSTEM”, for everything from a stubbed toe to the 2G Scam, like we were afraid back then.

We’ve made our peace with the ‘System’, and those that exploited the ‘System’. The Mumbai train attacks turned me into a raging rightist, but it seems like I’ve made my peace with that as well, and I’ve read so much raging on the Internet since then that I seriously doubt any doomsday-prophecy sort of piece will ruffle me now, be it about the state of research or Reservations or anything. We now love the whole world and all its messed-up folk. And that does not necessarily mean we have to be nice to everyone.

One thing I’ve never brought up in all these years on the blog is about ‘Being a woman on the Internet’. Or simply, bringing attention to the fact that we are girls writing this blog. And I’m glad we had that unspoken, unwritten rule on during our most awkward years…. when I read the blogs of much-younger girls who haven’t been out here long enough, I feel a shudder for all that could have possibly gone wrong for me if I’d written like that. That’s not necessarily true for every girl on the blogosphere, but knowing me, I know things could go seriously wrong if I write like that. And why do I bring it up now? Because while I’m still school-going now, I don’t think I’m all that impressionable and vulnerable, and frankly it’s hard to harass someone via a blog now when there are so many other realtime webapps available for that. And um, we also have seen enough trolls that if we’re feeding one, it’s because we have too much time on our hands.

It would be easy for me to diss those little blogging girls for taking us back by 200 years, for using Blogger and WordPress like a matrimonial service and for doing the damsel-in-distress act and all that, but while I knew at the back of my head that dissing is not the right thing to do, this episode of 30 Rock puts it all in perspective for me. It’s not right to expect everyone with two X chromosomes to speak for all of womankind, and it is plain stupid to think every woman represents all women. And while doing so in real life is by itself idiotic, bringing those rules online is even worse. This whole ‘all of us gals should band together and stick up for each other’ thing is probably relevant maybe on a workshop floor, but not on the Internet, because women have been represented on the Net in real-world-esque proportions since about 2000. So I think it’s okay to hate some women bloggers just because they aren’t very nice people, and I think all those ‘A woman is a woman’s worst enemy’ or ‘You girls tear each other down’ sort of lines are unwarranted for.

[Aside: I've been quite taken in with Tina Fey for quite a while now, especially more so since her book, Bossypants came out, and the number of talk shows she was featured in just rose up exponentially. Read the book. She's very funny. Overall, her writing feels very like Woody Allen... I was reminded of Without Feathers in a lot of places.]

I also realize I’ve put in a lot of Tambrahm-this and Tambrahm-that into this blog. Given that Tambrahmness is the current flavour of the season, what with all the Rage comics and all, and the Indian comedy scene I follow is being dominated by Tambrahms who very nicely appropriate every single thing that can be exploited for humour into ‘Tambrahm culture’, I declare I’m sick of it, and as a mark of protest, I renounce the self-identification and henceforth am just someone who speaks Tamil as badly as I speak Kannada, and who’s a Bangalorean. Because the next stage in every such cultification is going to be “You are not Tam enough” or something, and heck, I don’t want to be Tam if it means segregation of the Sathyabhama sort and general desponess that follows, or the total murder of the language or a choice between being stubborn about your community or totally rebelling… I prefer being a wannabe Kannadiga any day. And I thought of what if every community had their own Rage comic, and decided the idea of caste-based rage is sick unless you are raging against caste being relevant in anything…. so no more Brahm either, unless you mean Brahms the composer. I would say Bangalorean-GeneralMerit, but that doesn’t sound cool enough. So, to hell with it, I say.

I sometimes wonder how appropriate it is to put up so much of my life out online. What if I become famous one day… If I’m on any independent Bill-drafting committee, will stuff from here come to bite me in the back? Am I digging my own grave by giving out so many details that anyone can misuse? Or, going the other way, am I not using this space enough? When I go through rough patches in research, shouldn’t I try reaching out people who might be able to help me get out of my own way by using this platform? Shouldn’t I use this to enforce some accountability in myself, like in Julie and Julia?

I wonder what has come of six years of blogging. For me, yeah, surely, it’s been great venting out here, it’s been great organizing my thoughts, and getting to be less of a bad writer, and it’s surely been great making acquaintances with people who were somehow tricked into commenting here. When I went through a bit of a bad phase a few months back, I was really overwhelmed by the positivity people showered on me. And it sometimes gives me a high when I interview for a job and the interviewer tells me he (they have always been male except in two interviews and those two nice ladies didn’t give any indications of having read this space) enjoyed reading my blog. But what have I given back? I’ve not had memes to my name. I haven’t coined insulting terms for other people that have caught on greatly (though I suspect I’ve in my own modest way propagated the use of the term amit_123). I wonder sometimes why people read me if they aren’t some insane stalkers or schadenfreuders. No, really. I’m not fishing for compliments here, that thought really does cross my mind. Then I figure out it’s timepass, just like those close-to-150 feeds I subscribe to on Google Reader.

