The Unknown Indian

George Carlin: Religion is Bullshit

2010-01-07T05:46:00.002+05:30

Funny as hell, even if there isn't one.

R.I.P. Tanta

2008-12-01T18:48:00.000+05:30

Doris Dungey, or "Tanta" of Calculated Risk fame, passed away on Sunday in Columbus, Ohio. She died of ovarian cancer, aged 47.

Tanta's posts educated me about the U.S. mortgage market, and her "Ubernerd" posts have been phenomenal. She was a remarkable teacher, and she's inspired people all over the world, me included.

This is indeed a sad day. Rest in Peace, Tanta. You will live on, in our hearts. Truly, today, we are all subprime.

LeT headquarters found!

2008-11-30T11:27:00.000+05:30

I found the headquarters of the Lashkar-e-Toiba! It's here, as per wikimapia:

And that, on a bigger scale, is here:

I'm just kidding. But our army must have better resolution, no? There's a runway close by, a hospital that looks like a camp and all.

Pakistan meets India much to Mushy's chagrin

2007-11-20T21:33:00.001+05:30

Or so this video will reveal:

Al Gore, Cows and the Environment

2007-11-10T12:51:00.000+05:30

Stephen Dubner at the Freakonomics Blog wonders about the irony of an email he gets:

An e-mail just turned up in my in-box. It was clearly selling something, and the text ended with the following thoughtful note:

Please consider the environment — do you really need to print this e-mail?

And what, you ask, was the e-mail selling?

Private jet travel.

The funny part are the following comments:

#1. Hilariously hypocritical. Like Al Gore grilling up a juicy steak before his recent interview with Rolling Stone Magazine on global warming. (Methane from cows being one of the leading green house gases)

— Posted by Jason

#8.“(Methane from cows being one of the leading green house gases)”

ok, what IS the leading greenhouse gas of the day? because i’ve heard all sorts of things including concrete plants and cars?

— Posted by erg

#9. Leave the cows alone. What is the largest producer of methane gas in the world today? Sorry for spoiling the day for you vegan Central Park conservationists, but it’s plants and trees.

— Posted by Ralph J
#10. The leading greehouse gas of the day is, believe it or not, water vapor.

— Posted by Ralph J

#14. The leading greenhouse gas of the day is, believe it or not, Barry Manilow.

— Posted by Tom Jones

#16. Tom, that is spurious and you know it!

— Posted by Barry Manilow

#21. I hear Al Gore inhales oxygen, and guess what he exhales: carbon dioxide!

What a hypocrite…

— Posted by JT

Yeah, I'm back. Sort of.

It's a boy!

2007-02-18T13:29:00.000+05:30

Sunila and I are proud and extremely happy to announce the arrival of our son on 14th Feb 2007. He weighed 2.96 kgs and was born at 3:13 PM. He took one look at the world and asked, in a vigorously loud manner , to be put right back in - and for some reason, the doctors were very happy he was screaming. Crying is good, they said. I cannot understand what medicine does to people.

He's adorable. We're going to name him Varun. Varun Shenoy. He was born on Valentine's day, which means he's going to have to spend his birthday GIVING out gifts rather than getting them, unless he becomes a handsome hunk (like me). He's already quite a looker:

(Click on it - you'll see more)

Yes, I'm a dad now. These are exciting times for us; and I'm so happy I cannot describe it in words. One thing I do know: I was with Sunila through labour and during delivery - if anyone says men are the superior sex, I will slap them right across the face.

We're back home now, after three days in the hospital, and I'm already changing nappies like a professional. Everything else in my life can wait; this is the most wonderful thing that has happened to me, and my top 3 priorities are family, family and yes, family. Life is beautiful!

Tagged in the back

2007-01-24T14:09:00.000+05:30

Chailey1418 has tagged me. The idea is to write five things about yourself and pass the buck.

This is the bloggers equivalent of Multi-Level Marketing,the Tupperware and Amway of blogging. You pay in the form of having to write a full blog entry about this stuff, and revealing your deep dark inner secrets, actually believing that somebody will give a damn. Either that or its so funny they'll read it anyways.

So if you're expecting a fantastic revelation of how I conquered the Amazon basin and the lower congo in one day, this is not the place for you. Or if you wanted to hear about when I had a lump in my throat watching a young sheep die from overgrazing or whatever it is they die of, this is not the place for you.

1) I had shaved my eyebrows when I was a kid. I wanted to be Mr. Spock. So I was ass-whupped by the senior authorities at home and had to put kaajal where the hair hitherto resided.

2) My dad's surname was Murthy and his father was a Rao. Don't ask, I don't know.

3) I started Agni Software in 1998, with a few friends. I was 23, just a year or so out of college, clueless and penniless.

4) I was "most talented outgoing student" at KREC, Surathkal in '96.

5) My wife and I found each other online, on a freak post at 2 AM on a web portal. Thank goodness for the internet.

Well, I tag:
MadMan
Prabhu
~~Gautam~~
SuperManeesh
Amit

The Shilpa Shetty Chronicles

2007-01-19T16:56:00.000+05:30

So Shilpa Shetty is facing the heat, locked in a house for days with some other people. If you're locked in a frikking house for days with cameras all around you, you're bound to lose a few brain cells here and there, which is why some of the people in question got really aggro with Shetty; if you notice the behaviour of caged animals you might find they throw regular taunts at their neighbours, though you may not be qualified to understand the language.

The lost brain cells, however, are not only a feature of the occupants of the Big Brother mansion or whatever it is they call it. (Zoo would be better, but that's my opinion). TV viewers all over the world went frikking nuts because Shilpa cried on TV saying "Why does everyone hate me", with tons of them screaming "racism", "white supremacist bastards" and all that crap. Germaine Greer seems to have reduced cranial activity too, calling Shilpa a "tamil" which any Shetty worth her name would totally say "ijji" to.

Back in India, there are dharnas, processions and such. India loves protests and activism, for no apparent reason, and to no obvious end. Heck, we have a "traffic alert" today, on some people protesting the hanging of Saddam Hussein too. Wow. These guys must have one heckuva calendar:

10 AM : Protest hanging of Saddam Hussein
11 AM : Throw stones at people catching stray dogs
12 noon : Lunch + Agitation against highly priced vada sambar, goddamit.
1 PM : Join Relay Hunger Strike against company occupying farmers land. Note carefully that next time, at least find out name of company and not wear its T-Shirt.
3 PM : It's too hot, mate. Pass the hunger strike baton to the next person ("relay" hunger strike) and get a quick dosa+chai down
5 PM : Road march campaign against racism, carrying Shilpa Shetty Posters. Negotiate with leader and obtain miniskirt poster for taking home. Rakhi Sawant is now getting stale.
5:30 PM: Ask for the death penalty for racists. Oh, wait. That is "rapists". Not till tomorrow morning, 8 AM.
6 PM : Threaten to self-immolate. Search for reason.

Such is life, I guess, in a very boring sort of way.

Someone also mentioned this Shilpa Shetty episode in the UK Parliament, and all the suited politicians decided that racism was a bad thing. Then the official stenographer said, "what, obviousness struck you on the forehead just now? And what about Iraq, you numbskulls?" and in response, got fired for being racist. Because forehead pointed to "Indians" because they put bindis on them.

Kill all the stray dogs

2007-01-18T16:05:00.000+05:30

I'm incensed that stray dogs have killed a child in Bangalore. A pack of 15 dogs attacked and killed an 8 year old girl on Jan 5. An in Chandigarh, a 55 year old man was killed by strays.

Stray dogs are dogs without owners, who hang out on the streets like they frikking own them, and were always very violent towards other occupants of the road. They've attacked cyclists and motorbikes all the time. They are stupid enough to try to attack my car too (In response, I've unsuccessfuly attempted to run them over) But when they attack people and will KILL them, it's far beyond time to take action. It's time to wield arms and kill the bastards.

Oh there are animal lover organisations that don't like it one little bit. How can you kill dogs, they say. They're so lovable! Well, so are rats. Rats don't even bite you so much. I don't see no animal organisation asking people not to kill rats.

They also say that we don't own the frikking streets, we should share them with dogs. How about leopards? Just yesterday Mr. Spots appeared in the streets of Nasik and caught. I don't see animal organisations screaming about why we shouldn't be sharing our roads with leopards.

What do I hear you say? Leopards are WILD animals. Well so are stray dogs. In fact all dogs are wild - what makes them tame is only the fact that they have an owner who has the responsibility of keeping the dog from biting or killing someone. Stray dogs have no owner, so they're as wild as any other animal - in fact, any dog which joins a pack becomes ferocious.

The touted cure is to sterilize. Sterilization does not help. It's the fear that is the problem. Does a dog come with a big sign on it's frikking forehead saying "I have no testicles"? So how do you know a dog is sterile? And who's to say there isn't a chance a sterile animal won't be a grumpy bastard and attack a defenceless child anyways? Are you willing to let your children on the streets with this kind of fear?

Stray dogs cause far more damage to the environment than people think. A Indian express mentions:

Stray dogs are incredibly damaging to wildlife, killing untold numbers of monitor lizards, birds, snakes, and other wild creatures. No discerning environmentalist would want to trade our dwindling wildlife for a world of free-ranging feral domestic animals.

Read this article - it gives some amazing perspective.

Ald kill the goddamn stray dogs. All of them. Round them up and give them poisoned injections.

If anyone objects, put the dogs inside their house. Or, if you have the money, drive the dogs into the forest and throw them in there. If the activists can't take care of them, the dogs should just die. Why should our children suffer?

Okay, we may be able to do this in a slightly different way. By using squirrels.

What religion is your....

2007-01-17T16:19:00.000+05:30

Time and time again, the question has really baffled everyone: Are your private parts religious? "Krish" seems to think they might be, that you can have a religious dick. I am sincerely perturbed by this major rant which sounds more like, as they say in a language I know, "the man has a fly jumping around in his butt".

Basically Krish says : An atheist = no religion. Not just no god, but no religion also. Okay? I can see you're with me till now which is pretty good.

But, he says, the "blog kiddies" who he does not name but knows really well, are masquerading as atheists and in their lair, practicing black magic and voodoo, which are essentially religion, and therefore they cannot be atheists. Actually he did not say that, but it seems to sound better. That's how gossip starts, and man if you don't like religion, you don't want me starting about gossip.

Back to the program.

Mr. Krish is irked, peeved or otherwise majorly irritated by bloggers who rise up in arms against Christianity and Islam, and in the process, target the posterior of members of the aforementioned religions. ("kick the butt of Muslims and Christians") Specifically, those that claim Hinduism is the atheist way of life; and therefore hate everyone else of other religions. Indulging in such religion based hatred, he seems to say, is counterproductive to the atheist tag, a statement I cannot find fault with. If you takes the Hindu high road and propogates the anti-Islam or anti-Christian dogma, you are not an atheist no matter how many times you imprint it on your forehead.

But to protest the irrationalities of particular religions is fair game. I can protest against the Hindu Caste System, the Muslim Burqua, the Christian fear-of-embryonic-stem-cells and still retain the atheistic bent of mind. But if you equate my stand against certain religious beliefs as coming from someone who was born to a Hindu family and thus is biased against all other religions, I would ask you what you are smoking, mate.

(and to please give me some of it because this religion business is giving me a headache)

But Krish ends with "The moment religion enters your thought process, you cease to have any rational thinking." This is as stupid-ass as it gets because 1) his post is about religion so if this statement is true, the whole post is irrational, and 2) atheists are not necessarily rational, they are just atheists, gawddammit.

This would have just been another random post in the random world of blogs. But I wanted to write because the image of a "religious dick" was just hilarious.

You know there is a real estate bubble when...

2007-01-04T21:31:00.000+05:30

...you see something like this.

When chai wallas are trying to sell property, it's a bubble. "One by two tea please. And do you have any houses less than 40 lakhs?"

The dowry turnaround story

2006-12-27T13:24:00.000+05:30

Turns out that the dowry problem has reared its ugly head again. This time, Mr. Selvam, the demander of the dowry in question, hanged himself because his wife didn't get the money pronto.

Darwin's theory in action. Can we now have all the terrorists do this too, i.e. hang themselves? I'll pay for the rope.

Gender test

2006-12-21T11:16:00.000+05:30

"Indian Athlete fails Gender Test", screams the headlines. Santhi Soundarajan won a silver medal at Doha and them promptly failed a gender test, so they took back her (?) medal.

But there is something I do not quite get.

What the holy F is a gender test? Do they look inside your pant(ie)s for a visual obstruction? Or your chest for a couple of speed breakers? (Maybe that's why fat men are not athletes) Do they do the touchy-feely thing from the outside?

Or do they make you take online tests like this:

Which of the following most accurately describes you?

	I'm a real man.
	I'm a real woman.
	I'm not a real man or a real woman, but I'd like to be.
	None of the above. I'm something else entirely.

So if you click "C" or "D" they take back your medal.

The test statements say that Ms. S.S. "does not possess the sexual characteristics of a woman". If they got that from looking at a picture I will honestly say that this may apply to a lot of women in certain engineering colleges. We used to have a sexist joke in my college:

Why did Ethiopia get the drought and KREC get the girl's block? (the ladies hostel that is)
Because Ethiopia had the first choice.

Okay, not quite politically correct, so what. But I digress.

The medical team that did this "gender test" consists of "a gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist and internal medicine specialist", it seems.

Gynecologist, okay.
Endocrinologist, a complicated designation, but still okay.
Internal medicine specialist, uhmm. I think they invented that term yesterday.

What is a psychologist doing there? Testing if she had the mental make up of a woman? If anyone knows anything about women they will know that there is no standard mental make up of a woman. From chaos theory, the rule goes that you can never predict what will offend, excite, impress or otherwise affect any given woman at any given point in time, because of the butterfly effect, not necessarily in your stomach. Even if you are a woman. Even if you are THE woman in question, which is why endless phone discussions are about "I don't know why I was feeling that way".

If there is any recognition of this rule, chances are quite high that S.S. was, at that point, acting like a man, because she is a woman and can hormonally act any which way she pleases.

Now if they told me she went through a a simple chromosome test to find out if she's got XX or XY, that would be fine. Yet, they will choose psychologists to determine if a (tired) athlete is a woman, and that too, in an Arab country. Surprisingly stupid, no?

Theory: Maybe one of them tried to touch something they shouldn't have touched, and the penalty for that is that they cut your hands off, so it was probably better to decide she wasn't a woman in the first place. And to argue their case, we present Mr. Ram Jethmalani who says that she challenged their manhood, so they challenged her womanhood.

Ooh, it's started.

2006-12-20T16:56:00.000+05:30

So I mentioned earlier that IIPM's trying to use Wikipedia for marketing. A "Mrinal" had suddenly appeared on the scene, threatening to remove any elements that don't reflect IIPM's vast superiority over mere mortal business schools. Out of the blue, Mr. Mrinal, who does not log on to Wikipedia but names himself, ostensibly so that anyone can call himself/herself "Mrinal", had set a deadline - the Wikipedia page would be changed without mercy on December 10.

Probably the Delhi sealing held him up, but Mrinal is back now. And changing the IIPM page furiously because, let's face it, this is the #3 link when you search for "IIPM".

The talk page has his war cry:

Hi Makrand, I accept what you and Deepak are saying. I think that if we believe in freedom of expression without benchmarking it with others, then just the three of us can keep having a debate forever. But I appreciate your and Deepak's inputs. So I'll start making changes from this week onwards. If you don't like it, do please revert them. And if I don't like your reverts, I'll revert the same back. Let's go on doing that till we reach a negotiated conclusion (or one of us blinks first :-)). Best wishes, Take care, and let the reverts begin :-)

He's now made massive changes, removing all elements of the controversy. And when I revert, stating this is not acceptable, he goes and does it again. Three times today, already and probably starting a major revert war.

I'm not going to let them get away with this.

IIPM on two months notice

2006-12-15T22:00:00.000+05:30

Yes, beating this silly institution to death, but it seems that my earlier report that IIPM's premises was sealed has an addendum. It has been given two month's notice to "vacate its premises". And they've said they'll leave in two weeks, which, if I get the dates right, would have been December 1 or so.

Even if they haven't yet left, they have till January 17, 2007.

To recap, their premises was on land leased out from a welfare society in a non-commercial area and the courts ordered this office sealed on November 15, 2006.

A totally insufficient dowry

2006-12-08T23:20:00.000+05:30

This is rip-roaringly funny. Rolling on the floor funny. (And yes, I've been youtubed)

Torn. Fascinatingly Torn.

2006-12-06T19:29:00.000+05:30

Brilliant. I can imagine how much newsreaders on TV would like to do this.

Insane winters

2006-12-01T08:14:00.000+05:30

Why is it so frikking cold in Bangalore? I woke up at 6:30 and practically froze my neenies. This from a 90 kg individual who has survived, among other things, Norway. The problem with Bangalore right now is the daily range: my body is totally flummoxed. It's so hot in the day I need the A/C on full blast in the office. In the night, when it's time for our daily midnight walk, i can walk with a milk bottle (not that I do) and end up with ice cream.

And this whole global warming thing? I think it's happening. (Duh) When people are working it's frikking hot. And when they're asleep, hell freezes over. For it's supposed to be frozen over, just that all those working people have made it a furnace.

At this point, I have to stop and think if I want a furnace or a freezer.

Ok, thought.

I want one of the above. Either stay a furnace or a freezer. Don't f*** me up with both, at different times of the day.

And if you (Mr. Weather) behave like this when my baby arrives, I swear I will shut you up with enough heating and cooling equipment to make the devil lust. Equipment which, I've suddenly realised, is not going to be available in this city that has always had a temperature regulator named "Nature".

Who has, I think, left the building.

If you're still with me, watch this completely out-of-context video:

The Gift of the Magi

2006-11-23T23:39:00.000+05:30

O'Henry wrote one of the most fundoofied texts of all time: The Gift of the Magi. It starts like this:

One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And
sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two
at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and
the butcher until one's cheeks burned with the silent
imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.

And then it carries on till the end, a story of two innocent people much in love with each other. What I absolutely love about it is the language; phases such as:

Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He
enfolded his Della. For ten seconds let us regard with
discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other
direction.

What a vivid way to write! It's like a little jigsaw puzzle in which you can clearly see the next piece in your head while reading each sentence. Coax yourself to read it again and every time you read that other thing you missed in your last reading, and suddenly, a new picture emerges. Tresses, watches, gifts and Christmas. It's a simple story, written in brilliant language.

I wish that one day I will write like that. For he conveys, in a few words elaborately juxtaposed, a meaning I would take a tome to describe.

2006-11-20T11:58:00.000+05:30

A ryze movie mixer happened. And lots of the above beverage. And I was with my wife, so we had a lot of the above emotion happening as well. Life is good.

IIPM's Delhi premises sealed

2006-11-17T09:40:00.000+05:30

It seems like the sealing drive has got IIPM in another spot of trouble. It's Delhi office was sealed on November 15.

However, this might just be a case of IIPM being on the receiving end. They're a tenant of Canara Bank Relief and Welfare Society, which in turn has the land leased from the Delhi Development Authority. The Canara Bank Society seems to have violated the lease agreement by sub-letting out the property, and IIPM's got stuck in the fracas.

Poetic justice.

Know your pachchees.

2006-11-15T18:12:00.000+05:30

Yet Another Blogger Get-Together (YABGT) happened at Shiok, Bangalore. MadMan, Amit, Lahar, Prabhu, Gautam and Suman were there, and we had a sort of drink-fest. Let's just say there were cocktails and there were cocktails. And food. And in case you forgot, cocktails. And great conversation. Also, cocktails. Blue cocktails. Orange cocktails. Cocktails that managed to make a girlie drink of a good manly scotch.

With all that alcohol, which I've conveniently overstated for the purpose of exaggerating, and it's my firm belief that if we are not allowed to exaggerate why not just stitch our lips together, some amazing conversation was had. That is perhaps the worst sentence known to mankind.

But I digress.

Heard in the melee was a recount of how someone, during a visit to Indore armed with only a "madhyama" understanding of Hindi, accosted an auto. Not wanting to be stiffed by the well known auto-mafia, he decided to be the negotiator and asked for the price to their destination.

"Pachchees rupya.", quoted the auto driver.

"Pachchees??? No Pachchees!", said our friend, wiggling his finger scoldingly, "Only Pachchas".

(For the Hindi impaired: Pachchees = 25, Pachchas = 50)

And then I heard one of the best ways to get rid of the guys who ask you for a loan. Ask for a loan of One Rupee. Brilliant.

