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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

“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?

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?

More in a few weeks.

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!

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.

Filed under: analysis, geek, Review, travel Tagged: google plus, san francisco ]]> http://thenitknumbskulls.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/google-plus-san-francisco-and-everything-else/feed/ 3 wanderlust