I ritually thank my readers and frequent commenters by name every year, but heck, none of you lurkers comment and I have no idea who all you no doubt wonderful people are. So yeah, if you’re reading this, especially if you’re reading this on a feed reader, I thank you for all your support. Even more so if you’ve been my big brother/big sister on cyberspace and watched out for me and informed me of my faux pas before it got really bad… you folks know who you are.

And just as ritually, I mention Goddess Saraswati. Education has been my priority for literally all my life now, and I pray learning new things and using the power of the written word always stay with me, and bring me my good fortune. And given that I would soon be for sure stepping into the real world, I pray this time to Goddess Lakshmi as well.

And…. all I have left to say is Thanks for Reading.

Longvage Rage

Everybody acts like angry-angry these days. Everytime I open the shoshal medias minns, some hajaar ‘rage’ links I am the finding. The Kongas will rage minns everyone is monkey-see-monkey-doing, with all the stick-figure comics itsimms. Even small child in nursery school is drawing better. That too such stuppid-stuppid jokes – if the Brahmin is doing the koffings also one comic will come off for that. Wateveritis pa. Who is this Krish Ashok fello, I say? He is the Krish Srikkanth’s brether or the cousins or what?

If peepals are lazy to draw comics minns, they are writing blogs with byaaaaad Ingleesh like this one and this one. Madofellows. That also just chumma, they wantedly write bad longvage. All these rich-rich chilrans with costly-costly laptops and studied in caarment schools will sit and think and use the google and the yahoo and the bing to write in butler ingleesh. I am thinking, this will become off meme in twellaars time and all these fellows who want to study in the forin will write a proper-inglish-to-butler-inglish translator so that they will become off famous and can jamba-hachkofy on their resyooms.

Ok, once minns funny, twice minns funny, but thrice, frice, fice? Madofellows. Again-again same wordings, again-again not finding new butler words because you never speaking in the butler inglish since 2nd standar, your caarment-school Dingo Inglish-miss is slapping you if you are murdering her Queen’s longvage, and even your PT Master in your caarment school is speaking Inglish like Britisher because when small, his fother was watchman in Britisher’s bangla. And so you are trying to do the direct translation from the mother tongue longvage to ingleesh. But that is not the butleringleesh at all. No, Not, Never.

I am asking to this peepal, why your mummy-daddy send you to caarment? For your learning the good-english and speaking in tass-puss accent only no? From when you are child, your Basavappa unckal and Jagadamba aunty will come minns your mummy will say ‘beta, talk in English and show to uncle-aunty’ and then feeling proudly when they are giving you the fivestars and dairy milk no? When you are settle in forin minns, what you will show off your chilrans to your frands? “Oh my Chintu, he speaks so awesomely in Butler-English ya”, like that you will say-va? I know, I know all about you – you will say also like that, and you will record it also and put it on Youtube also, the dog’s tail is always curved.

This is a funny world, no? So many chilrans who are studying in the Vernacular-medium schools in Controlment-area will try to speak like all tass-puss, even when their frands are teasing them saying “Ey this Vijetha ya, she is sooo tass-puss, something and all long-long words she uses ya”, and they will go also to Prakruthi Banwasi’s Spoken English Coaching. But for you peepal, it is jokey to speak like this, it is a break from speaking all tass-puss in real life, and doing even more tass-puss when you have anyone who is looking forin. My frand also one fellow he used to do like this for some cute girl he is thinking she is Chainis girl, but then she is Mizo and is loffing. My one more frand, she is having the skin-problem so she is looking like the Britisher, and is beautier than Miss India only, she is always daily coming and telling, “Ei Priya, this fellow in bus ya, trying to talk in American-bhaashe to me”. If you see one Gowramma-type girl minns you will go talk to her in butler english-va?

In Mahanadi fillam, after the Sriranga Ranganatha song that scene is there no, where that girl is speaking one English essay and Kamalagaasan’s frand is videoing it,  if Kamalagaasan had Internet and Youtube, he would put his daater’s inglish-speaking video there. But you with Youtube and internet will put off your chilran’s butler-Inglish video there.