I tried that today, and the GE Money representative quickly told me this isn't for a loan but for a card. Then I switched to my good old, "I charge Rs. 500 to answer marketing calls" pitch, which, unfortunately for me, resulted in a slammed phone. To make money, you have to put money down, no?

I'm waiting for the day when my pitch will get the dream answer.

"Paanch sau! No Paanch Sau. Hazaar".

(P.S. Had forgotten Gautam in my first draft. Sorry, Gautam! Note to self: When you copy links from someone's blog remember to type their name in first!)

(P.P.S. Some photos are here)

IIPM is trying to use Wikipedia for marketing

2006-11-10T12:19:00.000+05:30

IIPM's Wikipedia page has been subject to a series of "positive" edits over the last few months, by a person that calls himself "Mrinal". He has been editing the Wikipedia page constantly, trying to change information that is provided there to reflect standard IIPM statements and flowery language. I'm fairly confident he's from IIPM itself, although he does not mention it.

For instance, he recently added language like this:

IIPM is the first institution from India to be selected as a member of CEEMAN (Central and East European Management Development Association). CEEMAN is the key body for registering graduate and post-graduate management institutions in the European Union and associate countries with members from 42 countries like IMD Lausanne, European University, and AACSB, which is the premier accrediting agency for bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree programs in business administration in the US).

which had to be edited to provide more meaningful information like:

IIPM is a member of CEEMAN (Central and East European Management Development Association). [4], which is a global network of management institutions. CEEMAN organises courses, seminars and conferences for educators.

Note here that while CEEMAN accredits colleges, IIPM is not part of their accredited list. (Of course when I added that, "Mrinal" reverted it) Basically, CEEMAN is a paid membership club - but Mrinal's first notes convey the impression that it as a premier accreditation agency in in Europe (which it is not) and that it is involved with accreditation in the US (which again it is not).

It's been quite trying to keep the page sane. To balance the equation some joker or the other comes in and places text like "Arindam Chaudhuri is a fraud" which gets reverted soon - though that's stopped recently too, thank goodness.

But what's of concern is that Mrinal wants to remove ALL pointers to controversies on the IIPM page.

His latest comment, when I asked him to refrain from making all statements a marketing pitch for IIPM:

I have a problem with your statement where you say that all the text seems to be about marketing IIPM. It is perhaps not about marketing IIPM, but rather putting across points which are positive, as I notice certain others vociferously have used Wikipedia to put only negative statements (which you have correctly deleted in the past, and I have used positive statements to give the correct viewpoint, the USA Today example being one of them).

But I should say that if Wikipedia is only about providing non-marketable (or marketable) information, then we should start putting across all the news of IIPM written by journalists that comes in all the 'neutral' newspapers. You would realise that if a "non-marketable" USA Today article can be put up, then you have to clearly accept we should also put up non-USA Today articles which also give a different viewpoint. I am sure your points would be logical on that.

I'll start putting up IIPM news that comes in various newspapers from now on under different paragraphs. Because if you truly believe that visitors to the web site should know details about USA Today (running into five lines), then I think that the same amount of space should be dedicated to typical newsy articles on IIPM that might not be "non-marketable".

Deepak, I do think that your viewpoint with respect to CEMEN is perfectly ok. But I find it grossly wrong that you can consider it a part of the "marketing" statement. Anyway, at this point I am suggesting that the complete structure of the IIPM site on wikipedia does not confirm to the structure followed while writing details about business schools globally. You could visit the details of any ivy league school on wikipedia, or even other schools. I am going to suggest a complete structural change to the IIPM page today or tomorrow. That would mean a complete revamp adhering to the standard set up with respect to wikipedia details about other b-schools. That'll also ensure that discussions and debates on "marketable" and "non-marketable" information have a benchmark with other b-school information provided, which currently seems to be not there.

Do kindly give me a feedback on this suggestion. I'll put up the completely reworked template on Monday (with references to almost all the other b-school sites on wikipedia).

Well, I have no problems with a number of news articles on the page. Just not that we should put the same flowery spin on them. Also that we shouldn't have pure advertising, and we should have facts regardless of whether they are negative or positive.

Note here that Mrinal does not register himself on Wikipedia like most regular editors do - he only writes his name, and uses different IP addresses each time.

BTW. mentions of other schools are bunk; controversies appear in pages like Harvard and Yale.

I need help! If this person is involved with IIPM he will have considerable time to keep removing all controversies etc. from the IIPM page (which btw is the second highest link when you search for IIPM). If this is allowed to go on, we'll eventually have only a big ad campaign out there, and the entire section on the controversy (which I think is very important to have in there) will go.

I hope more people will join in helping with edits. Last year's issue is passe now, but the facts have not changed. IIPM still does full page ads saying the exact same things it did last year. Some of them still convey a false impression. We're sorta "okay" to live with that.

But just because there are no more articles does not mean we allow them to take over a public information site like Wikipedia.

The Helmet Rule

2006-11-08T17:36:00.000+05:30

I remembered this when I heard excuses from people complaining about the helmet rule in Bangalore. The arguments against it are:
1) I'm only driving a short distance on unimportant roads. Why should I suffer?
2) First fix the roads, and light them properly. (Yeah right. And if you slip on rain water, you're going to ask them to stop the rains next)
3) They're uncomfortable, hot and cause you to lose hair. (Very important not to have a bald body in the morgue.)
4) Difficult to breathe and hear other traffic. (There are enough helmets that don't have the problem, and drilling holes for hearing and air circulation is bloody simple)
5) Difficult to carry while shopping. (They have helmet locks, folks)
6) It shouldn't be mandatory; It's a violation of personal freedom! (That line ends when more people die of ignorance than regulation will cure)

As you will notice, I think little of these excuses. I think pillion riders should be made to wear them too. And cyclists as well - after all, they're as prone to die on the road. I remember something that happened about 10 years ago.

A family friend is a neurosurgeon. One day I walked into my house with my helmet in my hand. He was talking to my dad, when he quickly turned and asked me sternly, "Do you wear that when you're riding?"

"Obviously", I said, "why on earth would I pay for a helmet to hold in my hand?"

He told me why he asked. He had just operated on a girl who knocked over by a bus while taking her moped across the road to bring some coconuts. My mom knew her; she'd met her in a gathering a few days earlier. A 50 cc moped, just across the road. And you might think, "I don't need a helmet for just that much distance, no?"

Turned out she did. She nearly died of head injuries (She survived after a long series of operations). Not by the bus running her over. But because her head hit the road.

Is any excuse worth more than your life?

News and views on November 7

2006-11-08T00:54:00.000+05:30

It seems to be quite long since I posted. I was sitting around doing nothing; don't ever be under the presumption that I was too busy to write, but I was too held up with way too many happenings around town and otherwise.

It is now Bengaluru

Yes, finally! The name of the town I live in is changed to Bengaluru and I live near Cunninghamu Roadu. My office is near Cubbonu Roadu, behind Manipalu Centeru and opposite the Coffee-u day-u. I like-u.

The fascination with parochial names isn't something to be belittled though. By simply changing the name of the city to what it was about 200 years ago, we have now brought the city's name in tune with the available infrastructure, some of which was still slightly better 200 years ago. For instance, there are roads. Or there used to be, for what exists now is a lot of potholes stitched together with tar. 200 years ago, they didn't even know what Tar was. Or at least, they called it tar-u. But I can bet that the roads were better then, simply because nothing can be worse than this.

In any case, I'm going to enjoy the name change and the gazillion people getting unhappy that "benglaur" was so much better and bang-galore kinda sounded like a place to get some nookie, like bangkok, except in bangkok it was legal. The biggest screamers are those that are so unaffected by the name that even if the authorities called the city upsky-dipsky-dang it would make as much effect on their lives as a mosquito does on an elephant. (For those of you unfamiliar with the size difference, you "squish" a mosquito, and an elephant "squish"es you).

India lost and Darrell lost his hair

So what's new, you ask. Good question. We lost again to Australia, which is by far the biggest bully in the cricketing world. But they deserve to be, because they are elephants in a land of mosquitos. That stupid metaphor again. I must be seeing too much of Sidhu.

So I'm rightfully happy when the whole world got back at Australia by sacking its umpire. Darrell Hair can no longer officiate, they've said, and chances are that the three big guys - India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka - asked for Hair's removal for being unfair. I agree with that because a) He's made decisions I would struggle to explain without an element of bias against the "brownies", and b) when your sport's biggest sponsors feel that way, you gawd-darn well give in.
Delhi mein traders ko shop bandh karne ka order

Honestly, that's how they report it. Two words of Hindi, one of English. Eventually there will just be Hinglish channels and that's all you get, tum miserable log.

The Supreme Court has finally decided to wear the pants in the Great Indian Family and tell shopkeepers that:
a) You can't buy a house and convert it to a shop
b) If you've done it, you can't hold us to ransom by violently protesting against us sealing these shops

Quite laudable, this stand. I feel for the traders - after all, they are people trying to eke out a living, though I find it difficult to sympathise with those that come to protest in their mercs. Anyhow, the real point is that they should be given time till January, they say, and that in the new "master plan" their shops may be in commercial territory and therefore, legal. Not a bad stand, that, but in the background of the fact that they'd been given a YEAR to fix things, it's fairly shaky ground they're on.

Well, they can't hold the city to ransom, period. And we finally have a set of people who won't give in to such terrorism. I just wish the Supreme Court could handle situations like Kargil and the Kandahar hijack. We'll be in a far better situation, perhaps.

America is voting for Congress

And India has already voted for them.

Saddam's last sigh...

...is that he's not being shot, he's being hanged. Both ways, he's dead as a doornail. The world is perhaps a better place without him. Unfortunately for us, there are ways he will live on; as a martyr, as a saint. For those that will use his death to incite others to fight against what everyone knows is the stupidest country in the world.

First you say we're going to get this guy because he's got weapons of mass destruction. Then you get him. And you don't get these weapons of mass destruction. Then you let hundreds of your soldiers and thousands of Iraqis die; in spite of the fact that your soldiers don't know why you're there, and the Iraqis hate you. And you hold a trial in which he goes berserk and does the equivalent of a broadway play for the Iraqis, after which you pronounce his death sentence. Very nice, but we're full up with stupid tricks in this country already, so don't try to sell us yours.

The Revenge of the Courts

Yes, the courts are at it again. Priya Mattoo's killer has been sentenced to death, for bludgeoning her with a helmet (which incidentally are back in favour in Bangalore) (Not the bludgeoning, the helmets, you oaf). The highly influential Santosh Kumar Singh, who killed Mattoo ten years ago, has been sternly told that such an offence can be very harmful to your life, and exactly how. He's going to the big kaboozah in the sky, and he can have a good time discussing helmet related injuries with Saddam.

In other news, Ram Jethmalani is defending Manu Sharma, another well known killer, who is allegedly not a killer because Ram Jethmalani said so.

And finally...

...I will turn 32 soon. It's not a moment to be happy. I will tell you why on another day, another time. But what is to be happy is that I will be a father in three months.

It's official. And I'm excited and scared. Happy and Tentative. We have left no room for innocence.

Yet, it's got my genes, so hopefully this'll all go behind a big smile and a hearty laugh. And that moment, I swear, I will cherish for the rest of my life.

The Diwali Story

2006-10-22T16:01:00.000+05:30

Happy Diwali to all of you. It's the festival of lights, and the beginning of a new year for some. The story is fairly old but it's worth a mention.

Ram is our main character. He's actually God, but in disguise. No one knows why. Has three half-brothers, Lakshman, Bharat and Shatrughna, all of whose mothers were married (legally) to old man Dashrath, who's CEO of Ayodhya. Actually, more like Chief Monarch. So Ram grows up as future CEO and one of the other mothers kinda doesn't like it; her son Bharat just doesn't sound as good with the Vice President tag. And she's got a big time IOU for a special vote at an earlier board meeting, and cashes it in.

Dashrath's totally not with it because of Bharat's lack of the MOS degree - Monarch's Oldest Son. But the IOU's just too strong and he gives in, banishing Ram from the board of directors and telling him to vacate the company premises for a 14 year hiatus. The boardroom drama, then enacted in 14 different episodes with highly influential lawyers and lots of crying, is too much for Dashrath and after the decision, he has a heart attack and goes to the big hole in the sky.

Meanwhile, Bharat finds out about the board decision and is totally against it - he knows he doesn't have an MOS, and he's big on Ram, the de-facto MOS. So he gets out of the campus, talks to Ram and tells him, "Mumsie screwed up, dude. I don't wanna take your seat cos you're like God and all that, so since you'll be back after 14 years, gimme your floaters".

Ram says, and I quote, "Huh?"

"Yeah Bro. I wanna put those up on the CEO's chair and I'll just do a proxy role, but your footwear rules until you're back"

"Ok, whatever tickles you mate".

So Ayodhya was then run by a pair of chappals, officially. (Editor's note: They tried this very thing later, in Enron. Didn't seem to work.)

Ram is now left with Sita, his wife and Lakshman, his loyal half-bro. They hang out for about 10 years next to a river, a fairly boring existence marked by visits by knotted hair rishis and battles with the enemies who for some reason didn't understand that our pal Ram was a GOD and you don't ever try to spar with GOD, at least not in this story. And they were living in a forest sorta place, so Ram and Lakshman were cutting wood and drawing water from wells and rowing oars so they weren't missing the gyms in Ayodhya too much.

One eveing, Ram and Lakshman go to a party, and there's an ugly babe named Shroopnakha. She's absolutely smitten by Ram's carved body and asks him out.

"You're hot, Ram! Let's get married!"
"Er...nope. I'm ekapatni, meaning only one wife, dudette. Look at the ring"
(Note: In those days it was impolite to say "Sorry, but you're ugly")
Shroopnkha's incensed.
"Darn that bitch. I'll take care of her right now"

And she runs out towards the river,with Lakshman running behind her but not as fast because his new dhoti was kinda loose. But he gets it together and just when Shroopnakha attacks Sita (and she was like a Sumo Wrester in comparison, in addition to the ugly bit) Lakshman chops off her nose and ears. That's about par for the course, and tradition continues in the form of Lorena Bobitt.

Shroopnakha's big brother, the schizophrenic 10 headed Ravana is quite miffed at this. Nobody cuts off my sister's nose and ears, he says loudly, while Shroopnakha goes out for reconstructive surgery and comes out as Michael Jackson.

Ravana gets his transvestite friend Marich to wear a deerskin bikini, and jiggle it near Ram's tent - and Sita's thinks it's Chanel and says to Ram, "You haven't bought me a dress in a while, but I'll made do with that if you can get it". Ram, like any normal guy who hates being taken shopping to expensive women's clothing shops, jumps in head first.

Marich screams "Help!" in a voice that sounds a lot like Ram, and Lakshman races to the rescue, though he does draw a circle around the tent in self-combusting chalk to protect Sita.

Meanwhile Ravana drives in with his new BMW and manages to lure Sita out of the combustion zone with his new Z-sound stereo system. Obviously, she's not impressed enough to elope or anything, but Ravana decides that heck, she'll come around, and forces her in. After a long car chase that creates a new record of being on TV channels for 6 days non stop, he's back home in Sri Lanka.

Ram is now smoking out of his ears. He gathers an army of monkeys (Ayodhya's still being ruled by chappals) and they all decide to drive to Lanka. Except they forgot there's a body of water in between.

"Get Online and book us 68,000 tickets to Lanka", orders Ram. Lakshman comes back in about 10 minutes.

"Two problems, Ram"
"What?"
"One: 'Online' hasn't been invented yet'
"Oh. Hmm. And Two?"
“"Flights" haven't been invented yet….”
"What the hell? (Note to self: Get the Wright brothers in BEFORE you do the movie)
“Okay we'll build a bridge across".
"Are you nuts? We can just build boats man, it's easier!"
"Dude, this is my story, right? If I say we build a bridge, we build a bridge spanning 150 kilometers over water."

And so they did, and the monkeys crossed over. But not before Hanuman, Chief Monkey man, had identified Sita’s location in Lanka using Satellite imaging and in the process, set Lanka on fire. Satellite technology wasn’t too safe at that time. It’s now called “The Long Tail”.

Then the big Ram vs. Ravana fight happened, advertised on RAW as the “Biggest fight ever” and the audience was backed up all the way to Australia for a view. After a lopsided battle between Ravana’s goons and the M-15 powered monkeys, Ravana calls his brother Kumbhakarna, but all he got was voice mail. “I’m asleep right now, but leave me a message and I’ll think of waking up”.

Ravana then shoves a Taser into Kumbhakarna’s side, who jumps up, startled, and attacks Ram, thinking he did it. Ram empties his Uzi into the big K who, not being God, dies.

Ravana’s son Meghnad, in an attempt to avenge this gruesome death, races towards Ram on his Suzuki 600.

“I’ll get you for killing Uncle Kumbhakarna! He hadn’t even heard my voice mail, you ba…..(splutter, choke, die)”

“You talk too much”, mumbles Ram, blowing the smoke off the Uzi. “If you wanna shoot, shoot. Don’t talk”, he mutters, and instantly realizes this dialogue could be a great western movie, which it later was.

Ravana surges forward, and after the explosive exchange of firepower, flies up in his newly obtained helicopter (which thankfully had been invented just in time). Ram, realizing that Ravana’s getting away meant a sequel and there was a love story he had to do next, threw a sword at the copter, which threw the blades off and the helicopter pitched back. The sword, shaped like a boomerang for the Australian watchers, then returned from above to penetrate the windshield and crash into Ravana’s body, severing all his heads in a way that would put Rajnikanth to shame.

So the war was won, and the whole gang returned to Ayodhya, this time using a different route and reaching just at the time when the exile period was over. Their car ran out of petrol just about at the edge of the company wall, so they had to hike the last bit. The campus was kinda dark for lack of proper energy planning and the solar panels having been pointed wrong, what with chappals ruling the roost, so people decided enough was enough and lit up their tiny lamps so Ram and Sita didn’t step into any goo.

There was much joy and celebration all around, with people spontaneously playing cards and making bets on whether Sita’s next step would be before Ram’s.

That’s why we celebrate Diwali with lights, and crackers and lamps. And that’s why the biggest amount of gambling happens on Diwali.

Have a good one, folks.

The hole in the wall

2006-10-19T10:49:00.000+05:30

No, this is not about a dutch guy who put a finger in a wall to save his town from flooding. Or about Israel and Palestine. It's about India and India. I mean uptown hyperlinked pseudo-impressive India and the real India.

The Hole-in-the-wall experiment was started by Sugata Mitra, head of research at NIIT. The videos on that site (and also here) are mind-blowing; Sugata decided to put a computer (connected to the Internet) on a wall of his office building in Delhi which adjoins a slum. Only the screen was visible through a layer of some thick glass; and there was a touchpad and some coloured buttons next to it. No keyboard, no instructions.

Kids from the slum were instantly attracted; That was Sugata's aim really, to see if anyone would use it. Note that these kids have little knowledge of computers, and a second hand computer would cost as much as their parents make a year.

The experiment went beyond the obvious. Not only did the kids figure out the mouse tricks instantly, they soon realised how they could go on to the internet, and soon were found googling for search terms like "Aishwarya Rai but not with so many clothes". Just kidding.

(I don't like the idea of kids getting unbridled internet access so I hope they have a porn filter out there)

Seriously, the kids figured it all out! Soon they were visiting disney.com and playing games online and all that. Amazing, I say. We need one of these boxes in Bangalore, preferably with only links to sites like:
1) How to drive.
2) How to drive without having to honk incessantly.
3) Running over pedestrians is a bad thing.
4) Stopping at red lights: The glamour of people who do.

And people should have to do this before they get a licence, renewable every year.

But I digress. We need the boxes for the under-privileged in Bangalore. And in all sorts of villages - perhaps as a movable van, with a phone link on a cellphone for providing internet access.

I think the video opens many eyes. And tells you the story of a real India. Lots of talent, little opportunity. Open the opportunity, and you'll suddenly see a much bigger market for both employment and for selling to. The big guys do not get it - other than Reliance. The future is in todays castaways.

Google Earth is the new hero.

2006-10-10T16:16:00.000+05:30

Farmers in Pen Taluka, Maharashtra whose land was going to be acquired by the government for a new SEZ, were peeved when they were offered lower compensation because their land was "submerged in salty creek water". Fertile land is worth more.

So they used Google Earth to prove that their land was fertile.

I'm just curious about this. If these officials would not accept the testimony of witnesses, photographs or even their own eyes (if they went there), why the holy hell would they cow down, tail between their legs, to a Google Earth? Does the government machinery work in such mysterious ways?

I love the smell of coffee in the morning.

2006-10-07T10:31:00.000+05:30

I'm still hung up on my Chikmagalur trip, amn't I?

The Kannada school controversy

2006-09-29T12:33:00.000+05:30

FT has a post on the the Karnataka Government's decision to derecognise schools that don't teach in Kannada till the 5th standard. And then you get posts like this and this that get all senti and like the FT article, warns of the xenophobic, and really "non-kannadiga"-o-phobic sentiments behind the act.

The affected schools (list) are also quite unhappy; as their primary source of income has been "robbed" from them. Not that they care about their students; if they did, they would have gotten with the program and hired Kannada teachers. They're screaming hoarse now that a) students must be allowed to complete the year (ending March) and b) the law was a stupid one anyway, look at how English has helped the IT industry and c) this is xenophobic and anti-student and all that.

Bollocks.

There was a Karnataka government order in 1994 that only permitted private investments in primary education if the teaching medium was in Kannada. Let's go into the merits of that order later, but I will say that if schools said "ok, we'll teach in Kannada, give us permission to have a school", and then went ahead and taught in English, they were doing a wrong thing. Just because the law is bad doesn't mean you violate it; you can attempt to get the law reversed or take your business elsewhere. The law against murder means you'll get arrested even if you killed an insane murderer or a bureaucrat that endorsed substandard part purchases for MIG planes that killed your fighter pilot best friend.

Let's now get to the government order. First, I don't believe the government has any right to police education; not when they have miserably failed in their own method, and made the public school system a complete mess. But they must have a framework that schools must work under, and criteria that all schools must cater to; otherwise stupid teachings like Intelligent Design become possible.

Second, what's the real issue? They've ordered that primary schools must teach in Kannada medium till class 5. This does not mean "don't teach in English" - in fact it does allow you to teach the English language, but all other subjects must be taught in Kannada.

And what's the class 5 business? There are no public exams till class 5. In fact, none now till class 10. So schools needn't even conduct exams - and many do not - for students to pass through to class 6. In fact there's no federal requirement of minimum marks to get into the 6th standard.

Note here that after class 5, English medium instruction is not prohibited. That means only till age 10 does one have to learn in Kannada.

But then, what subjects are taught till class 5. Languages, Maths, Science, Geography, History. Students will find it altogether difficult to suddenly switch between Kannada and English in class 5 - but that's not bad at all! Children are fast learners and can easily grasp language differences, the trouble really is that parents will have to do so too. But overall, I think this is the biggest disadvantage, and perhaps the only one.

So why can't schools teach in Kannada?
1) They don't have Kannada teachers, or management. Now that can't be difficult to solve.
2) They don't have a Kannada curriculum. Okay, not too difficult either.
3) They don't WANT to teach in Kannada, because they believe that students must fundamentally learn English only. This argument is ridiculous; English is a very easy language to learn and learning Kannada prepares kids for a potential future with law (legal papers can be in either language), public sector jobs, rural employment and, in general, conversation with people who've only learnt kannada.
4) They face pressure from Parents that want to teach their kids only in English. The problem here is that some parents don't know Kannada and can't help their children with studies; so my take on this is: perfect time for all to learn kannada.

Remember that parents can put kids into private tuition (not a school, but an unaffiliated private institution) till class 5 and then move them into an English school in class 6. This is permitted and will most likely be the outcome for hundreds of those that will stubbornly not learn kannada. Current primary teachers too can moonlight as unaffiliated teachers in such institutions.

Schools, too, can hire only a few kannada teachers and reduce their primary intake (upto class 5). There's a monetary hit, which I believe is the major cause of the school's apparent unhappiness.

Students have been assured of alternate schools anyway, either through a nearby government or "recognised" private schools. The latter have said they'll go to court, which means the primary kids will have beards when it's settled. But I don't think kids are too badly affected - after all, studying in a "non-recognised" school till class 5 isn't very depressing.

Third: Should the law be changed? I think class 5 is too much. Upto class 3 is fine (in my own opinion) and kids should be taught subjects like Maths and Science in both languages.

I also think the compulsory kannada bit should stay; if adults are going to be stupid and not learn the local language, it does not mean they force their kids to be as stupid - they're probably ruined the pie enough by passing on such genes.

And this law should apply to all schools - not just those created after 1994. That bit makes no sense whatsoever.

Finally, the biggest problem is that this protest comes from a Mr. Horatti, who proposes laws like this one that RESERVES seats for the less-intelligent of students. This is so dumb I'm spluttering with my reaction; we'll all now be forcing our kids to be less smart so we can get into a reserved section. Hey, wait. In the age of too much parental pressure and homework overload, that may be a good thing.

Also perhaps studying in shifts will prepare kids for the BPO industry.

The latest is that schools have been allowed to wait out this academic year. But is that just buying time? Horatti may be amenable to a few crores here and there, and an appropriately stuffed pillow may ensure he makes this like the infinitely-postponed helmet rule.

For the record, I'm all for action against these whining schools. And I'm all for a law that promotes teaching kids in local languages during early education.

Where have you been, Deepak?

2006-09-26T17:42:00.000+05:30

Answer: I've been here:

This is Chikmagalur district, from a resort called Eagle Eye Holidays. A couple hills beyond the visible horizon is my birthplace, Tirthahalli.

The resort was fantastic and Sunila and I had a fun holiday...the food was just awesome throughout. We stayed 2 days at the resort, which had enough nature for us to sit and imbibe and take photos like this one:

Well, to complete the nerdiness of the entire thing I decided to give the standard photo albums a skip and figured I would (hold your breath) implement my own image gallery.

Laziness happened. I ended up downloading an open source tool called "Coppermine", running it on my web host, asking the host to set up some permissions to some folders, and voila!

www.deepakshenoy.com has an image gallery, and my trip is online at:

http://www.deepakshenoy.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=2

So there.

Photo trip: Potsdamer platz, Berlin

2006-09-05T16:46:00.000+05:30

The old meets the new. That's a Massive Mercedes Benz billboard behind a few standing pieces of the Berlin wall, at Potsdamer Platz. Lexus and the Olive tree indeed.

(Sunila's on the eastern side of the wall)

The Infosys Backside Plot...

2006-08-24T14:45:00.000+05:30

...sounds like a plan to get at the company's ass but is really this:

Infosys backside plot for sale
I have plot for sale behind infosys campus Mysore, size total of 14400 Sqft
...

News for the day

2006-08-17T11:15:00.000+05:30

Rakhi Sawant banned

Rakhi Sawant was disallowed by the police from performing at the annual general body meeting of Suchir India Developers Private Limited in Hyderabad. "We don't want obscene gestures", said the police, and in response the organisers asked everyone to bandage their index and middle fingers together.

But good job. This was an annual general body meeting, and the body part was not allowed to dominate.

No forward trading

Prakash Karat of the CPI(M) says, "Ban Forward Trading". This, he says, is bad because there should be, at the very least, Backward Trading, Scheduled Class Trading and Reserved Trading for Communists.

Of course, the real argument is ridiculous: that somehow forward trading in commodities pushes up prices - it really brings about a more informed marketplace. Because as a farmer, knowing prices a year ahead will help me understand what I can sow. "So shall I reap, therefore so shall I sow" is the new adage.

Dr. Beggar is coming

Bangalore will get a new medical college in Beggar's colony. So don't be surprised to see a stethescope knocking on your car window.

Head hung in shame, nose cut off in public.

2006-08-11T14:47:00.000+05:30

I have lost the Bad English Competition. I thought my entry was pathetic, but there are patheticer and patheticest entries much worster than mine.

But we are not leaving behind just. I wrote off to winning competitor, Kaushik:

Well done, Kaushik...today only you win. my angreji is so far better that one day i will leap and bound you. Just like that. only.

Pls to publish movie script your blog. we are watching, the movies, knowing there is face behind awesome dialogue is good news.

All your base are belong to us.

I think I'm going to write a book this way. The ish-story of Raju the Gentleman that starts like this:

And there she was. Sitting there on the four road intersection of life not knowing at all where all she can go. She was confused very much but knew; there was no going back to the village. Nilhalli was her behind, yes her past participle. Nilhalli means blue village and all the time there were the blues.

Not like the songs, ya. Blues meaning unhappy type. Meaning bhain, bhain crying and it was not only that time of month when something and all happens. Whole life is sad and she was city girl, no? She know enough English, more than that ugly postal man daughter who came off to town in skirt showing ankles and no silver ornament around them.

But that was all her behind. Now only looking to front, and walking walking till sole of foot is tender. It was tender now, that's why she was on the four road intersection, sitting and hoping for water or a bus. Not that she could drink a bus, but she was sure only that bus would take her to pumpwell somewhere.

That's when she saw Raju, I think. He was sitting there only, opposite side without chappal, little bit away from me. How he could manage?! She was finding it soooo tough, just wearing sandal and that too without heel. No chappal in this hotter sun, the thinking only made that feeling passing up middle of back. Shiver. Ya, shiver passing up spine.

Suddenly, Raju looked at her.
"What ya, no father or brother in house-uh? Staring staring from that time?"

"Umm...what you mean ya? Free country no? I look where i want to look you come in the way what can I do?", Nalini spluttered, not pausing for all that punctuation and all.

... The rest you will find in my book which will be written one day. Or one night.

The ATM attacks: Call for lower limits

2006-07-25T10:07:00.000+05:30

Yet another mugging in Bangalore. The modus operandi is
a) Find software or BPO company employees going back home at wee hours of the morning
b) Stop them; overpower them and take their ATM cards
c) Take them to an ATM machine and make them reveal their PIN numbers
d) Withdraw cash
e) Throw them out on the road somewhere

Attempts to resist or give false PIN numbers attracts brutal violence and frankly, money is less important than your life. But obviously there should be some protection, with banks offering MASSIVE withdrawal limits of upto Rs. 25,000 per day on ATM cards! How do you ensure that a) you're alive and b) you're not bankrupt?

Madman suggested something that might be very helpful in such circumstances:
Idea #1: An alternate PIN that has a lower ATM withdrawal limit.
This means you can give a mugger the alternate pin and he'll only be able to withdraw, say, Rs. 4,000. (If this is too low the mugger may take out his frustration on you, violently) You'll get off for lesser.

But:
1) Are you going to ever remember this "other" PIN?
2) If this strategy becomes ubiquitous, won't the muggers simply go on beating you up till you give up the main PIN?

While chances for the above are low, it may be a way to get muggers out of the way (after all, they don't have too much time on their hands). The bigger issue is that banks have to seriously upgrade their infrastructure and software, which I believe they'll groan about - they always groan when they have to give money.
(Also mentioned at: halfbakery.com)

Idea #2: A "panic" PIN
If this PIN is entered, the ATM goes into ALARM mode and sounds a hooter, sends a message to the bank + police control room etc. A camera in the ATM gets active.

But you may get killed: after all the police in India takes a while to arrive and the robbers may just decide to snuff out your life for the trouble created. Additionally, these events happen so late at night that this option may not at all be effective.
(Got the name from halfbakery.com.)

Idea #3: Two bank accounts, one with a lower limit
Considering that most banks' infrastructure only allows one card per account, each account holder should have multiple accounts (with the same bank) - the "second" account will have a small balance (say Rs. 4,000). ATM cards are given for both accounts, but you will only carry this "second" account's ATM card with you - leave the other one at home.

The idea is:
1) if you get mugged, you only have the second ATM card, limited to the balance.
2) If you urgently need cash for yourself, you have upto Rs. 4,000 immediately and more when you get home.

The only downside is to have to maintain two pins, and two different bank accounts. But in this age of netbanking and phone banking, you can easily transfer money between your accounts without any human interaction.

From an implementation perspective:
1) Idea #1: Banks haven't yet implemented it though some have "NetSafe" cards, like HDFC for Internet transactions with a pre-assigned credit limit. These can't be used for ATM withdrawals, though. So Idea #1 is not feasible unless banks upgrade software, meaning not possible today.
2) Idea #2: For this, the banks and police have to get involved, co-operate and spend money on infrastructure (sirens, network alarms, cameras etc.) If you know the state of co-operation of these two entities, you will understand why I say this is not possible today.
3) Idea #3: Most banks will allow you this privilege, and if they need an excuse, create a "joint" account with your spouse or parents or siblings. Inter-account transfer is very easy, at least with HDFC Netbanking, and I'm sure it's possible with other banks as well. In short, you can do this today.

If you are a BPO or Software Company employee, or in fact anyone keeping late hours, please consider the above options carefully. If you know friends who work late or need to walk in dark areas, please let them know too.

(Yes, the real problem is the muggers themselves: but in big city disparities of income, such incidents will invariably happen. We have too small a police force to protect our population; we need to protect ourselves. Forming citizen-watch groups in residential neighbourhoods, learning martial arts, carrying pepper spray or a weapon you are trained to use etc. are options to solve that problem. That is another day, another blog post)

All bloggers are terrorists.

2006-07-18T10:22:00.000+05:30

Or so the government seems to think. The DOT has recently asked ISPs to ban all blogs at blogspot.com, or so it seems. I couldn't access this site from home, with an Airtel broadband connection, which (Airtel) has the high customer service levels of not even providing information on their web site, though if they did I would keel over and die from the shock. (That would be terrorism)

Now I can imagine the thinking of the Babus that did this.

"Uhm. There are lots of these sites, something blogspot something"
"Oh. Who writes them?"
"Everybody yaar, even my neighbour's dog has a blog"
"You mean har kutte ka blog hai?"
"Ek minute yaar...terrorist bhi to kutte hote hain...so even terrorists may be using blogs no?"
"Eggjactly! Ban all this blog wog things ... all these dogs should be taught a lesson"

So it came to pass that blogs would be banned. This of course, might have been a liquor induced stupor, but if we allowed that to rule our country we would have had compulsory nasbandi (check), interfering in other countries when our own was in danger (check) and of course a clamped down emergency for no reason at all. (check)

Oh wait. All those were done by people with the surname "Gandhi". Let's BAN the surname "Gandhi" completely! That will do the trick. So from now on, every person with the surname "Gandhi" will be referred by only the first four letters of the surname. That will teach them. (Maybe they'll be hired as Ass Managers)

Coming back to the blog issues, it's obvious now that blogs are a bad thing and they should all be banned including this one. That also means we should ban the internet because, you know what, that's about how far blogs go. Let us, in the same note, ban email, fax and phones as well. SMS is a criminal offense of course.

Why not go one step further? Make pens, pencils and keyboards illegal. Spray paint will be punishable by death. Sign language is the mark of the devil. Language is banned - we must all speak in a correct dialect of Hindi from now on. All people must wear burqas so that no emotion can be conveyed by the eyes or by body language. Let us, from now on, learn to bend over and grease up while the babus try to get their action from their impotent appendages.

Or, while they're at it, let's simply chop their b**** off.

The songs of years gone by

2006-07-16T14:03:00.000+05:30

Listening to "Farishta" on Worldspace today, I came across some songs that moved me by the sheer power of their lyrics. I post them here as my tribute to the songwriters and singers alike.

Note: I will not translate them to English. There is a certain "dard" in them you will not understand if you don't know Hindi.

siine mein jalan aankhon mein toofan sa kyon hai
is shaher mein har shaks pareshaan sa kyon hai

dil hai to dhadakne ka bahaana koi dhundey
patthar ki tarah behis-o-bejaan sa kyon hai

kya koi nayi baat nazar aati hai hum mein
aaina hamein dekh ke hairaan sa kyon hai

There is so much in that last stanza. Thank you, Shahyrar.

Another one that you might know, but worked for me today:

Rishta dil se dil ke aitbaar ka
Zinda ha hamee se naam pyaar ka
Ke mar ke bhi kisi ko yaad aayenge
Kisikee aansuon main muskurayenge
Kahe ga phool har kali se baar baar

Jeena isi ka naam hai.

How hard we have become today. Life has become :
ke jee ke bhi humee ko bhool jaayenge
kisikee aansuon mein reh na paayenge
koi kahega humse phir bhi baar baar
kya jeena isi ka naam hai?"

Ass-inine adverts

2006-07-16T13:05:00.000+05:30

Have you successfully controlled the size of your posterior? Or, even better, that of others?

You can then apply for the job of an "Ass Manager" in Bangalore.

Subject: Looking out for Ass Manager: Business Development for a multinational firm

(Company name censored) in Bangalore is looking out for Smart Business Development candidates with 3 to 5 years of experience. (Company) is a multinational firm with 40000 employees. Check website for further information.
(blah blah)

The things that bangalore's laziness has brought about. Of course, this is butt expected. Nobody wants to be left behind.

Help the terror victims...in whatever little way you can.

2006-07-13T01:19:00.000+05:30

It's the most cowardly act known to mankind: terrorism. The people behind the bomb blasts in Mumbai are too scared to show their faces, and perhaps snicker in glee at their TV sets today. But remember, whoever you are: We will find you. But more importantly, we will overcome. You will remain but a blot on the history of Mumbai, and indeed, of India.

I will, starting today, build a separate cash allowance to fund the search for these murderers, and the supari to kill them. It may take years, and we may find them when they are near death, but find them we will.

But there is more to do today than just that. There's a blog called http://mumbaihelp.blogspot.com/ which helps in the search for the injured and the deceased . Mumbai Police have also provided a list, on a per-hospital basis, of the dead and injured victims. Only, it's in Marathi.

If you can read Hindi, you can read Marathi. But thousands of people are looking for their friends and relatives and they perhaps cannot - so help is needed in placing all these names in the "List of the Dead" and "List of the Injured" so that searching is easier.

I've converted four pages, and I'm nearly in tears. Every single name calls out to me as if I knew it closely. Some names ring a bell, but I know no one. The only thing I really know is that their life was snuffed out of them, prematurely, by an insane but planned act.

The anger rages within. Ubiquitous today, perhaps is the hatred of our impotent government, the (shame at the) helplessness of our shackled army, the courage of the rattled mumbaikar. And more commonly, the rage of the unknown Indian...a rage that seethes relentlessly now, at least in *this* Indian.

We will find you, who did this. And we will prevail.

Whisky ne kiya beda paar?

2006-07-11T17:39:00.000+05:30

Manmohan Singh Patiala peg is now firmly in the grip of the Air India crew that flew him to Germany. Not because they didn't want him to drink on the plane; but because they wanted to mooch it for themselves. The captain took five "top grade Scotch whisky" bottles, and an attendant another five. Totally, 29 bottles of whisky were stolen.

Twenty nine bottles of whisky. On a flight to Germany.

Now I know why India keels over on every foreign visit by our top guns. They're bloody drunk, that's why. I can imagine how, after winning the 1971 war, we gave back all the territory we had earlier claimed as ours. Alcohol induced insanity.

But these Air India guys are unbelievable. They break into the cabinet of the most protected official of the Indian state, and then steal his whisky! I wonder if the buzz will be worth a jail term.

Turns out if you want to become a steward or air-hostess with Air India, you can't be overweight or have acne or marks on your face. But dark circles are allowed, if they're caused by having too much whisky.

Searching for what?

2006-07-07T14:27:00.000+05:30

I recently found, from the logs maintained in a dark dingy cellar, that this site is being located through certain search phrases. I don't know what the deal is, but here's what people are searching for and getting to this page:

1) Ugly Indian Bride
2) Indian Marvadis Sex stories
3) armpits of indian girls (???)
4) american holocaust: when it's all over i'll still be indian

This is just the past week. I don't know who these people are, but I think they need to be in an institution. Maybe they *are* in an institution that has internet access. Well, whatever it is, the weirdo's have landed.

Also what I don't get is: How does my blog get listed with these keywords? "Indian Marvadis sex stories"? I'm #1 on the list from yahoo, of a total of TWO results. I don't have any marvadi sex stories on my site, and neither does the other link. So there are no marvadi sex stories in the ENTIRE WORLD. They aren't even having sex, those marvadis, they're all immaculate conception, which also explains their wealth.

So whoever's looking for "marvadis sex stories", stop right here and get back to work.

And "armpits of indian girls" person, please note that your license to use the internet has now expired.

It's football season.

2006-06-28T23:25:00.000+05:30

And what better excuse not to have blogged.

I'm into the world cup. So into it that we've converted the hall to a bedroom. You might think it's easier to put the TV in the bedroom. Not when you have a 48" projection TV. Also I need to have my legs on the ground. So that when they don't do simple things like slide in at 250 miles per hour and get their legs on the most fantastically delicious cross ever, I can stand up quickly and say "What the heck!!!!!!!! You miserable losers!" and repeat that until I realise my beer is going flat.

So in the course of football what is also happening is that I'm sleeping at 3 AM. And waking up late and going late to work and appearing groggy all day.