I am also in forin only. I am also speaking the good Inglish, even in 4th standar, my teacher is saying “See the Priya talking the Inglish, all you should learn like her only”. My mummy-daddy will feel Aiyo what we have done, if they read this post, but they feel Aiyo what we have done for most things I do anyway. But when I am in the deep talkings with my sister and cousins and all, we are all the talking like this only. It is not jokey for us, it is mamool only, it is our comfortzone. But all you caarment type peepals, for you all this is joke, this is museum piece, this is like the zoo-visiting. Even in your sleep you are speaking in tass-puss accent, like that jana you are. You have none of the rights to make fun of our bhaashe, our culture. What, you are going to the African-American man and making the grape soda jokings uh?

PS 1: I just hope this doesn’t spawn more butler-english posts. I’m sure it won’t, but just indulge me in my grand delusions of being able to affect public opinion, will ya?

PS 2: Here’s to the post with the most number of squiggly red underlines ever.

PS 3: I hereby dedicate this post to the PT Master at my school, Jagannath Sir, whose voice has been dictating this post in my head. And also to all PT Masters, including the one in my sister’s school who said “Once minns ok, twice minns ok, but thrice, frice, fice?”. They are the true guardians of Butler English.

PS 4: Prakruthi Banwasi, in case you get to read this, jnaapka idiya, sir? And, for the uninitiated, Prakruthi Banwasi conducts awesome spoken English classes in Bangalore.

PS 5: You ain’t butlering englishing unless and until you’ve been through this guide.

My Experiments with Food and Fasting

Folks who know me from childhood will assert I was not an easy child to feed. My mother and her mother struggled hard to keep me well-nutritioned. In fact, my mother has so much practice that I’m pretty confident if she was on the UPA’s side, by now Anna Hazare would have quit crying about Lokpal or another one of his imaginary pals and go to sleep well-fed.

All that exposure to wholesome food is hard to get over. I’ve always eaten well save second year at NITK… It’s impossible to get unused to filling your craw every few hours with something or the other. Which is why my desk drawer always, always has some assortment of junk food and my fridge is well-stocked. Touchwood. I can’t for the heck of me fast.The system is always being fed at regular intervals. It doesn’t stock up on adipose because there’s no need to; the next source of energy will not be long in coming.

But a couple of weeks back, I’d just gotten done with a killer course and wanted to let myself off a few days, where I could just sleep and eat and watch movies and all that. I did end up watching a lot of chickflicks. Which is why I didn’t sleep much more than usual. But eat….. ahh…. that’s a story.

Living by yourself (or with a roommate whose culinary requirements are way different from yours) means nothing moves unless you move it. And your larder will not be stocked unless you stock it. And food will not magically appear until you make it. But given that I had resigned myself to a vegetative state, I wasn’t too enthusiastic about all the dosas, uthappams, sandwiches, burritos, palyas and other things I usually am enthusiastic about, and that increased how lazy I was to even eat. I think I had only about 33% of what I had everyday. So while I wasn’t technically fasting, for my body, which rings its alarm bells rather loudly at regular intervals, it was a reasonable approximation.

The point is, there was no lasting damage to me or my appetite or anything. I did feel weak after I got bored of the movies, but it wasn’t anything one square meal couldn’t fix. I’m sure if I was outside for a greater part of the day, I would have groaned in hunger and taken refuge in pizza, but given that all I was doing was wasting time on the Internet, watching movies and talking to friends, my calorie intake pretty much sufficed.

So I find it hard to figure out why the government caved in so early to Anna Hazare’s blackmail. I mean, this guy has made a career out of threatening to go hungry. He’s used to days without food. What’s more, he was in the damn Army, and I’m pretty sure their constitutions are sturdier than mine, and they’ll be used to standing in the sun without food for hours on end. So…. his threat doesn’t really strike me as a threat. More so since people of less sturdier constitutions go hungry not by their own will but because they don’t have the resources to procure food, and still continue to survive. Agreed, Anna Hazare is thrice my age, but I’m the desk job person who has to actually try to gain weight and goes to the rec center just so that I don’t forget what it is to run, and he is the one who has built a model village with his own hands.

The trick to starving well is to not remind yourself or your body that you need food. You need to keep yourself distracted, but not too active. You shouldn’t indulge in tasks that require much physical exertion or mental flexing. So solving differential equations is out, as is taking a long walk in the sun. Even more so, you shouldn’t indulge in this for more than maybe a few minutes at a time. Ideally, you would have to breathe correctly from your stomach to keep the circulation to your brain up so that you don’t get a headache from the lack of food, and to not tire your eyes, it would be helpful to go into a vegetative – oops – meditative state.

Now what exactly do these fasters do that violate these things? They sit in a public place, that’s it. They might make speeches, but that just keeps them distracted and not thinking about the food. They pretty much suspend their day-to-day activities. And they aren’t even exposed to the hot sun; their followers make sure of that. People, the sun is the biggest enemy to lack of food. The hotter your head gets, the hungrier you get. If you are not facing the sun, half your troubles are avoided while fasting. And I suppose no one watching the show would even be eating. I dare Anna Hazare to carry on his fast-unt0-death in a crowded restaurant, where the smell of well-cooked food assails his nostrils. Or to do his day-to-day work while not eating a morsel… that makes sense.