It has turned out that Wimbledon is also going on. I don't know why but Wimbledon always reminds me of Ivan Lendl, who never won Wimbledon but won everything else or something. He lost first to...er...some long haired chap, and then to Boris Becker. After which he said "Grass is for cows". I thought it was darn funny at the time. For the life of me, I can't remember why. I think I had a lousy sense of humour.

It took me around 8 more years to moo.

But I digress.

Football is incredible because India isn't participating. So I don't give a flying f*** about who's winning as long as they're trying to score goals. I'll cheer Brazil going in, and then I'll be pushing Ghana to score. In the end, no matter who won, I'll be as cheerful as a drunk cheerful guy.

So now, moments:

Germany is by far the best team around, at least by the way they've been thrashing everyone
Australia deserved to win. And Italy is a spineless piece of crap.
The difference between all these teams is not about who's good. They're all bloody good. It's about that one superlative effort that makes or breaks the deal. It's that one Beckham Goal, that Argentinian move, or that Ronaldo drive that seals it up.
There are no ads while watching football. Thank you, whoever you are.
The Portugal Netherlands match was the stupidest battle in history. Four red cards and some 11 yellows, and some other colours as well.

That's all for now. Will be back with more...

The "Walk from Office" campaign

2006-06-08T20:15:00.000+05:30

In light of the fuel price hike by the Indian Government, I'm starting a "Walk from Office" campaign, supported by, currently, me.

The idea is to:
Walk back home from office. My office is less than 4 kilometers away from home, and I can easily walk back in 45 minutes - I take nearly that much to drive in peak traffic. Plus, I get some exercise. If I do this three times a week, I save Rs. 500 per month and perhaps more importantly, one kg per month!

I'll take an auto going up - why? I can't handle a whole workday after huffing and puffing for three quarters of an hour. When I develop more stamina, I'll walk it all.

If you're looking to do this as well, write me a comment. I'll keep the post updated, unless of course, I'm walking.

The Walk from Office List
1) Deepak Shenoy, Bangalore. 3.5 Kilometers.
2) Mohit, Ipswich. Walks *to* office. 1.6 kilometers.
3) Minkey Chief, Somewhere. Office=Home. 50 meters.
4) Vasan, 2930 steps, 2 steps a second, depending on traffic, 25 to 27 minutes. Very complicated maths, that.

Sony Ericsson P900 - my review...

2006-06-07T16:10:00.000+05:30

...is up at mouthshut.com.

I'm going to post it here someday, when it gets all old and rusty there.

The Rahul Mahajan Conspiracy Theory

2006-06-05T17:53:00.000+05:30

...is that the entire thing was organized by Pepsi. They found Cocaine inside Rahul Mahajan's blood, and the whole story was about "Having Coke is Illegal". And after all, who can be more transcendentally "thanda" than Bibek Moitra, the poor secretary who died of an overdose?

Diatribe on reservation

2006-05-30T11:37:00.000+05:30

It makes little sense to provide reservation based on caste. If anything, we must provide for the rural, the poor and the handicapped. And them only.

Caste based reservation sucks.

There are those who say we must have "positive discrimination", an oxymoron if I've ever heard one. Our upper caste ancestors, they say, have abused the lower castes and structured society so they were discriminated against. And we can undo this by screwing the upper castes of tomorrow, who are largely involved in exchanging ring tones with the lower castes of tomorrow, who in turn believe oppression is when they're not allowed into an "A" movie.

To blame the errors of the past on the children of tomorrow is an absolutely ridiculous idea. I will not have my children pay for the mistakes of some idiots in the past. Female infanticide was and is a curse, and we all recognise it. Should we then kill male babies for next hundred years?

And caste downtroddenness, if such a word exists, was perpetrated by the lower castes as much as the upper castes. There are those, even today, who favour a caste divided society to keep social norms in place; norms that no longer accept reality, technology or change. Why do people fear inter caste and inter religion marriages? The same reason applies to some who want to keep caste differentiation in our society. And these are the very people who will call someone "SC/ST" in a derogatory way - and this label is firmed by reservations.

The more we reserve seats for the backward classes, the more we brand our society with the caste iron. We have to undo this only by removing caste reservation altogether; and provide only reservations for the needy - the rural, the poor and the handicapped. These are "fixable".

Think about it.

You can fix "rural" if the place you live in develops. Reservation helps; after all, if you study, you may be in a position to develop your home town.

You can fix "poor" by getting rich. Reservation helps, you study, and you have opportunity.

You can fix a lot of "handicapped" - if you can study, you can help with research of those with your disability, or earn enough to get more expensive treatment or survival devices.

You can never fix 'caste'. You're born with the tag, and you die with it. You can therefore NEVER achieve anything by reserving seats for castes. Or for genders (male/female).

(Some will say you can "fix" gender through sex change operations. But inherantly, gender needs no fixing - there is no shame in being male or female. There is no shame being of any caste either - that is only a birth tag. Are you ashamed of the day you were born?)

In fact you shouldn't ever discriminate those things; make it illegal to discriminate between castes or genders in any job or educational institution -> no such rule is enforced, in fact people still post ads saying "Wanted female receptionist" or "wanted salesmen, preferably male". This is disgusting - and should be illegal.

If we continue tomorrow we will need to make reservations, in jobs, for stupid people. Why? Because such people are discriminated against, no?

KREC videos

2006-05-20T14:54:00.000+05:30

It's been 10 years since I graduated - or it will be on July 13th - and I was getting nostalgic on a Saturday morning. It's called National Institute of Technology, Surathkal (NITK) now, but was Karnataka Regional Engineering College, Surathkal (KREC) when I was there (1992-96).

I spent some time with the Wikipedia entry on KREC and then came across this video:

It's a very sadly edited amateur video but has some of the elements that trigger a bout of nostalgia.

It begins with "Lamhe" (moments) - a mirrored render of 3D text using, I think, 3D Studio. This is what we used to do in college for our annual fest, Incident. The machines were so slow that we would painstakingly map all the points, figure out the right textures, colours and lights and pre-calculate the movements of the text, camera and lights - all on paper or in our heads, because a "render" took upwards of 8 hours. We'd then use the lab machines at 10 PM, when everyone was done, and set the render to run through the night.

Today, the same darn thing takes less than 2 seconds.

But I digress.

The video has some "moments" - of the hostel rooms, "Samudra Darshan" (SD), Classrooms, Copying in sessionals, stealing glances at the opposite sex, a kinda weird human "IT" formation in the main garden (Why???), bonfires at the beach, the ring ceremony, the farewells and the class photos. They'd look cheesy to most of you, but for me, they all trigger some memory or the other.

There's also an attempt at humour - the "muggus" (bookworms of sorts) arriving early at 8:05 AM, and the cooler dudes strolling in at 9 AM. The coolest dudes, such as yours truly, were usually there only in time for the 9:50 break.

Things that show how old I've gotten:

Hostel rooms seem to be much better - cupboards with doors that aren't propped up by duct tape, beds that can actually be slept in and all that.
Paved roads and painted footpaths! Wow. Though that might only be the walk from the girls block to the main block.
SD doesn't have the smokers anymore. Smoking is banned there. Kinda sad - the cigarette + chai was my favourite thing in the 9:50 break (and what used to wake me up).
There's no mention of Cresendo, Incident or Phoenix (Cultural and sports festivals). And no SAC. No Gate, no sunsets and no laat sessions in the hostels. Maybe all that has changed; it was SOOO much of our life then.
There are way too many girls in a class. That many would have been the sum total of the girls in our entire batch. Not that I'm complaining. Wait. Maybe I am - Why didn't we have these numbers???

There's another video of a basketball match. A night match in the floodlit courts. I was a college team player too, though right now I will only qualify to be the basketball. Notice that there's too many turnovers, bad shots and even a missed layup. But also an amazing three pointer and some neat offense. That stuff hasn't changed.

A few of us from the '96 batch are driving to college on July 13. Hopefully there will be enough alcohol to help us remember....and forget.

Marriagonomics

2006-05-15T23:12:00.000+05:30

You've heard of the arranged marriage. And you've heard of dowry, the age old concept of giving money to the groom's family for something I don't entirely understand but agree is a social evil. And you've heard of boys making demands: that the girl should be fair and beautiful, that she should have studied in a convent but should not be a nun, unless you count the virginity aspect, but she should also gel easily with other people and so on. And much of this from ugly, pathetic losers.

The empire has struck back.

The arranged marriage market in India, and there's a reason it's a "market", is not the groom's domain anymore. Women, and more specifically women's families, routinely demand more of the "boy"; demands that are not only based on stability, but also on a deep understanding of economics and politics.

Let me give you the four eras I have seen. All are accounts I have heard from those who've been through this first-hand.

1995-1998: The H1-B years

"Do you have an H1-B?"

That was the dreaded question. H1-B is a visa for residency in the U.S. which allows you to earn the monthly moolah in dollars. 1995-98 wasn't the most happening time for the Indian economy, so most people wanted to go abroad - and the U.S. was the easiest destination, what with the H1-B visa, companies willing to take anyone, and scores of consulting companies hiring junta for contract projects. A H1-B visa meant weath, stability and a "foot hold" abroad. The concept of downsizing was alien to Indian culture; the only references to pink slips were coloured undergarments.

Scores of eligible gentlemen left for the shores of America, armed with Rasam powder, Ghar ka achar, Ten packets of Maggi and the H1-B visa. Soon they would settle down with a house, a car, and a prestigious account at the ubiquitous Indian Grocery Shop, and the only thing to do next was to find a bride. And then there were girls in India, whose families wanted their daughter to live in a U.S. house, travel in a U.S. car (Oh my gawd, a Hyundai!) and of course, to shop in the Great Indian Grocery Shop.

So the women's families would ask: Have you an H1-B? If not, sorry - we don't like trash. The remaining marriageable folk in India had to deal with the "second rung" of the girl market - the less fair, the less beautiful, and the lower dowry bazaar.

Without an H1-B, an arranged marriage was doomed; the aunts would whisper among each other,

"He's so dark, he's bald also"
"They couldn't find a H1-B, I think"
"Poor fellows. But who will give a H1-B to that girl? She was seen with some boys, by my cousin, and you know how picky these H1-B families are"
"Ya ya, my daughter, I have kept her completely away from all boys.I want H1-B only"
"And at least he should have applied for Green card"

Yes, the green card. Now people had figured that H1-B was a visa for temporary residency - six years at a stretch only - and that for a more longer term settlement, one would need to go down the Green Card route.

A Green Card is for permanent residents - and you can get one only if your company sponsors you. While it was considered a good thing by Indian that a company did, one has to understand the nuances of the Green Card application - you are not allowed to change employers, and if you do, you lose your green card application. The process can take years, and usually does, and during this time the company has the equivalent of a bonded labourer. Who even pays taxes. And cannot vote.

(Personal account: I got a lot of flak for leaving the U.S. in 1997 and staying on in India, despite a job offer abroad. I've never regretted that decision; but a lot of people tried to give me a lot of flak for it. To all of them: phooey.)

1999-2000 : No Green Cards please
The Green Card rush was a result of a deluge of H1-B applicants (and the other immigrants). The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) couldn't keep up with the demand (or didn't want to) and Green Card holders took a long time to get their piece of labour freedom.

But there was one more economic impact. As Green Card holders increased, and arranged marriages went ahead with their blistering pace, more and more applicants emerged for the "spouse green card" - a permanent residency permit for the wife of the green card holder. The INS was flooded and it became known that a spouse green card would take upto three years to come through - three unfertile years from the perspective of the potential bride's family.

The rule then was - H1-B okay, Green card no-no.

Counter attack of the Emmigrants: When it got known that the Green Card was in the final processing period, the H1-B holders would rush to India to get married before the green tarnished their otherwise unsullied H1-B reputation. This resulted in some hilarious affairs - the "Ten Day Turnaround" marriage.

U.S. companies typically grant only a two week vacation annually. It was imperative that H1-B boys visit India, do the "interviews" with girls, make their choice and get married. Earlier, such marriages would happen over two or three such visits - a meeting in december, another in January and marriage in March.

With the Green Card imminent, waiting would be catastrophical. So the chat-mangni-pat-byaah scene started to take massive proportions. Meet, select, get engaged and tie the knot: all in the two week vacation.

A friend of my mother's dropped in one day to invite us to her daughter's wedding. She mentioned that the boy and girl only met two days back and that the marriage was a week later. I was flummoxed.

Me: "So early? Don't they want to get to know each other?"
Mom's friend: "No time, baba. The boy has come down with seven friends, and their parents had already chosen 20 girls for them to see, in round robin fashion. If someone chose first, the others would choose from the remaining lot."
Me: "What???"
Mom's friend: "They have even booked the marriage halls. Seven of them. And even the dates are fixed. I am so lucky that my daughter was selected"
Me: "This is nuts! How can you be sure? Doesn't your daughter want some time?"
Mom's friend: "But where's the time? If he doesn't get married now, he will get his Green Card and then we have to wait for so many years no? And they are not even asking for dowry"

Imagine, the pride of one's daughter being "selected" for marriage, round robin, among seven friends. But I digress. The green card had brought this upon us.

2000-2002: Not the U.S. please. At least, not an H1-B.

With 2000 came the bust. Not the Pamela Anderson kind.

In the U.S., jobs went flying out the window. Companies shut down suddenly, without any notice, leaving hitherto employed and well heeled individuals stranded in the middle of their mortgage leveraged lives with little hope of finding any lifestyle equivalent employment.

Suddenly the H1-B visa was a nightmare: With the visa linked to one's employment status, the lack of a job meant you either found another job or left the country. There were horror stories of all kinds; the Indian couple that was pink-slipped and had to leave, lock, stock and barrel within a week. Mounting mortgage and car payments prompting people to board planes and rush back "home", leaving empty houses behind and their cars in the airport parking lots. The H1-B engineers playing contract poker to keep their visas, and ending up on the "bench" with no salaries.

Stories spread back home in Indai and obviously the first thing that gets re-aligned is the marriage market. You're an H1-B in the U.S.? You're dead, mate, because no self respecting bride family will even spit in your direction. Too risky, they said.

At this point, the Indian software market was booming. So suddenly those in the Indian Software industry weren't outcastes anymore. With opportunities in India creating cash rich engineers with fancy cars and disposable incomes, bride-families started to accept the Indian located engineer as serious son-in-law candidates. And with Intra-company visas (L1) opening up, the chances for travel were just as good.

So now it was Indian Engineer : 1, H1-B: 0.

Note: Green card holders were ok if they weren't in the software industry, or McDonalds burger flippers. And given just those two, I'd have thunk the burger flipper had the upper hand.

2003 onwards: Show me the money

And the boom in India has continued. The most recent story I heard was a heartwrenching one: A guy I know was complaining that he wasn't able to find a bride.

"Why?" I ask.

"Because they all earn more than me", he mutters.

"Whoa. What's the problem, then?", I ask, hopelessly unaware that the marketplace works on status, not logic.

He ignores me and goes on.

"And they all want me to own a car and a house. Otherwise, no deal".

Surprise, surprise. Employment is no longer any measure - it's your bank balance. But they can't ask you that, so they will work with visible wealth detectors - the car, the house, the home theatre system. You get 'em first, and then we give you a bride. And you better earn more than the girl, dude; we can't have ya living offa our daughter, get it?

It's amazing how the marriage market seems to be so well in tune with economics - it's not surprising to most of you perhaps, but it fascinates me. As a long term activist against forced marriages, dowry and female harrassment, it is heartening to see women demand their own. And eye-opening to see the male reaction: the bewilderment, the resentment and the unwilling acceptance of the new status symbols.

Marriagonomics is here to stay. Only now the balance has shifted.

"Stick it up their behind" day?

2006-05-11T00:00:00.000+05:30

I read this today on Ryze: (emphasis mine)

It has been calculated that if everyone did not purchase a drop of petrol for one day and all at the same time, the oil companies would choke on their stockpiles.

At the same time it would hit the entire industry with a net loss over 4.6 billion dollars which affects the bottom lines of the oil companies. Therefore "thursday september 22nd " has been formally declared "stick it up their behind" day and the people of this nation should not buy a single drop of petrol that day.

The only way this can be done is if you forward this e-mail to as many people as you can and as quickly as you can to get the word out. waiting on the government to step in and control the prices is not going to happen. what happened to the reduction and control in prices that the arab nations promised two weeks ago?

Rremember one thing, not only is the price of petrol going up but at the same time airlines are forced to raise their prices, trucking companies are forced to raise their prices which affects prices on everything that is shipped. things like food, clothing, building supplies medical supplies etc. who pays in the end? we do!

We can make a difference.if they don't get the message after one day, we will do it again and again. so do your part and spread the word. forward this email to everyone you know. mark your calendars and make september 22nd a day that the citizens say "enough is enough"

Why don't we all walk to work instead? Or use bicycles? Or only travel with Reva Cars?

That's the only way the concept may make sense: If I don't buy petrol on that particular day it means nothing - I can tank up on September 21st or wait till the 23rd. And if it appears that I am stranded with a near-empty tank, chances are I will go straight to the bunk and fill 'er up.

Why? Because if I don't, the only behind getting the sticking up will be mine. The oil companies don't give a hoot about our collective "not-buying" of petrol - they know we'll buy it either today or tomorrow. This "oil companies will choke on their stockpiles" bit makes for dramatic reading but in reality they are more than willing to wait it out, but you and I need to drive tomorrow.

But not driving a gas guzzler to work - walking, bicycling or otherwise - makes perfect sense. Not for giving the oil companies a certain finger, but for our own health, wealth and wisdom. Lesser pollution, more exercise, and the lack of FM radio on the road will do wonders for me, at least.

(Oh and the whole thing is an urban legend. Read more about it)

Plagiarism update

2006-05-04T15:01:00.000+05:30

News from the plagiarism front:

1. It's getting hotter by the day, and I want it to rain. I know this has nothing to do with plagiarism, but it's bloody hot mate.

2. K.R.Chandrashekar has "acknowledged sources on his web site". What this means is that he has said that:

I acknowledge the material I have borrowed from the Internet - news items, pieces of columns and articles.

And given a list of articles.

Rajeev Srinivasan is one lucky guy. He got ripped off thrice!

I'm still ticked off; this is still blatant copying and the authors don't get no say. It's not about just acknowedgements, it's about not getting the original author's "okay", about not giving them part of his proceeds, about my paying for what is effectively an irrelevant collection of internet material, and also about twisting the words around so they mean something altogether different.

Acknowledgements are one step forward. But Mr. Chandrashekar, you need to learn to give proper credit - meaning, don't twist their words, don't copy more than a couple sentences, and quote their NAMES in the book. You need to release a new edition with the changes, and recall the current one.

3. Minkey Chief is angry. He says, "Dai Deepak! Can you put your updates on separate blog entries? "

Deepak is sorry. Deepak has therefore bowed to the dictates of the Chief and dedicated an entire bullet point in his honour. And he's got a darn good web site.

4. Kaavya Vishwanathan is screwed. For those of you who don't know, she had written a book called "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life". She copied a large amount of content, with K.R. Chandrashekar-esque word-changing techniques, and got a $500,000 two-book deal with Little, Brown . (now called Little, Drowned) People weren't too happy when the found out that she'd copied from more than one author and perhaps from another Indian-American novel.

Kaavya admitted the plagiarism and apologised saying "The copying was unintentional", but believing that would involve a frontal lobotomy. Eventually, the publishers recalled the book and said ta-ta to the second book as well.

And now, a newpaper named "The Record" will investigate Kaavya's articles as an intern with them in 2003 and 2004. "We have no reason to believe there's anything wrong with her copy. But in light of what's going on, we thought we should check her stuff out."

It's a big bad world, isn't it.

Copying...from Bangalore

2006-04-23T22:03:00.000+05:30

I recently bought a book, Pinging from Bangalore by K.R. Chandrashekar. It's a "blog novel" (whatever that means) about "Basu" - a delivery manager at a software company; his overly stressed work life; his thoughts and ideas on arbitrary, yet important things such as language translation, Americans, the Iraq war, vultures, rocks and such; and Basu's diatribe on the software industry in general.

I didn't like it. Partly because it is the story of a manager whose only problems are a) intra company politics and b) inability to find people ("resources") for his customers' projects. I'll harp upon this in a different post.

Another thing I dislike: The book has appalling English, perhaps the worst I have read in print. I'm not saying mine is any better, but check this:

I went to the bathroom. Drank some water and was looking outside the window. Sun was rising slowly, triggering activities. People distributing milk and newspaper were seen going in their bicycles.

("Going in their bicycles"? I hope they didn't go on the newspapers..and milk!)

The book is littered with grammatical errors - it soon begins to get to you. Phrases like people at offsite are a put off - it means people in Bangalore, off-site from his customer in the U.S. But "at offsite" is just wrong. There is such a miserly approach to using "the" that Sun was rising slowly and Otherwise the moment US turns the tap of outsourcing... and so on.

But what's really disgusting is this: He has copied content shamelessly without giving proper credit. Throughout the book, Chandrashekar COPIES and PASTES text, largely unaltered, into the book. Sometimes he prefixes this with "A web page said", or "A survey reported" but follows that with the text of the web page verbatim.

This is wrong. This is blatant violation of copyright, and in a google-able time and age, very stupid. He does start the book with:

I acknowledge the material I have borrowed from the Internet news items, pieces of columns and articles.
Most of the material is from the following web sites: timesofindia.com, rediff.com, newindpress.com, sulekha.com, news.bbc.co.uk, nytimes.com, amazon.com...
Many thanks to:

The web sites
...

Small mercies. The original authors of these articles would perhaps be enraged that they've been copied verbatim and acknowledged as part of a glorified thank you. That's like saying, "Thank you journalist world, I have copied some of your articles".

Note here: Quoting people means taking a small paragraph from their text, and giving them proper credit. If you take a whole page, you get the author's permission. If you make money from such copying, like Mr. Chandrashekar does by asking us to pay Rs. 200 for his gramatically flawed book, it is only fair that you share the profits with the authors.

What did he copy?
A helluva lot, but here's my initial set of findings:

[Note: He has, for some reason, changed some words, in some cases altering the meaning of the entire sentence.]

page 182 : a web page said: (etc.)

Copied from: http://www.nytimes.com/...
Author: Bob Herbert

"For all the talk of supporting the troops, they are a low priority for most Americans. If the nation really cared, the president would not be frolicking at his ranch for the entire month of August . He'd be back in Washington burning the midnight oil, trying to figure out how to get the troops out of the terrible fix he put them in."

Note: Text is slightly modified.
---------------
page 157-158 A web page said:
Copied from:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Author: Kenneth Chang

"The proponents of intelligent design, a school of thought that some have argued should be taught alongside evolution in the nation's schools, say that the complexity and diversity of life go beyond what evolution can explain....
"

Note: A lot of text is copied verbatim.

Subnote: Kenneth Chang's article says:
"One of the rules of science is, no miracles allowed," said Douglas H. Erwin, a paleobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution. "That's a fundamental presumption of what we do."

Erwin's statement is uncredited and changed to:

A scientist said, One of the rules of science and a fundamental presumption is, no miracles allowed.

Note: When you quote someone, credit them! Why he doesn't like Chang or Erwin is beyond me.
---------------
page 160: A scientist declared:
Copied from:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Author: Cornelia Dean

"Belief in the supernatural, especially belief in God, is not only incompatible with good science, Dr. Hauptman declared, "this kind of belief is damaging to the well-being of the human race."

This statement declared by Herbert A. Hauptman, who shared the chemistry prize in 1985 for his work on the structure of crystals. "A scientist" indeed, but why not name him, Mr. Chandrashekar?

Further in that page:
"Most scientists, who do believe in god, believe in "a God who is behind the laws of nature but who is not intervening. "

comes from

"Most scientists he knows who do believe in God, he added, believe in "a God who is behind the laws of nature but who is not intervening."

"He" is "Steven Weinberg, a physicist at the University of Texas, a member of the academy and a winner of the Nobel Prize in 1979 for his work in particle physics." (from Cornelia Dean's Article)

I do not understand how Dr. Weinberg's statement can be twisted to mean "Most scientists, who do believe in God". It ticks me off - it is a completely different meaning. Dr. Weinberg talked about most god believing scientists he knew and Chandrashekar twisted it to mean most scientists believe in god. This book should be taken out and shot.
-------------
page 178
"nagasaki news item"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4133572.stm
Author: Unknown, but referred in tons of pages online.

Chandrashekar offers no credit, but copies text shamelessly.
-------------
page 182
"By elementary moral standards, in both Iraq and Afghanistan the US and its "spear carrier", the UK should be paying enormous reparations for the atrocities they supported or carried out.They have the company of many other countries: the skewed moral standards of the self-designated “enlightened states”."

copied from:
"By elementary moral standards, in both Iraq and Afghanistan the US and the UK should be paying enormous reparations for the atrocities they supported or carried out directly, particularly since the 1980s — joined by others as well, notably Russia, but also France, Germany, and others: the list of criminals extends well beyond. That would be one simple way to increase the likelihood that the outcome will be more or less favorable. It is, of course, unthinkable, by the moral standards of the self-designated “enlightened states”."

http://groups.msn.com/...
Author: Anuj Chopra
-------------
Oh and he's not altogether bad. He gives credit to Amartya Sen, page 186. He also credits V.S. Naipaul (of whose book a page is lifted). What did the rest of the journalists do to you that they deserve no mention, Mr. Chandrashekar?
-------------
page 186
I said "the strength of the U.S. has been its extraordinary focus on productivity. And, ultimately, productivity is doing more things with less people. Here, you have an economy that makes and destroys millions of jobs a year. Outsourcing is simply more visible. A guy in the bay area loses his job, and somebody in Bangalore gets it. When you put a face to it, it's more emotional.

Copied from:
"But the strength of the U.S. has been its extraordinary focus on productivity. And, ultimately, productivity is doing more things with less people. Here, you have an economy that makes and destroys millions of jobs a year.Outsourcing is more visible. A guy in Detroit loses his job, and somebody in India gets it. When you put a face to it, it's more emotional. "

http://www.businessweek.com/...
This statement was made by Nandan Nilekani when interviewed by Steve Hamm.
-------------
page 193
One editorial said"Hurricanes come in two waves. First comes the rainstorm, and then comes what the historian John Barry calls the "human storm" - the recriminations, the political conflict and the battle over compensation"

http://www.nytimes.com/...
Author: David Brooks
-------------
page 196
"The fact of the matter is that terrorists, those who are intent on taking the lives of innocents (as in the dictionary, not an Islamist definition that ipso facto says a non-Muslim cannot be an innocent), should be treated as beyond the pale: they have forfeited all rights and all expectation of leniency."

(rest of the page also)
http://in.rediff.com/news/2005/aug/11rajeev.htm and
http://in.rediff.com/news/2005/aug/10rajeev.htm
Author: Rajeev Srinivasan
-------------
page 43
"Key to the vulture mortalities is a condition known as visceral gout."
And so on..

http://www.peregrinefund.org/...
Asian Vulture Crisis-2002 Report - (28 Jul 03)
-------------
page 49-50-51
ends with:
" Unfortunately, many senior executives busy travelling the world, signing new deals and developing a vision for the company, have little idea of what may be going on at home. That deep within an organisation that otherwise does all the right things, one man could be driving its best people away"

http://fecolumnists.expressindia.com/full_column.php?content_id=21825
Author: Simran Bhargava
This further quotes from "First break all the rules" - Marcus Buckingham,Curt Coffman.
--------------

That's just the first set. I'm willing to bet that I'm going to find twice this on a more detailed search. It's terribly disgusting that his web page contains no credits either.

Update 24/04/06
More juice:
Page 72:
"One serious misunderstanding amongst the elitist Indians has been their confused interpretation of secularism. The USA is a good nation with which to compare India in matters of secularism. USA does not define secularism as alienation from its traditions. Even though tracing back AMerican civilization to the Greeks is a big stretch, this link and continuity is emphasized. Certainly, the Judeo-Christian foundation of Americanism is made loud and clear."

copied from:

"One serious misunderstanding amongst this milieu of elitist Indians has been their confused interpretation of secularism. The USA is a good nation with which to compare India in matters of secularism. It does not define secularism as alienation from its traditions. Even though tracing back American civilization to the Greeks is a big stretch, this link and continuity is emphasized. Certainly, the Judeo-Christian foundation of Americanism is made loud and clear. "

Link: http://www.sulekha.com/blogs/blogdisplay.aspx?contributor=Rajiv%20Malhotra...
Author: Rajiv Malhotra
Note: Nearly all of Rajiv's article is cut up and sentences juxtaposed in random order in pages 72 to 74. But the sentences are clearly lifted from Rajiv's article.
----
Update 25/04/06:
An anonymous commenter has said that perhaps I was being a bit too harsh. Perhaps I was. Perhaps I should have just said "I wish the author had acknowledged the authors", and left it at that.

But this is not just about acknowledgement, you must understand. This is about theft - he doesn't just QUOTE the authors, he copies ENTIRE ARTICLES. There's a difference.

Quoting is like taking a small part of a cake I made with a lot effort. I don't mind, because if you like it, you'll spread the word, and more people will come to eat my cakes and I'll get recognition and fame and money and whatever.

What Chandrashekar did is like taking the entire cake and pretending it is his own. (And saying "I got a cake from someone in Bangalore. Thanks, Bangalore")

If an author takes the time to research and write an article, re-reading and editing till she has done it right, that time is paid for partly by the money she earns, and partly by the recognition of her writing. The former provides a living, the latter ensures that living will be easier tomorrow.

When someone shamelessly copies this author verbatim, with minor text modifications, he is essentially taking away from both the money and recognition the original author worked hard to earn.

Chandrashekar has denied all the individual authors the recognition they deserve.

And in selling his book, Chandrashekar has earned money from this exercise. I'm willing to bet the authors don't get a naya paisa. That is cheating them out of what should rightfully be theirs, is it not?

Note: Some authors may not mind a complete lift, if they are duly credited. But then some may not. And you simply cannot lift verbatim and not provide credit.

On another note, Kaavya Viswanathan was exposed by Harvard Crimson recently for copying content from Megan F. McCafferty's novels. The copied text may seem inconsequential - it does, at first sight - but it is blatant copying. She is being called a cheat, an embarrassment to Harvard and a frauster. The literary scandal d'jour?

Like Oliver says:
On that note, what is even more astounding is that Viswanathan - or anyone - would want to plagiarize prose so banal to begin with. No offense to McCafferty but I'm pretty sure her two novels were not in the running for the Pulitzer. Viswanathan couldn't come up with anything better than this on her own: " “Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart."
----
Update 2 May 2006:
The author has now acknowledged sources on his web site. This is commendable, as a first step. I still feel that copying stuff verbatim is wrong - the author should either quote or rephrase.

Note: Still not credited: Anuj Chopra.

----
Voice your opinion
You can Write to K.R.Chandrashekar. This is worse than blopycats. This is theft.

itni si jaan...

2006-04-22T14:09:00.000+05:30

...aur itna gussa?

(That's one of my all time favourite dialogues that I have always wanted to say in real life, along with "Mahurat ka waqt nikla jaa raha hai". I have successfully used the latter in my brother-in-law's wedding )

So the itna gussa part is Shruti telling "outsiders" to what I think is "put up or shut up". That's not actually correct - she should have addressed it to those people who incessantly complain about Bangalore's infrastructure and blame it on Kannadigas. Yeah, you know who you are, you assholes.

I'm what you might call a pseudo-kannadiga. Born in Tirthahalli, Shimoga. Lived 15 years of my (now) 31 in the north of India or abroad. Have never learnt kannada formally, but I can talk the kannada and walk the kannada. Mother tongue: Konkani. Am I a kannadiga? Or an outsider? I don't know. And frankly, I don't give a fuck.

But what I am pissed about is three things:

1) People who say that kannadigas are pricks. Because:
a) Kannadigas expect you to speak in Kannada to them. Not all, but the few that do piss them off. Because Hindi is the bloody national language and we will speak it, and you must reply to us in it. You're in Bengaluru, dude: ninna ajjina keya. Very carefully, take your head out of the hole you are in, and listen: You don't want to talk or learn the local language, then you'll get hostile treatment once in a while. You can live with it - heck, hundreds of tourists do, in Bangalore, France, Norway, Britain, wherever - or you can wither away and die. Anything else is unacceptable.

And Hindi is not *the* national language. It's one of the many, and Kannada ranks equally. Don't give me the bull crap that it's the most widely spoken. It's not in the south, and that's where you are, deal with it.

b) Kannadigas are violent bastards. They quote the Raj Kumar death riots. I'll say this: the guys who rioted *are* pricks. Whether he was a great man or not, his fan club has a lot of anti social elements who will take any opportunity to throw stones or the kannadiga card. But by and large, kannadigas are peaceful, which is why everyone in bangalore does not carry a knife or a gun for self defense. Note that rowdies exist everywhere: Bal Thackeray's crazy fan following and Indira Gandhi's death riots show that latitude is no barrier to insanity.

2) Kannadigas who think "outsiders" are pricks. These are other kinds of xenophobic idiots. They are angry because:

a) There's too much traffic. There was always too much traffic, somewhere or the other. City market was crowded, then Chikpet, Avenue Road and KG Road were crowded, then Shivajinagar (Russell market) was crowded, and now everywhere is crowded. You can't blame this on "outsiders" - even in the past (read, from independence), Bangalore has been dominated by people not from the city - the Coorgis, the Bunts, the Tamilians, the Gults and the Marvadis.

b) Outsiders have raised prices to untenable levels: Yes, this has happened in cases of household help. It's a booming city, and this will happen - with scarcity, prices go up. Yet, you get benefits - your houses and plots are now worth 100 times what you paid for them. Your children drive fancy cars from their fat pay packages at MNCs. Your club memberships at Rs. 5,000 bought in 1980 give you good food and alcohol at phenomenally low prices - memberships that "outsiders" have to pay an absolute bomb for.

The increase in prices has resulted in a general increase in the quality and standard of Bangalorean living. You can now get cheaper food, delivered home in nice packages. You can eat after 9 PM (folks living here in the 80's will understand). You can get affordable prefab furniture and kitchenware. Jobs don't need "sifaarish" or "salpa heLkodri".

But yes, if you have retired, it's not the nicest place to be. Bangalore was a retirement paradise; not any longer. I say if you want to retire in peace, choose a smaller, less vibrant town. No one wants to retire in New York. Florida's been the choice for a reason. (I generalise with "no one" but you get what I mean)

c) Outsiders "expect" too much:This is a pet peeve. Dudes and Dudettes: get the facts straight. Bangalore's infrastructure is appalling. It has always been appalling, but because too few people cared, it got ignored. People who live now do care, and so should you kannadigas. It's not "outsiders" who caused phenomenal damage to 80 feet road in Koramangala. It is your own politicians.

It's not outsiders' fault that some of you chose to land-grab the storm water drains areas and build your houses on it, and now there's flooding.

It's not your fault either. If the outsiders blame *you*, spit on them. But when you blame the outsiders, expect they will spit on you.

3) Companies that cry about infrastructure: they have a right to, yes. But they should participate also, no? There is such a poor response to BMP's infrastructure project requrests for private participation - private companies don't even want to do seven footpaths! Why should only the builders - Prestige, Purvankara etc. - do this sort of work? Can't a company like Wipro, or Infosys or Biocon do it? Or any of the tens of hundreds of MNCs?

They pay no tax. Yes, their employees do - but that goes to the centre. If you think that's a lot of money consider this: if 5 lakh people (in the IT/BT/BPO industries) pay an average tax of Rs. 20,000 per year, the total tax collected is only Rs. 1,000 crore. That means the whole "new" industry in Bangalore pays less tax than HALF of Infosys' annual net profit (2800 crores).

Read that carefully. One company's net profits are more than double the tax paid by all the IT denizens of bangalore. If Infosys was taxed at corporate rate (35%) that means Bangalore would get Rs. 980 crores as tax, which can be used for infrastructure. ONE company's tax can pay for 100 flyovers. For 200 km of roads. I suggest we tax all Bangalore companies at just 10% - that will give you TONS of money - more than Rs. 10,000 crores.

Infosys is an exception -they have paid for roads, flyovers, traffic lights and such. The public sector biggies have done their bit too - BEL, BHEL and all. But my complaint is against the rest - IBM, Accenture, Wipro, TCS etc.

These companies won't give a paltry 1 crore or so for footpaths. Cheapskate miserable whiners.

Okay so that's my pissed-off at people sandbox speech.

Read less aggressive views here.

Enter the blopycats

2006-04-21T19:03:00.000+05:30

There's a new face in blog-town. Blopycats, as I choose to call those that will shamelessly purloin content from the web and paste them on their own blog. They refuse to give credit - no, that would be terrible - and sometimes, when the conscience pricks, will change a few words "here and there". The sun is always shining becomes Shining always, is the sun. Or even Always the sun is shining.

They don't mind that the language is inconsistent, or that deleting punctuation could cause severe grammatic damage. Or that the original author spent a lot of time phrasing the very sentences that were heartlessly "blagiarized". And later, they will shed a tear or wipe their harried brow when they receive applause for their "wonderful post".

Blopying isn't "new": it's existed ever since someone invented Copy+Paste. The idea is simple: Visit a web page; Look left and right; nobody's watching; Copy and Paste the content to blog; Close the original web page. Sounds suspiciously similar to someone stealing something? It is, as per this link. (thanks to Madman and Amit Verma)

Now for some egg-samples.

The Blopiers, and their Blopy-rating:

1) Anushka : This one seems to have copied from a TON of sites; Read more at Shilpa Bhatnagar's blog.
Copied from:
Shilpa Bhatnagar (blopy)
Dr. Ahmed Adam (blopy)
Michael Millet (blopy)
Makarand Paranjape (blopy)
Lots of people Link1 (blopy), Link2 (blopy)
Yash Sehgal (blopy)

Blopy-rating: Dirty Disgusting Stinking Rat. Defends her copying by deleting comments questioning her, does some ridiculous counter posturing by saying she'll sue. It's more su-su than anything else.

2) Rahul Mishra: Copied from Anuradha Ganapathy. Read about it here.
Copied from:
Anuradha Ganapathy (blopy)
A lot more, it seems. Help!

Blopy-rating: Stinking Rat. Could be Ignorance but has been warned and still keeps the posts there.

3) Rohan Pinto: Was "outed" by MadMan and Amit Verma. Full story is here.

Blopy-rating: Ignoranus. Yep, google for it.

The Outing tools
Copyscape: Darn good tool; enter your URL and check for copies. Nobody copied me. Or they did but copy-escaped. Ha.
Gimme more.

I will soon come out with another plagiarizer post. I's done some research and this is worse than disgusting scum because he makes you pay for it. Asshole.

Real Estate Cash Flow Calculator

2006-04-12T19:54:00.000+05:30

Okay, this might sound terribly advertisingish.

I've written a "Real Estate Cash Flow Calculator" for Indian Real Estate Investors, and it shows why real estate investments in India do not generate positive cash flow for a long time.

Oh yes, and you can download it too (link in the article).

Read the article, and send me comments on my Investor Blog entry.

Sorry for cross posting it here. My first real article on deepakshenoy.com and I'm feeling good.

It's time to buy a yellow TV.

2006-03-25T13:26:00.000+05:30

It'll match the colour of what's being shown on it.

No, really. It seems there was a 30 minute Rani Mukherjee piece on primetime news, celebrating her birthday. 30 minutes for her birthday. On a news channel. Reality check time. news channels: This is NOT news. This is bullshit. And very yellow, at that.

You want more? Check out the The Shakti Kapoor Sting, and reactions here. And then they did it on Aman Verma as well. In both cases, these "stings" seemed to be soo over the top that the girls practically requested for sex before the hormones of the "stung" kicked in. Overzealous sting operators are bigger arseholes than the stung.

And the best is this article. TV channels showing a man who saw Yama and more...you know, it's kinda weird that such an article comes from TOI.

Intro to blogging

2006-03-17T02:08:00.000+05:30

In response to the Intro to Blogging Content Competition, I have decided to post the most authoritative post on blogging, ever. Sit back, relax, and stay away from any sharp objects for the duration of this post.

So the questions are:

1) What's a Blog?
A Blog is a shortened form of Web Log, which comes from Web, which is what spiders weave, and Log, which is a piece of wood. So a blog is simply a piece of wood that is covered with spider spit. The spider, having done this after trying, trying and trying again, decided to write about it and found no publisher worth his or her salt (who the hell is worth salt? publishers perhaps) was willing to publish this extremely boring piece of writing. Therefore, the spider chose to use the internet instead, which is why you call it the world wide web. Which also explains why the majority of blogs are about extremely boring topics like libertarianism and its effect on mutated frog embryos in Baluchistan.

In the internet you can't have a six letter word. I mean using weblog is not happening. You get four letters, they said. So we got blog , because webl sounds plain silly. So does eblo, if you were planning get democratic with the words.

2) Start Blogging now. How?
First, you get a spider.