When we think of hunger strike, we think of the said person requiring the number of calories we require on a day when we’re going about doing our work. It doesn’t strike us that someone who is just sitting around in a comfortable environment requires far lesser number of calories and hence the not eating doesn’t affect them as much as we think it does.

On a related note, I suppose everyone assumes Gandhi had his simple diet which did not consist of milk or sweets or anything ostentatious. ‘He lived on fruits’ sounds so austere. I used to assume that too, until I came across some magazine where a former assistant of Gandhi’s was talking about his last day. The description of the morning meal baffled me. True, it consisted only of fruits, but heck, how much? Five oranges, three large tomatoes, several apples and a bunch of bananas to finish off, along with some juice as well. And possibly goat’s milk to tide over that technicality of his not having cow’s milk, but I’m not sure that was included. I sometimes have a single banana with milk for breakfast when I’m late for class, and I know several people who go without breakfast.

Till age 14, I could not imagine myself ever observing Ekadashi fasts – no grains in diet, but it turned out, the no grains is a technicality to be tided over – you can as easily have delicacies made of sabudana, as I learnt from a pro-at-ekadashi-fasts sort of person. Apart from the litres of milk and the kilograms of fruits, of course.

So heck, the next time someone says “He’s on a diet of onlyyyy fruits and still is so active!”, I’m going to sock them one. Even though it’ll be a rather weak punch because I only eat cereals, vegetables, lentils and junk…. beat this… my sister and I quit junk food for a while and snacked only on fruits, and it turned out we felt less lethargic, more active and more alert, even without coffee or Red Bull. Or maybe especially without.

The point I make after 1200 words here is, hunger strike is not a big deal until you’re at it for a week or something, if you are not indulging in any activity during it. All that it serves is to publicize your cause.

But even that is pretty suspect…. Irom Sharmila has been hungerstriking and has been force-fed for 10 years now, and the media is pretty tired and is pretty much ignoring her and her cause. And hunger strikes don’t always work…. which is why they are not so common. And read this piece by Manu Joseph, it’s pretty harsh on Anna Hazare, but it points out that he does the hunger thing mainly because he seeks publicity for his causes. I mean, if not the publicity surrounding him, why else will the country bother about yet another person dying of hunger?

Where were you when India won the World Cup?

I woke up from a seeming stupor at 7:45 am, and the last thing I remembered was closing my eyes during the 9th over of the SL innings for ‘two minutes’. Webcric’s feed was intermittent and I ended up following the match on cricinfo, and somehow wasn’t ‘in the worldcup final mood’, and thought I’d just go running. But then when I’d changed, I thought I’d just check the score before I left…. it was the 40th over by then, and things were looking pretty exciting, and the feed came back on.

I’m still here in my running clothes, hungry as ever because I haven’t yet had breakfast, feeling glad for not missing such a nailbiting few overs.

AND OUR WIN.

I am the sort of person who starts tensing up when I see the number of runs to win greater than or equal to the number of balls to hit it off. And the batsmen weren’t doing much to improve that. I prayed for a four and a six to just ease my tension. And then two magical overs. 11 runs off each of them.

And then we needed four runs to win. Dhoni finished it off with an old-style six. And history was made.

I’d all but quit watching cricket after the final of 2003… I just lost interest. The hype around the last two matches have brought it back on. Now I think I’ll restart OD-ing on cricket. Yes, Mr. Aakar Patel I’m a fickle Indian fan, and I didn’t just ‘clap clap clap’ when India won.

I missed the sound of firecrackers and wild screams and cheering while watching the match and am quite pissed that this had to happen when I’m not in India.

Was sort of glad, though, for the folks I follow on Twitter. You folks made my World Cup, even though I whined to high heavens about my timeline getting messed up every single time there was a match on.

Like Mohan said, “When averaged over the world population, this must be among the most euphoric moments in mankind’s history”.

And, just because I want to… WE WON WE WON WE WON WOOOHOOOO!!! WEEEEE ARE THE CHAAAAAMPIONS.

And Sachin finally got to kiss the World Cup. The world can end now in 2012 and India will go down happy.

 

Given the historicity of this moment, how did you bring it in? Who were you watching the match with? Were you watching the match? Did you hold your pee for five overs straight? What were you munching? Were you wearing some Bleed Blue merchandise? Did you have Facebook open? Were you livetweeting your every emotion? Tell me in the comments. I want to preserve this moment forever.