Then you kill it, because your wife is standing on the table and screaming. You open your computer and write a nice article in Microsoft Word about how your wife is leaving you in peace because she's still on the table not yet convinced that the spider is dead. Now you figure your good friends want to read this also, because it does not occur to your brain cells that this act will eliminate the adjective "good" from their description.

But you also want the whole world to read it and not have to email the whole world, because let's face it, the world is stupid and will simply email it back to you and say "FYI" in the subject and then you will spend the rest of your life deleting emails and your wife will starve to death standing on the table.

So you decide you will publish your own BLOG! So you go to www.blogger.com. From there on, you enter all sorts of details like Name, last name, any other given names, any names not given but could be used in times of peril, shade of lipstick, make of underwear, and small technical details like if you want to "ping" "weblogs.com" or "enable float alignment" which sound important but the spiders in the background are laughing when you click "Yes" and thinking how stupid humans have become that they actually want to align floats or float aligns or whatever the hell it is that option does, and frankly the spiders couldn't care less because they're bloody spiders and they're only good for eating flies and scaring women though with all the women's liberation movement and all it is more likely a woman will squish the spider and tell you to do the dishes or she'll shove the wooden log up where it doesn't belong, but we have to warn you because we have now reached the end of this sentence.

So you publish this blog and tell your friends that you are now a blogger and they look at you with awe and wonder and ask you if it hurts.

But you have to face such hurtful remarks when you have just become a writer and publisher, so don't give up just yet. Give up when they actually read your blog and threaten to kill you.

3) Tools for Blog Nirvana
The last time someone achieved Nirvana was under a tree, which presumably consisted of lots of spiders.

So that really is your only hope. Write whatever you will, and post it in your blog. Then go sit under the biggest tree you can find, and I'm really sorry for you folks that live in bonsai territory. Recite the following mantra, over and over again:

Om Technorati linkaaye namaha.
Om Flickr asya picturaaya namaha
Om Shree Google adsense inastu
Om Stat Counter badh jaaye namaha.

Repeat until your head bursts or your wife voluntarily gets off the table, and hits you on the knocker with a kadai.

4) State of the Indian Blogosphere...
...is Karnataka. Tomorrow it may be Maharashtra. We don't know yet.

That's what makes blogging so dynamic.

Maaeri.

2006-03-16T15:03:00.000+05:30

Aadisht's post brought me to the video of a song I absolutely love: Maaeri.

The song, when it plays in my car, plays at an extremely high volume. Because I love it. Because I will scream, Maaeri aap hi hansdi, Maaeri aap hi rondi, maaeri yaad vo yaad vo aayeri. And I will stop and listen when it slows down. Euphoria's Palash Sen has a fundoo voice, but it's not the voice that gets me. It's the music. It's so ephemerally hindustani. And so bloody powerful it makes stop and ask myself why I am where I am.

But I'd never seen the video. So I did.

And I loved it. See it before you read further. I loved it more for it's context than the story line which is the standard ole lovers forced to get separated, woman gets the arranged marriage, man gets the song, and then walks in next woman. Somewhat like the song in Munna Bhai MBBS. Not much of an ishstory.

But the context of the video is brilliant. It's like going home. The trains. The fields and mud roads. The sitting on bags in a railway station and singing - heck I'm not much of a singer but I can do that clapping thing quite well. The woman carrying flowers or something on her head. The one rupee coin run over by a train. The sound of the train chugging along, and the smell of the air when you wake up in the morning and stick your head out the door.

And the background - right through the video, there's faded action in the background. Man fights with TT. Vociferous hand raising on the platform. People walking, leaving tractors behind. A man warming his hands on a makeshift fire. The sugarcane laden cart, the girls running around a tree, TT colliding with sleeping man, the punjabi dad getting miffed about man's hand on daughters shoulder (that scene is crafted brilliantly), and the casual juxtaposition of a woman with a Shiva photo. And the hariyali all around.

You can just about smell it.

Or I've been a city boy too long.

Either ways, I miss the country. I miss walking on empty streets. I ache for the sugarcane - standing in the courtyard and ripping cane with your teeth while the juices spill all over your face and you get poked by the strands of cane.
Watching while a train whizzes past the fields.
The thrill of standing in the doorway with your hands on the iron rails outside...and stretching forward.

I miss it all. And it took a music video to show me that. Grr.

10 years after a cricket match.

2006-03-10T10:17:00.000+05:30

I just read Michael's cricket match review, of the India-Pakistan match in the '96 world cup. (cricinfo Link). It was in Bangalore - at the Chinnaswamy Stadium - and I was in Surathkal. (Add in "bahut naa-insaafi hai" somewhere here)

So I decided to hop over, a nights bus journey away, and Dad had got us four tickets - he was a member of KSCA which got him a few tickets in those days. The stadium's walking distance from my house, and this was a day-night fixture, so we left home at around 11, figuring we'll get there early. And we had to do the "packing".

You weren't allowed to take anything in there. I mean no cigarettes, or matches, or anything that could be used as a weapon. So we had to "pack" - cigarettes went into socks, matches into other locations that were unfriskable. When we got in, it was the most inefficient frisking ever. We could've smuggled in anything short of a nuclear missile. The guard would run his hands over your back and stop just before the derriere, and let you go. What kind of idiot would smuggle anything on his BACK?

Anyhow, getting in was ok, and getting to seats was fine. The stadium has rickety plastic chairs but we intended to be standing most of the time, mostly on the chairs. So after a long time of running around to get pepsi (which at the time was the choice of a new generation) and watching Prasad and Srinath practice a bit of bowling, we were itching for the real game.

And one helluva game it was. India won the toss, and decided to bat. Tendulkar and Sidhu came out to open, and got on with it. Not at a pace we were expecting but they were doggedly moving along, around 5 an over. Now that's a good pace, but not enough for a crowd to go ballistic, so what we did was choose to entertain ourselves with Javed Miandad.

Miandad was fielding where we were - which was third man and mid-on in alternate overs. He'd field quite close to the rope, and consequently, our stand. And we would incessantly niggle him, loudly and clearly, about his fielding quality, his growing too old, and that he should run faster, but how can he because he's so old. Lots of name calling happened, including references to female members of immediate family, and Miandad did turn and give us all menacing looks - yeah, we were mean little bastards, all of us. (See Segue)

At 40 overs we were 200 or so and then something happened. I don't know what but there was a flash of light and the earth caved in and Sita disappeared. Or it seemed like that because suddenly our batsmen showed major jigar. We hit around 70 runs in the last eight overs I think, pretty standard nowadays, but only getting known then with the likes of Jayasuriya. Jadeja hit some 22 runs in one Waqar Younis over, and that was so-ooo--ooo cool to watch. We ended up making 287 and I was one happy bloke. We were hungry but too busy celebrating to step out of the stand to the food area. I would later regret that.

You know when they call them fast bowlers? They *are* fast. I'm not saying relatively fast like Prasad vs. Younis. I'm saying fast in general, so fast that if you're in a frikking stadium you're not going to see the ball. You hear something when the batsman hits the ball and then you look at the entire 360 degree area around him hoping to see some fielder move - that is approximately where the ball has gone. In TV, you see it crystal clear, a round white very visible object. From a stand it's about as visible as a mosquito. Now imagine that mosquito moving at 130 kms per hour.

So when the Pak bowlers came on, Latif (Pak's wicketkeeper) was so far back we were going "What's he going to do, wait for the ball to stop and then pick it up?". And Younis's first delivery kinda answered that. If I was the wicketkeeper I would choose to stand in the adjacent parking lot instead.

But I digress.

The Indian team was now on the field, and then first 10 overs were a bloody nightmare. Sohail and Anwar just thulped us all over the place and the crowd was silent. We were silent. We, the tormentors of Miandad, the ever-enthu, effervescent bubbly stand were wondering what serial was on TV tonight.

Anwar got out, but Sohail carried on the (bad) work. Then it happened - Sohail hits Prasad for a four, and points to the boundary - as if to say, "watch that, the ball belongs there". This pissed us off. Because a) Prasad is a local lad, and b) Sohail is a pakistani (bad word). So kannada gaalis were flying all over the place, and people were so angry they could have killed Javed Miandad. Don't ask why.

The very next ball, Prasad did two things.
a) He bowled out Sohail with a neat incutting delivery, knocking out off stump.
b) He pointed Sohail to the player's stand, as if to say "Watch that, YOU belong there.".
The crowd went wild.

Then Pakistan never recovered. They kept trying, kept losing wickets, and even a partial cameo by Latif couldn't get 'em close. We were ecstatic. And when we won, the only bad thing in our mind was that we hadn't bowled them all out. They made 248 in 49 (an over cut for bowling too slow) and we took the spoils. What a match.

Walking back was amazing too - it was around 11 PM I think, but people were everywhere. Running, jumping, flag-waving, car-honking, "India Zindabad" screaming people. And there was this poor set of muslim cap wearing people in a car that were forced to stop, and say "India Zindabad" three times before they were let go. They were visibly scared, but did repeat it, and went on their way. They could've been Pakistani visitors and we gave 'em shabby treatment. We should reserve that only for Miandad.

But great match overall. The intensity, the crowd, the feeling of a good win: I'll cherish that forever.

(Segue) I think I have hated Miandad since he hit that last ball six off Chetan Sharma. I was 12 at the time and it deeply influenced me to hate Miandad for the rest of my life. The fact that his son is now married to a Dawood daughter just puts that hatred in stone.

I think all of us in that stand felt that we were responsible, in some way, for Miandad's pathetic performance in that match, and his subsequent retirement. If we hadn't heckled him, he would have been in better mental shape to beat the crap out of our bowlers. I'm sure he looked at mid-on and cringed during his batting, and then got hopelessly run out. My little part in a very very big victory. (End Segue)

Of Berlin, Walls and Frozen Ba...er...Toes

2006-03-03T14:10:00.000+05:30

Berlin. That's where I was over the last week or so. To meet my wife, who's doing a course in German there. There are really only five things I brought back with me.

1) Berlin is cold. I'm not saying cold as in Bangalore's pathetic winters where people where shawls and sweaters and monkey caps when it's 18 degrees celcius. I'm not even saying Delhi cold where you feel a little chill down your spine and it's like FOUR degrees outside.

I'm saying cold as in -10 degrees with a further wind chill factor. When the air is so cold you take a long deep drag of air and your lungs go *clink*. Where you remove your gloves to take out money from your pocket and by the time you've gotten to that 1 Euro coin your hands are frozen stiff. When you know that you don't have to be dead for rigor mortis.

And we froze. Luckily everything inside anywhere was heated. Which meant that we would rush to the U-Bahns and the S-Bahns, which I will talk about, and even into supermarkets and coffee shops just to get a little happiness watching our fingers thaw.

2) Berlin has history dripping out its nose. Really. You can trip over it on the pavements. Literally. There's a project called Stolpersteine ("Stumbling stones") where people insert brass plated stones into pavements, inscribed with names of jews that lived nearby and who died in the holocaust. The stones are slightly raised above pavement level so you would trip on it and then look. (read an English review)

And that's just on the pavements. Every place in Berlin has a history, and I'll go about it in more detail when I have photos uploaded. There's the wall of course, and at Potsdamer Platz you can see parts of it lying around aimlessly with little placards describing it's gory history. And all around it lies some of the most magnificent icons of capitalism you will ever see. Lexus and the Olive tree indeed.

There's Checkpoint Charlie, the Jewish museum, Babylonian reconstructions, Palaces that were broken down by communists, communist palaces that will be broken down...and more. Later.

3) Public Transportation means something. Not "walking" which is what it is in India. Berlin has S-Bahns and U-Bahns - metro train systems that actually work and have timings that have a distinct connection with reality. And trams and metro buses. And you can buy a single ticket that allows you to travel on all of them - or buy just tickets for a certain distance.

Unlike Washington D.C. and some other systems I know, you can just walk into a Bahnof - a train station - and get in on a train. There's no barrier or "insert-ticket-gate-opens" kind of system. What happens is that two guys get on the train. When it gets moving they announce, loudly and in German, that Bush is an idiot. No, wait, wrong story. They announce that they want to see your ticket, and you show it to them or pay a stinking huge fine at the next station. This happened exactly once in my week long stay - which means there aren't enough Indians there, yet. (Yeah, you can mail me your stinkers. It's a bloody joke.)

4) Rascists exist. I've not made that in bold because it'll ruin an otherwise good experience. I was on a U-Bahn with my wife, and suddenly a man in the compartment started muttering somthing in German. My wife, knowing German, realized he was swearing at us and calling us, of all things, pigs. I take offence at that, because pigs are generally way overweight and eat just about anything. Wait. Er. Okay I take offence at that because this guy was smelling like one and trying to pass it off on me.

Anyhow I didn't retaliate - I didn't know how to, not knowing German - and overall, no one else in the compartment did anything to help. That's because of the "German angst" - they don't get involved unless it's their own hand getting chopped off. He muttered things at us, came close to us and suddenly announced that he didn't want to be in the same compartment as us and went somewhere else. That was a sum total of two minutes, and I think he got out in the next station.

I'm a little pissed with myself about not reacting. When the guy came close I did bunch my fists to ensure I was going to get one in, at least. But that's not the same as getting up and saying "Fuck you, you racist bastard." I wish I'd done that...but I didn't. And that pisses me off.

5) I can't end with that point. So I'll just say this: Berlin is beautiful. There's a life and charm to it that somehow makes it alive. Even beggars walk around with nice shoes and sometimes with a dog, and ask for money in a way that would appear they're asking for venture capital. It's a polished business proposal which people listen to patiently, on trains and pavements, and then hand over their change. It's fascinating.

How they survive in that cold without a home is frightening. As much perhaps, as is the thought that the homeless in India face the summer heat. But why compare: it's not the same thing, it'll never be. The biggest beggars in India are of the Sachin Tendulkar type anyhow.

Deepakshenoy.com

2006-02-07T23:21:00.000+05:30

It's the height of narcissism. When you get your own web site. (And the spelling of narcissism right the first time)

So here you go: http://www.deepakshenoy.com.

What email do I get? me[at]deepakshenoy.com? HeDaMan@...? Deepak@...? (that's weird) What do you think?

Pitch it right, says Guy Kawasaki

2006-02-07T23:11:00.000+05:30

I just came across Guy Kawasaki's blog today. This guy is AWESOME. I've been to one of his presentations at Borland - he is incredible on stage. One thing I REALLY liked was his "top ten" format: everything has a top ten, including the Palo Alto High School baccalaureate speech, which everyone in the world has read because of a forwarding epidemic two years ago. They now read it out to six year olds.

Anyhow, Guy has written a book: The Art of the Start. It's about starting up, and you don't have to be a car. Okay, it's about entrepreneurship. Guy's got a very lucid writing style, so I suggest you read that book: except it's not available in India yet.

As a teaser, Guy's read out a full chapter, recorded it to MP3 and referenced it on his blog. It's a long MP3. It's the kind of MP3 that has you wondering why all this didn't strike you earlier. It's the kind of MP3 that'll make a difference to the way you sell, buy, hire people or even try to get donations for a charity. Listen in.

Do Not Call Service.

2006-02-06T11:35:00.000+05:30

ABN Amro Bank has been calling me incessantly over the past month. I have now cancelled their card and torn it to pieces and sent it back, because they wouldn't stop calling me. It's so bad that when someone calls me and says "this is a call from ABN AMRO" I cut them off. And I recommend you do the same, because I just absolutely hate them.

I've expressed severe discontent before, in my Dear Inconsiderate Caller post, and now is the time for action.

The RBI has issued a notification saying:
The card issuing bank / NBFC should maintain a Do Not Call Registry (DNCR) containing the phone numbers (both cell phones and land phones) of customers as well as non-customers (non-constituents) who have informed the bank / NBFC that they do not wish to receive unsolicited calls / SMS for marketing of its credit card products. The DNCR should be set up within two (2) months from the date of this circular and wide publicity should be given to the arrangement. [Nov 21 2005]

So has this happened? Today is greater than two months from the date of the notification, so many banks do have such a service on their web site. Two major problems though:

1) Many banks "hide" this link somewhere within their site, making it soooo much more difficult to find.
2) Banks tend to say "give us 30 days to implement" which means they can STILL call you for 30 days.

For 2) above: you can take their call and cut it off, and thus make them pay the call charges.

And for 1) I have listed the set of Banks and their Do Not Call Service Links. Use it, and tell your friends, and your family and your dog please.

Note that items marked with a (*) are banks where the link is available on the MAIN PAGE. These are very nice people. (Thank you very much, sirs.)

Bank	NAV Page
ABN AMRO	Click Here
HSBC(*)	Click Here
HDFC Bank(*)	Click Here
Standard Chartered(*)	Click Here
SBI[1]	Click Here
Citibank	Click Here
ICICI Bank	Click Here

* Link is easily available on the MAIN PAGE of the bank.

[1] Had to find this using google. The link is http://www.sbicards.co.in.

You'll notice that a number of banks are missing here. Such as the PSU Banks (Canara Bank, Syndicate Bank etc.) and some other smaller banks.

I went to some of the bank sites and could not even find a "Do Not Call Service" link. But in my experience, none of these banks hound their customers with calls.

Having said that, you might have had a bad experience. So if you, or anyone you know, has been hounded by a bank NOT on the list, let me know, and I'll find the link and add it in.

Why I don't sign standing instructions

2006-01-30T23:03:00.000+05:30

I got a couple of forms from Airtel today. One was a Standing Instruction form that would allow Airtel to charge my Credit Card for all future bills. And in the form is this clause:

I therefore, undertake to unconditionally honour and pay without demure and contestation all the said charges, including interim charge when I am billed for the same by the aforementioned bank.

(splutter, cough) What? You can charge any amount to my credit card, and I can't contest it? Do I look like I was born yesterday?

To those of you who don't know: interim charge refers to a charge made without a bill. They want to charge your card without a bill, and you can't do any-fucking-thing, because you've signed a form that allows them to charge even *their* underwear to your account.

I don't know what without demure and contestation means. What it does mean is that they hired a lawyer who's a fuckhead at english. Or, if this *is* a legally valid term, the entire bloody legal system is screwed up.

Okay, so we're not signing that form. We're referring to ourselves in the plural, but that doesn't mean we weigh enough for more than one person.

The other form is the ECS form - that allows them to automatically charge my Bank Account. That contains:

I/We hereby unconditionally and irrevocably authorize Bharti Tele-Ventures Limited, to raise debits on such regular payments as referred to above against the above mentioned Bank Account two days earlier to my bill due date.

I am disturbed by the phrase unconditionally and irrevocably. Because in the notes section, they write:

Maximum ceiling can be specified.

There's no entry in the form for "Maximum ceiling". And the word unconditionally indicates the lack of such a ceiling.

I have to say though, that this form is not as bad as the Credit card instruction, and does not mention anything about interim payments.

(Additionally, Banks have been known to not honour ECS mandate withdrawal unless you also get the consent of the other party. Meaning, if Airtel service is lousy and I decide to get rid of them, I have to ask their permission to withdraw the ECS mandate. What incentive does Airtel have, if I'm exiting their service? They can stall for a few months for some free money!

Note: The RBI has published a notification that specifically bars banks from requesting the other party's consent. If you're the bank account holder, the bank must respect your wishes if you withdraw the ECS instruction.)

I don't think I'll sign these forms - am quite happy if I'm in the know BEFORE money goes out of my pocket. If I signed, I'll probably never know how much money's going where, and when - meaning increased blood pressure each time I look at my online bank statement and see an unknown item in there! Also, I can plan for a contingency by staggering payments if I'm short - and choose to pay by Credit card on a particularly bad month. (Gives me another month free credit)

Getting linked.

2006-01-30T17:32:00.000+05:30

I just found Shanti's post on How to Get on Desipundit for Dummies. I'm going to be the crash test dummy for today and follow all steps required.

I remember, when I was a kid[1], that Indian politics sucked[2]. Indira Gandhi was an absolute idiot, but what else can you expect from a woman?[3] And her son, Rajiv, was totally off his rocker, like all congressmen, totally and completely logic challenged.[4] At the time, the western media berated his actions, but for all the wrong reasons.[5] And yet, the "phoren" dude would revel in "Indianness", which they equated to dressing in saffron, smoking pot and having tantric sex [6], which were as fascinating to me as an adolescent.[1 again] It used to get my goat, the first time I went abroad, that people asked me if I owned an elephant.[7]

"Yeah, of course, we all do. We get an elephant each on our tenth birthday", I used to say, and they would know NEVER to mess with Deepak Shenoy.

Deepak Shenoy.

That's the name they feared.[8]

"Don't mess with Deepak Shenoy", they'd say to each other when they passed each other on the street.
"Who's Deepak Shenoy?"
"That bloke, there"
"He's Deepak Shenoy?"
"Yeah"
"And I'm not to mess with him?"
"Yeah"
"Okay, I won't mess with Deepak Shenoy". [9]

[1] to [7]: Rules on the page you didn't go to, you lazy bum.
[8] : Segue.
[9] : Not big letters, but surely all over the place.

Well, I don't expect to be linked to. (And I expect to have ended that sentence with a preposition.)

Was fun writing it, though.

Vasantahabba 2007: how we can make it happen.

2006-01-29T15:22:00.000+05:30

As we all know by now, Vasantahabba 2006 has been cancelled for lack of funds. Vasantahabba 2007 is still a possibility though, and I had written to Lynne asking her what we can do to help.

I just got a reply from Lynne Fernandez at Nrityagram. Here's the content:

Dear Deepak,
Thank you very much for your email - when I get letters like yours, I feel
motivated to continue to work and make Nrityagram and Vasantahabba a
reality!
I welcome any kind of help and support - let me know how you can help and we
can take it from there.
And yes, we accept any kind of donation, no matter how small! After all we
have been built on donations and goodwill.
The sponsorship for VH is approx 20 lakhs (it was this year - next year we
may have to increase depending on prices). And we can get sole sponsor or
co-sponsors. as long as we cover the cost, am fine - we usually do not make
any money on it or even attempt to.
More soon.
Lynne

Can we all do something to aid Vasantahabba next year? The sponsorship is only Rs. 20 Lakhs, around that of a college festival nowadays! And for this amount, we get an amazing coterie of top class artistes, dance shows, music and the unforgettable ambience.

Many of us have been there, and if they'd charged an entry fee, we would surely have paid. If I paid 1000 rupees for a concert, I would surely pay that for a Vasantahabba! All we have to do is find 2,000 such people who will pay 1000 Rupees each. Is this possible?

Or, can we get our companies to put in Rs. 10,000 each? An Infosys could easily sponsor the event completely, and so can the IBMs, Googles and Microsofts. But can we get to them?

I'm willing to give it a shot.

I will find out what we must to do, who can we send cheques to, address details etc. I'll post the answers here, very soon.

Meanwhile, feel free to contact Nrityagram or Lynne at:

Tel: +91 80 28466313 / 4
Email: nrityagram AT vsnl.com
Website: www.nrityagram.org

The best blonde joke. Ever.

2006-01-27T10:29:00.000+05:30

You've read blonde jokes. And you've read Blonde Jokes.

But you haven't really read Blonde Jokes, until you've read The Best Blond Joke.

Hairless and why.

2006-01-25T11:54:00.000+05:30

Gawker again, in his goose egg blog, says there's a reason we're not hairy. Because we've evolved. Because we wouldn't get laid if we were hirsute, which comes from the words hir, meaning "People" and sute, meaning "that look like magnified armpits".

And I commented:
Oh but you have not met some people I know, who, in the hair department, have refused to evolve, but have succeeded in getting noogie, largely because of the concept of:
(tan-tan-tada!)

Arranged marriages.

Yes, getting laid was not a problem because someone in the Indian 'we know best' department long back said "No looking before marriage", and then beat his chest and roared because, let's face it, unevolved habits die hard.

So your average hairy male gets snogged and hay-romped, because, let's face it, she's not going to see anything before the marriage, and even most of the "after" because of purdah/aanchal/sehra/whatever. Also proves why a lot of women sprout like, well, whatever sprouts very often.

But there's a reason mythological figures like Ram, Laxman, Arjuna and all that were sorta less hairy. They had to go through svayamwars.

(Let's just say there was enough extra-marital stuff happening to these guys also. Kunti said the Pandavas were born from a "boon" granted to her. Ahem. Probably a less hairy boon than others.)

The more I think about it, the more it makes sense to me. Why are Indian men ugly? Again, arranged marriages. No woman in her right mind would choose hairy gorilla man for her husband if she didn't have her father telling her it's either hairy gorilla man or lack of external body parts. Consider now that most Indians have nearly all body parts intact. What option would she have chosen?

Maybe there's a reason they call him a "BrideGroom". He was for the Bride to Groom.

You may think: Maybe it was the inbreeding. Because that would only account for the insanity so prevalent in Indian society that people, even today, honk their car horns for no practical reason. Earlier, when there were only villages and farms, they used to ring the cow's bells, because, let's face it, it was quite lonely out there and even cousins were in short supply.

So while hair loss is an evolutionary thing, we stymied it with our ancient rituals. But when we do let Darwin take the course, men would become bald. And then, as we noticed in our world famous "One Night SHIFT-2 the Call Center", women would "reject" them unceremoniously, since arranged marriages allow people to now see photos of their US based to-bes, and talk to them on the phone.

You have to have the right amount of hair. Baldness is good only when applied to chin, cheek and nose. Not good when applied to skull, eyebrows, hands and legs.

"Chest" is debatable. Salman Khan has no hair on chest. But also the process of evolution in his case, has been debated to not have gone the distance. Or maybe the subject in question evolved from a non-hairy animal, such as the Crab.

Oh, we've received an legally notarized email from the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Crabs.

Fatta maro-ing pays off big.

2006-01-19T11:04:00.000+05:30

When I was a kid, I used to maro fattas. Which means, for those of you ignorant of Delhi lingo - I used to make up things. We all do, and if you didn't you're fatta maroing. But I was really bad. Because I would actually believe these things happened to me. Fairly innocent stuff, like saying I saw Maine Pyar Kiya ten times when I only saw it thrice and nearly puked the third time. Or that I was an investigator in the lines of Jupiter Jones, Pete Crenshaw or Bob Andrews, and had a secret van hidden in my backyard. I really did believe them, and that's what scared me. Was I schizophrenic? How many points is "schizophrenic" in Scrabble?

When I grew up I realized I was fatta maro-ing big time. I guess I still do, like when someone asks me what I do I say I'm a para-sailer on holiday. But now I know I'm faking, and I still think it's a bad thing, even if it does lead to some extremely funny situations.

Turns out it (fatta maro-ing, not parasailing) is not such a bad thing, and it can actually earn you big ticket money. Someone named James Frey farted about his entire past in a book called A million little pieces. The book is supposed to be a "memoir" (pronounced "mem-oo-vaary-stupid-pronunciation") which comes from the words mem, meaning "People" and oir which doesn't mean anything.

The book contains details about Frey's years as an alcoholic and drug addict, and provides blow by blow accounts of his interaction with the police, running a cop over, getting beaten up, arrests for drug activity, time in jail, etc. etc.

It sold 3.5 MILLION copies. Let me put that in perspective for you: In India, selling 5,000 copies of a book makes it a bestseller. 3.5 million is greater than the sales of ALL Tarla Dalal books put together, and she's India's biggest selling author (in terms of total number sold). Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things, which contains, among other things, a term called "locusts stand I" which has been etched into my brain and I hate her for it, has sold one million copies.

Even Oprah Winfrey said this was a good book (A million little pieces), but that is a woman who does one hour TV shows on people who can't throw away stuff. If that's good enough for a show, her idea of a "good" book is perhaps equivalent to "better than toilet paper. Has real words."

So it turns out this book is a big fat lie. Evidence provided by an article in The Smoking Gun reveals that most of the facts in the book were WILDLY exaggerated, and some were figments of imagination. Frey never ran a cop over, didn't spend any serious time in jail, didn't really get a root canal without anaesthesia and didn't even get the sports facts correct.

Frey of course says no dude, you must be smokin' something, cos it was all true...really. Really really. I mean it was. Or maybe it was not. Maybe I made some things up. Maybe my name isn't even James Frey, it's Gaylord Fokker. That's why I was in jail, that big black guy...ok, I'm back to fatta maroing.

Oh, and you must read through some humourous rants on Frey's action, at The Onion, Neal Pollack's site, and Tim Carvell's post.

The crux of the matter is: There's no problem if the book has fabricated stories. But that classifies it as "fiction", meaning lots of buyers would not buy it because they are into reality shows ONLY and can't handle it if someone's lying, except if they lied to protect their friends who cried with them when they said "deal" when they should have said "no deal".

What it really means is: Fatta maroing pays. Only if you classify it as the real thing.

An Indian stand up comic

2006-01-16T21:13:00.000+05:30

...who is really funny. Check this video out. Awesome stuff, I like this guy - "Russell Peters". He absolutely trips on Indians and it's riproaringly funny. I don't mean funny like Hahaha funny. I mean funny like "hawhawhawstoppleasestopyourekillingme" funny.

Vasantahabba 2006 is cancelled.

2006-01-16T14:42:00.000+05:30

I just called Lynne Fernandez at Nrityagram, and the show is off. Vasantahabba for 2006 has been cancelled. Lynne said the event was cancelled for lack of sponsors.

What is Vasantahabba? It's the "spring festival" (Vasant = spring, Habba = festival) held in Nrityagram, Bangalore. Held on the first saturday of February (usually) - and yes, spring starts THAT early here - Vasantahabba is a festival that brings together cultures from everywhere. There are performances by Odissi and Bharatanatyam dancers, both from Nrityagram and outside. Some of India's best musicians and vocalists have performed at the habba, including Kadri Gopalnath (Sax), Tavleen Singh (Tabla), Pt. Vishwamohan Bhat (Mohan veena) and so on.

And there are the Rock and Fusion bands too: In 2004, Indian ocean performed at the Habba -as the Dawn show (the last show, typically starts at 5 Am and goes on till dawn) I was there till 7 AM until the final beats of their amazing music rocked the exhausted-but-loving-it crowd.

There have been qawwalis, and there have been jugalbandis. And there has been the most amazing feeling of being there, the woodstock of Bangalore.

Read more at:
http://www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/jan172004/metro1.asp
http://www.narthaki.com/info/reviews/rev181.html
http://www.nrityagram.org/passion/habba/habba.htm
http://www.anuragjain.com/vasantahabba.html

and of course:
http://www.vasantahabba.com/

And now, this year, Vasantahabba is cancelled for lack of sponsors.

I feel really bad about this. Vasanthahabba is an AWESOME event, and I am feeling lousy that I couldn't help. I spoke to Lynne and she said preparations start at least 6 months in advance - so 2006 is out, but maybe 2007 can be in! Can we go all out to support it for next year?

I've asked Lynne what we can do. She told me to mail her and she will add us to the mailing list, and for next year, when they're looking for funds, we'll know well in advance.

Here are the details:
Tel: +91 80 28466313 / 4
Email: nrityagram@vsnl.com
Website: www.nrityagram.org

I have already asked Nrityagram if people can send in personal donations. I will send in my bit, and I request that all those of you who want to keep Vasanthahabba alive, please do help in whatever way you can.

Sorry for sounding all sentimental. This is my olive tree and it hurts to see it dying.

The word is out.

2006-01-15T20:00:00.000+05:30

Yes, it *is* out, folks. The 2005 Indian Weblog Results are here. Tons of very good folks won. Tons of very good folks lost. And a full 892 people cast their vote.

Excuse me for choking.

Eight Hundred and Ninety Two? Only?

No offence to the awards and the people hosting them, but is 892 reflective of the popularity of the Indian blog-o-pyramid? (No, silly, it's a different geometric object. blogododecahedron.) I mean that's like a small gully in mumbai. Or a 5 minute passing-through count on Brigade Road, Bangalore. That's how many people voted for the Best Indian Blogs.

To me there are two serious issues related to this.

Some people have said, in the past, that the Indian blog + i (sphere) is very complex. Yes, it is. But they said more. They've said: Blogs come of age, Bloggers as public regulators, Blogs are a warning to newspapers, etc. If only 892 people are voting in what seems to be the premier awards for Indiblogging, there's no way this "medium" has reached anywhere significant. I'm sure some of these blogs get more hits per day than 892!

So perhaps blogging isn't as widespread as some people think - or threatening the "main stream media". In India, I mean.

Secondly, The awardees deserved their awards, quite rightly so. But it's not in the right spirit for them to win an award where so few people vote. I maintain, these are excellent blogs - those that won and others that were nominated - but still, winning in such little franchise elicits little more than a "*shrug*". You won, but only 892 people cared enough to vote at all, and you got the highest percentage? It's less of a blogosphere (Ed: Finally!) than a blog-o-tiny-little-dot.

Think about it. If someone wanted to take this away from the good bloggers, then rigging 225 votes with REAL people ain't that difficult. One wouldn't even need to create false email ids, just do the mail-the-address-book-and-pass-it-on trick.

(I'm not in the best Indian Blog award nominees. And I'll probably never be, because I largely write as a narcissistic endeavour, not a journalistic one. I don't write very well, despite my wanting to believe the opposite, and I'm very aware of that.)

Oh and I didn't vote. Not because I didn't want to. I just couldn't deal with one blog winning when I really like so many of them. Maybe almost everyone's like me. Other than, of course, 892 people.

Why Osama Bin Laden is not hanging out in a Bangalore Mall

2006-01-13T16:26:00.000+05:30

Someone recently told me Mr. Laden could've shaved his beard and "hung out" in any big city in India. Well, I just found out something:

He is 6 feet 4 inches tall. Perhaps more. (Source: FBI)

Chances are you'd notice someone that tall in India, and someone will go "hey...Hang on a minute!". In some Bangalore malls, there will be people bringing their kids to see him. Cops of course, won't recognize him because they're too busy clearing the traffic so that some VIP could travel faster to the airport.

Funny thing about that page. It says "Usama Bin Laden is wanted in connection with the August 7, 1998, bombings of the United States Embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya. These attacks killed over 200 people. In addition, Bin Laden is a suspect in other terrorist attacks throughout the world.".

No 9/11? Perhaps the entire FBI web team is out there looking for this guy. And they want a single update from "Most Wanted" to "Now Dead".

Today I saw...

2006-01-12T10:42:00.000+05:30

...A Reva owner who has a driver. The Reva is an electric car which is enormously spacious if you have the surface area of a mosquito. This is how it looks:

I saw this woman in a Reva driven by a DRIVER, and she was in what one might call the back seat, but more well known as "part of the car we didn't know existed". The pomposity of having a driver - or the convenience of it - somehow makes up for not having enough space to sneeze.

The flight to Germany.

2006-01-11T10:11:00.000+05:30

Chennai. That's the Amazing Airport of Today.

My wife went to Germany on Sunday, and for lack of a direct flight from Bangalore, she had to go through Chennai.

The Bangalore airport is less equipped than the Majestic bus stand. (Which, for you non-aware readers, is the central bus stand in Bangalore, and currently has more people than Texas) There is too much traffic both inside and outside, and the politics of the airlines inside is visibly annoying.

Log:
Flight out of bangalore, Air Sahara, 6:40 pm.

Bangalore, 5:30 PM, Cubbon road: It's a bloody sunday but there's still a jam. Driver (read: me) takes most unknown road with passenger mentioning that she wants to take the flight to Chennai, not drive there. Driver ignores comments and heads towards goal of reaching airport before 6 PM.

6:00 PM: Reach airport. Find out that queue for baggage x-ray is encircling the airport - er, no, but it was massive. Noted that Jet Airways XRay machine was empty. (Do the airlines own the xray machines? I thought it was a police or CISF job, not an airlines, so why the difference?)

6:10 PM: I find parking after burning down someone's car (just kidding). Sunila (the passenger in question) (also, my wife) finds huge queue at check in counter too, but it moves fast.

6:15 PM: I walk into terminal to see a sea of people. Sunila is arguing with the check in counter, who says it's too late since flight is just about leaving (Note: Boarding not yet announced)

6:30 PM: Boarding pass usurped. Goodbyes happen. She's in the security area, where half the population of the world is currently located.

6:55 PM: Sahara has not yet announced Boarding. Sunila checks to see if the time on the ticket is for 2006, just in case.

7:05 pm: Ok, we're boarding. Like Normal people, everyone tries to push everyone else out of the line or "jugaad" in. Sunila watches because she's not the Normal sort.

7:15 PM: Sahara has given her a first class seat. A big thank you, inspite of the HUGE mess at the check in counter. Maybe that's what prompted it, but gratefulness is there nevertheless.

7:45 pm, Chennai airport: Air conditioned terminal. You can "feel" the aircons, and in the sweltering heat it's a lifesaver. She has a neck problem, so asks an airport employee to help with the baggage. Two burly men arrive, and carry the baggage to the international terminal. (Thank you, whoever you are)

8:10 pm: In international terminal. Shops everywhere, and lounges. Places to sit down and wait. Places to eat, even though a sandwich plus coffee = Rs. 80. Clean environment and very little noise. The loos are clean. Announcements are crystal clear - unlike Bangalore, where they use a hissing snake to make announcements.

9:50 PM: Lufthansa says there's too much baggage, off by around 1 kilo. Which is how Lufthansa is, we expected that. Sunila then goes to an "excess baggage" counter. I've never even heard of this kind of thing in other Indian airports! (someone tell me I'm wrong) She finds out that all she needs to discard is a packet of Tea - which finds its way to an old man who asked, very nicely, if he could have it instead.

1:50 AM: Goodbye said to Chennai airport.

My wife wants to move to Chennai just because of the airport. I don't think she's going to like the auto drivers very much though. But the airport, she said, was world class.

The curious gawked.

2006-01-05T09:09:00.000+05:30

Yep, there's another fundoo post at The Renegade of Junk. Which, by the way, is a phenomenal blog of the really unknown indian in Pittsburgh, PA.

And he mentions that he saw the IIPM full page ad a few days ago. I saw it too, on TOI, Bangalore. Been there, done that, and seen the siloutted ponytail. The things they do to make him look fair as in "fair and handsome", which might actually be an IIPM initiative.

The ad contains an article by Lassi-Malai-maar-ke Chaudhuri. About "Why IIPM's Course is Superior to Other MBAs", and Mr. Gawker has a good handle on their salient points.

Anyhow. Here's what else is wrong with the ad:
11) Malay says the IIMs "raised their fees to exorbitant levels" (or some such thing) to compete with the ISB style wham-bam-thank-you-maam MBAs. And in this IIPM is somehow supposed to be the saviour of the masses. Someone forgot to mention that IIPM's fees are around the 8 Lakh area which makes IIM sound like a non profit organization.

12) The IIMs are restricting supply of good MBAs, and therefore, keeping MBA salaries high, says Mr. Chaudhuri (Senior). Duh. So my guess is, IIPM is doing its bit to REDUCE MBA salaries by getting out MORE graduates, who have just paid 8 Lakhs for a non-recognized degree. If salaries get lesser, Mr. Chaudhuri will become Late Mr. Chaudhuri.

13) IIPM is inviting everyone including IIM candidates for interviews to jobs there. I think the salary package might go like this:

a) Basic package: 8 lakhs (for IIM people 3 lakhs, since we're covering only your MBA fee)
b) Study allowance: None. Why bother.
c) Allowance to prepare papers for publication in IIPM web site or magazine: Rs. 100,000.
d) Allowance to prepare papers for publication in academic indian or international journals: What are you smoking, dude.
e) Rights to advertise your degree: Rs. 15 for IIPM students, Rs. 100,000 for IIMers. (No allowance for Islamia Institute of Management)
f) The feeling of telling the world we have an IIMer working for us: Priceless.

14) IIPM has a 1944 hours of coursework versus some 1500 or so for IIMs. And EVEN lesser for ISB, Hyderabad. They're all bastards, he seems to say. How can you not have enough hours of coursework? IIPM believes in putting more and more coursework such as:
- create arbitrary blogs linking to IIPM site and praising the ponytail
- vandalize wikipedia content where IIPM ain't cuttin' edge

I think what they mean is "of-course work". The art of breeding yes-men.

Apart from this, I believe IIPM is a fine institute except it hasn't been fined yet. (Insert laugh track here)

Would I...

2005-12-19T15:55:00.000+05:30

...room with this person? Hahahahaha.

This is like rooming with the Military Officer From Hell. There's standard stuff like "private rooms", throwing trash in the trash can and staying off each other's voicemail. What's hilarious is the attempt to run it like the red army. Private spoons and plates that no one else touches (jeez, keep it your ruddy room then). Don't mix the darn cooking and eating items (no more spoons to taste the dal). No touchin food with bare hands - and definitely no tearing out half a samosa with your hand and leaving the rest for someone else.

Life isn't so much fun without all that, no?

Oh and this guy's a ghaasahari - no meat 'n eggs. I'm sure Rohit would love to see this, and we'd be rolling on the ground. What's next, I'm sure, is that there would be a ban on even watching cookery serials where they show a meat recipe. I'm cracking up already - but if you're reading this and you're not Rohit, you will probably not understand.

It's going to be Bengaluru.

2005-12-16T23:20:00.001+05:30

Yeah. From November 2006, you will call it "Bengaluru". So many people are unhappy, saying, with startlingly unbridled rhetoric, that the Bangalore brand has been compromised, that this is an utter waste of time and money and that it is a bloody big deal, waaah.

Let me give you my side of the picture.

Phooey.

Nothing changes with name changes. Kengal Hanumanthaiah Road is still double road to me. Malleswaram 18th Cross is called Chitrashilpi Venkatappa Road. My office was there for SEVEN years, and I didn't know - heck, you know how I found out? When Hutch started displaying the area on my mobile - that's when I found this name and consequently, the board.

I still call them Bombay, Calcutta, and Madras sometimes. (arranged in increasing order of "hatred of old name" according to me) I doesn't change me - Heck, I've called it Mumbai before it was Mumbai, and I will even (shudder) use the word "Dilli" instead of a more colonial "Delhi".

What happens due to a name change? Nothing. Other than money being eaten up by bureaucrats to change everything - but this is a coup for Bangalore, in the sense that only English boards will change :) Remember in Mumbai, they didn't want to change the "BEST" name for public transport, so out came the wonderful "Brihanmumbai" suddenly. Wonderful.

So this money is better spent otherwise. Which government money is not? I say rip the entire system apart. We don't need to spend crores on MP's telephone bills, or on building a second vidhan soudha (and may I add, blocking one of my favourite roads in the city). We don't need to build "gates" all around Bangalore. We definitely do not need the phenomenal waste of a "grade separator" they have built near Rajajinagar entrance - that place needed a dairy circle style separator, not that ridiculous half witted approach they have. And of course the flyover at Bannerghatta road/ring road intersection isn't a lifesaver either.

Not that I'm justifying the name change, saying so what, the entire system is bad. What I'm saying is, if the government will be busy doing this name change, perhaps...just perhaps, it will take all their time and they won't think of stupid and idiotic plans of how to further destroy our already defaced, congested, polluted and pothole-mired city. Maybe it's time they ignored us - so we can actually fix this place.

Get ready.

Dear Inconsiderate caller.

2005-12-15T16:46:00.000+05:30

In the lines of the Dear Hutch post, a few other callers must, I believe, be sent a missive.

Dear Credit card divisions of HSBC, HDFC, ABN Amro, StandardChartered, SBI and the unfortunate others who I put on hold forever,

I have a credit card. I don't want another credit card. I do not need to transfer the balance from one card to the other, in case my screaming it out on the phone did not get to you. Your offering me a free credit card is not a favour. I will never understand why, when you call me, you ask "Who's this sir?". You called me in the first place goddamit, you need to know who I am. I don't want a home loan. I do not EVER want a "lifetime free card" simply because you have irritated the hell out of me. If you ever get the feeling I'm too brusque, it's on purpose. If I ask you to call a "few months later", don't. Be a nice flower and every once in a while, wither away and die.

---

Dear Country Club,

I am already a member. So I don't need your grubby membership call. I also don't want to upgrade every six months, to be able to visit a new club in Timbuktoo, which I usually avoid because of the bad roads. When you say "How are you, sir?" when I say hello, it does not "bond" with me, I become suspicious. When I ask "How much?", please just say how much so I can refuse with budgetary constraints. Even Rs. 5 is too much for me.

---
Dear Direct Selling Agent of anything,

Please don't call me. I don't want insurance. I don't want a term money back endowment unit linked plan that will help me have better sex. And no, I don't need a car loan. My car may be a 2002 model, but that does not mean I need a new one. I have a mobile phone, a fridge and every bloody accessory you can think of. I don't want a personal loan - what would I do with a person? If you want to give me money, I accept only cash. Please send small denominations, in brown paper bags.

---
Dear Person who puts leaflets in newspapers,

You miserable oaf. I open my newpaper in the loo. I read it every frikking day out there and when I get to page 2, a leaflet falls to the ground. I hate it. Even if I try to shake out the leaflets earlier, one of them stays behind. Why don't you bloody STAPLE the darn things to the newspaper? Oh yes, and I don't want to earn money from home, or home from money, or whatever. I don't think you care. I know I would willingly burn that person's house down so he won't have a house to earn money from. And hopefully, will shut the fuck up.

---
Dear TV channels,

Nobody likes advertisements. Everybody likes content. It would do you less harm if you gave us more content and less ads. And I mean good content.

"Aaj chandni chowk mein bomb...break ke baad"
(370 advertisements)
"To jaise humne kaha, Aaj chandni chowk mein bombay handloom house ke peeche ek dhamaka...break ke baad"
(298 advertisements)
"bombay handloom house ke peeche ek dhamake se sonia gandhi ke kutte ke dayine paanv mein chot aayi. Baaki news break ke baad"
(click.)

Nobody likes this. Nobody. If we watched your channel continuously our brain would be jelly by now. You must try it. Wait. Maybe you have.

---
That feels slightly better.

Neurotic outsourcing?

2005-12-05T14:51:00.000+05:30

Worry too much? Want someone else to worry for you? Well, it's possible, says A.J.Jacobs, in an article named "My Outsourced Life". Among other things, Jacobs asked Honey, an outsourced personal assistant from India, to "worry" on his behalf for a business deal - and she replied saying it's a wonderful idea.

That article is funny. After reading "The World is Flat", Jacobs decides to get himself assistants for his research and his personal work - he gets em both for a sum total of $1,400 per month, from companies in India. He makes them do some of the research he needs. They will also send people emails - people he earlier would spend a lot of time speaking with. They'll change his cell phone plan, pester his boss for him, send birthday cards to his wife. They'll even mail people that send unsolicited mails, expressing the lack of his interest in topics like the world's most famous harlequin.

But it gets scary. From his article:

Whatever soul-deadening chore I give her, she says, "That would indeed be interesting" or "Thank you for bestowing this important task." I have a feeling that if I asked her to count the number of semicolons in the Senate energy bill, she would be grateful for such a fascinating project.

Jacobs tests this out. He asks his "assistants" to do things that would, from what I could glean, demean the average American assistant. The closest he gets to a "No", he says, is when he asks "Asha" to play Hearts for him because he spent too much time doing it. Asha says "Later" but still thinks it's a "good idea".

What's getting my goat? That in this article, somehow, it feels like it's fair game to ask anyone from India to do anything - and they won't say no. And that we'll do what Americans just don't want to do for themselves. Heck, you know what, they're right. A majority of companies here will simply bend over backwards willingly, if that means the extra bit of moolah.

And there's nothing wrong with that. But aren't there any companies that will stand their ground, and refuse to yield? Are we going to be classified as the whores of the outsourced economy, because the majority is willing to prostitute themselves? Moving up the chain is key, they all say. It's bloody easy, when you're the maggot in this food chain.

On the lighter side, Jacobs says he'd even considered outsourcing having sex. That, I know, would be of interest to a lot of people. I will even dare to say this: (whisper) They'll do it for free.

Farishta ki Jai. Worldspace ki Jai.

2005-11-29T18:44:00.000+05:30

I'm an avid Ghazal fan, and I was recently listening in to one of Farishta's Ghazal shows. Farishta is a radio channel on the Worldspace Network, by the way.

So there was this contest, and I mailed in my answer. And to my surprise, they sent me a personally autographed Ghulam Ali CD. I mean a CD signed by the master himself. My brain can't even process this information. I'm shell shocked.

Two reasons. One, Ghulam Ali is one of the bestest, fantasticest, geniusest singers I've ever heard. He makes me forget my English.

Two: I've never won in any contest like this. I always thought it was a con job. I guess it took a Farishta to open my eyes. My thanks goes to all of you at Farishta, and please, keep it going. I love your channel.

IIPM: it doesn't seem to be over just yet.

2005-11-29T17:51:00.000+05:30

There's a lot of action happening at Wikipedia's IIPM entry.
The History section shows at least 50 Entries, with at least nine entries dated 29 November 2005. Jeezus.
And while I was writing this blog post, someone named "iipmstudent9" came in and vandalised the page, removing many of the items that weren't bowing to the IIPM highness.

So I, muttering under my breath, registered in Wikipedia and reverted the edits.

But check out the Talk Section of the entry. There's extensive conversation between Ravikiran R, Kunal (on one side) and a drnaomchomsky (who later changed to IipmStudent9).

IipmStudent9 is described as An alias used by a group of IIPM students, dedicated to fighting the lies and misinformation spread by IIM-alumnus, whose burning jealousy is the subject of much laughter on IIPM's campus. Considering the size of their average campus, this is probably more like a snicker than a laugh. Anyhow.

Just a clarification: I'm not an IIM-ian. I'm just a regular guy, with no MBA degree, that is absolutely ticked off with the lies and fraudulent behaviour of IIPM.

I don't know anymore.

2005-11-27T02:44:00.000+05:30

A dingy hostel room. 8 feet by 7, a metal cot next to one wall, a four leg table next to the cot. On the table is a collection of wires attached to an old car stereo and some speakers. A chair, conveniently placed at a corner to pile unwashed clothes on. Five men. No, "guys". Sitting around, on the floor, on the bed, and even under the table.

A zero-watt bulb glows dimly near the ceiling. Red. Pink Floyd is being paid homage, as Indian hostelites have done for the last few decades, and will do for the next few. Someone is smoking a joint. Someone is not. And someone's waiting for it to come their way.

They all don't know what's going to happen. They don't know why they're where they are, or where they want to go. Even where they have to go. Five people, who've been told all their life that an engineering degree would take them there. They would have arrived. They have. Only they don't fucking know where.

But in life's fogginess, it dawns on them, with the unerring clarity of a grass-induced high, that this is the clearest their life will ever be. They know they have no frigging clue - a few years later, they still won't have a clue but will be too full of it to admit anything.

They're all talented, but not in the way society would be proud of. Some can sing, some can play a mean guitar, and some can kill flies with one hand. But something tells them this isn't what they came here to become. A one-handed fly-swatting guitarist singer isn't going to cut it, not in the resume department, no sir.

But they did cut it, somewhere. And ten years later, today, one of them stands and looks back and sees the bullshit they fed to him. A farcical glorification of muggu behaviour. An absurd lack of self determination, proliferated by superstitious beliefs, and reinforced by the education system. When in doubt, shut the fuck up, they said. Lie if it helps you, they said. Stand for what's right, only as long as it's winning, they said. HONK before an intersection, they said.

Games are for losers, a 10 year career, tops. Media is for pimps, Hospitality for "waiters" and B.Sc for the people who couldn't make the "engineering" or "medical" grade. Learn to save. Sex is not even a word.

Some chose not to listen anymore. One of them who, when he looks back, realizes how silly it all was. And today, he's seeing it again.

The schools are feeding the same crap to the children. They interview kids - kids that are three years old - and expect them to know the ABCD. And of course, how the optic nerve works. They're supposed to know, dammit, what were you doing for three years?

Then they interview the parents. We only want the best, they say - a rat race for grades again. Tutions for them, extra classes, and please, if they do badly in the exams we don't want them here. What's that, a guitar? In your spare time only.

And parents listen. They want to fire the competitive spirit in their kids. Only in the academic department, of course. My kid is better than yours, you hear them think. Yeah, take that, you little prick - why don't you see, it's simple, the square of the hypotenuse is....okay, I'll change your diaper now.

Get ready, or they'll get you.

I wonder what it would be like to have been "got". I wonder, because I've always been running. Jumping, screaming, crying, laughing, but always running. It's terrifying to have to run forever. How long will it take for us to figure that out?

Our kids don't have to be like us.

Our kids should be kids. And we should be kids, more often.

(And buy that Playstation 2 we have been wanting for the last few months.)

Of Dinosaurs and Shady Headlines

2005-11-18T15:46:00.000+05:30

Okay, this is absolutely ticking me off. An article in HT, from The Press Trust of India (PTI) is headlined "Indian dinosaurs were vegetarians". Now what impression does that give?

That all dinosaurs in India were herbivorous, and did not eat meat, correct?

Wrong.

A National Geographic Article, dated August 2003, confirms that India had at least one carnivorous dinosaur, the Rajasaurus.

("We know that there were carnivorous and herbivorous dinosaurs in India through individual bones...", a quote from the article.)

This isn't all. My first google results gave me IndoSaurus and IndoSuchus.

There's also the Dandakosaurus (Check the "India" section).

I fail to understand why the headline was that misleading. (Note: Conspiracy theory coming up) Was it some bored sub-editor trying to tell us Indians *should* be beggie because heck, even the dinos were?

Or was it simply an attempt to sensationalize an otherwise mundane issue? I mean, so what if they were vegetarians...I'll say "hmm" and move on. This headline forces me to stop there and marvel and wonder..."heck, if dinosaurs in India were vegetarian, then maybe even I should...". Nonsense.

(Now that the headline is also proved incorrect, I will resume my non-vegetarian-ness with gusto, thank you.)

One good thing about this exercise: I found out many dinosaurs had brains the size of a walnut, which is perhaps a wee bit bigger than the cranial mass of the hitherto mentioned headline creator.

Update: I earlier thought this was an HT headline. Thanks to Aadisht Khanna for pointing out that it was actually from PTI.

Parking isn't that easy anymore.

2005-11-17T19:54:00.000+05:30

Bangalore's Parking Woes.

And more deeply, Bangalore's Garbage Woes. No, not the Fiat.

Dave Barry in a Movie!

2005-11-17T12:09:00.000+05:30

They've made the movie! Wowee. I absolutely loved the book - it's called Dave Barry's Guide to Guys, if you didn't guess by now.

Check out the trailers. I's gonna buy DVD and get it shipped here, no matter WHAT.

Bloggers Stung in Operation

2005-11-14T17:59:00.000+05:30

Or so I glean from Ravikiran's post. S'posedly Some Bloggers met in Delhi. S'posedly there was journalist posing as bee in sting operation. S'posedly he was Manipuri, which is where Uloopi, one of Arjuna's wives was from. That was a long time ago, so don't go looking for her now.

Also Manipur is famous for a lot of things including eating fish that has been buried a few weeks ago. We currently cannot find other things Manipur is famous for, but we are digging it up and in the process, finding lots of fish.

Anyways, the Bee Stung in the MSM world. Which, after some googling, found "Main Stream Media". So Mr Bee said, in "Delhi Times":

Bloggers are Bad, because they call a four people episode a "Delhi Bloggers Meet". Bloggers are pathetic because half of them (?) are IT professionals. And they only bash the MSM, often with little or no substantiation. And they don't have no journa-listic skills, and we the MSM ain't afraid of you, no way, so tell me bitch, who's your daddy now, huh.

Or something of that sort. That riled everyone in the "blogosphere" (that term again) of Delhi and other places closely related to Delhi, unless they are married and filing jointly.

So a mini bloggers unite happened, and people threw dirt, washed linen in public and generally created a big fuss. The Bee got ticked off at the Manipur attacks, people quoted Wikipedia as the Oracle, others said How dare He, and he said How dare They.

Aaj ke samachar samapt hue. Ab aaj ke vichaar suniye.

Delhi times is a tabloid for heaven's sake. This is like Bangalore Times, except it's in Delhi. (Duh) And if it's anything like BT, the only nice things about it are a) Calvin and Hobbes and b) Sudoku. (You could say the TV listings are nice. You could be that bored) Most of the rest is arbitrary dhanda chaap, most of it...like Love in the time of astrology. Take appropriate amounts of salt before reading.

Next, Bloggers, MSM bashers, Stung operators: He's partly right, isn't he? Journalists will do selective journalism and so will those of you who aspire to be the next news channel. You still have a long way to go before you reach Ramu kaka and Birju halwai. And if you said "elite", boo. Which field's radish are you?

Blogging is largely opinion. Which is different from fact. It sometimes helps dig out facts, but it's rarely, if ever, unbiased. And journalists aren't any different - by the end of an article, it's fairly obvious which side of the fence they're from.

I don't pretend to be a journalist. I'm not. I'm not in the caliber of a journalist who can write pages and pages about how Monica Bedi refused to eat rice and rasam but might have shared her food with a co-inmate in jail. I'm never going to be a sting operator, unless you could the times I've played "Englishman in New York" at parties.

So if you think any of my writing is unsubstantiated or other very long words, I don't give a rat's ass. Or Murine Posterior, as the real journalists, who haven't stood up, would say.

Rishte mein hum tumhaare...

2005-11-13T20:30:00.000+05:30

"Ek ladki hai"
"Ek kundli hai"
"Beta, ek achcha rishta aaya hai, vakil ki beti hai, ladki ka naam hai Pooja"
"Mujhe pasand hai ma"

That's an ad for a phone company. Just one of those ads that seem to glorify the phenomenon of matrimonial arrangements in which things happen in one tinny little glance. In the ad above, the guy's in a bus stop, looking at a girl in an autorickshaw for approximately three seconds after which he pronounces the verdict "Mujhe pasand hai ma". Yuck.

Another ad I remember was one in which girls meets guy, tells him she's not interested, she has to pursue studies, confides in friend, friend tells her guy would've dumped her anyway because of hair. So she uses some shampoo (or soap? or detergent? I don't remember) and cleans up the act, and guy comes home, says yes purely on hirsute attraction. Loverly. Just loverly.

And how can we forget: Girl likes house, asks parents to "baad badhaiye na", and parents do so to find out son of house is 10 years old. Girl says 'main intezaar karoongi'. (Clap, clap)

What prompted this blog post was yet another one of these ads: Girl is told to go to parlour, gets lazy and uses some liquid on hair, mom says "kahaa tha na, parlour chali jaao, woh to aa gaye..." and then obviously man with brains below navel goes ooh-aah, but not the iodex way.

I think these ads are driven by people who're getting into the whole arranged marriage concept big time. Perhaps the copywriters have come to that age where their parents are "thoopofying" them with resumes. Perhaps the ad-men have the daughters of that age. Perhaps we're all getting carried away with tradition, and want it in a quick-fix-two-bit-film manner.

While I don't particularly dislike the arranged marriage concept, I find the concept of choosing ones life partner because of flimsy things such as hair...fairly stupid. To see it in an ad is quite demeaning - to women because they're now objects of desire only with respect to hair silkiness, or to expand it, with respect to their looks only. And to men too, since we're dumb enough to stop at percutaneous pulchritude.*

But if this helps reduce dowry because "heck, man, look at that hair, I'll take her without any money!", I'm all for it.

(* - Beauty only skin deep types. Someone once said "Of course beauty's only skin deep. That's fine with me. What do you want, an adorable pancreas?")

Another blog!

2005-11-11T16:05:00.000+05:30

I've created a The Investors Blog - a Blog on Investing. Very beginner-ish at the moment, and talks about two issues:

1) Capital Gains Tax
2) Equity Linked Saving Schemes

If you have too much money, give it to me. (Give, not lend) If you want to make some money, I hope my blog will help you.

Book review: The World is Flat

2005-11-11T15:26:00.000+05:30

“The World is Flat” says Tom Friedman, three-time Pulitzer prize winner. Pretty apt for a book by a New York Times Columnist who was born in Minneapolis, studied in Oxford, and worked in Beirut and Jerusalem, and who got the title from a statement made by a CEO in Bangalore. In an interview, Nandan Nilekani of Infosys said, “The world is being levelled” – and what he really meant, says Friedman, is that The World is Flat.

Expanding his take on Globalization in his earlier book, Lexus and the Olive Tree, Friedman concentrates on the relatively new phenomenon of High Tech outsourcing, primarily in India and China. Already, companies in these two countries process U.S. Tax Returns, analyze CAT Scans, handle worldwide insurance claims and even do Friedman’s job – journalism. All this, writes Friedman, is part of a fundamental change the world is undergoing – flattening – with nine other forces, including the fall of the Berlin wall, Open source collaboration, Google search technology and the digital “steroids” like Palm pilots and Wireless Technologies.

The book gets overly defensive at times; the author’s nationality shows in his obvious fear that American jobs are at stake in the flattening process. From fright at Indian CEO Jaithirth “Jerry” Rao’s statement, “Any activity where we can digitize and decompose the value chain, and move the work around, will get moved around”, Friedman moves towards realizing that this will mean more meaningful work for Americans. He concludes that the way ahead (for Americans) is not to stop outsourcing, but to upgrade their skills so they can claim their “slice of the bigger but more complex pie”. It’s not going to be simple, he writes, but there’s no option but to be an “untouchable” – a person whose job cannot be outsourced.

Outsourcing today is just a repeat of what happened when the world started to be connected earlier, Friedman notes. And what does he say connects the world today? Technology. With access to the Internet, any individual can empower himself anywhere – noted in the book are interesting examples: people printing Boarding pass online so they can board before other passengers; a friend using wireless access to send email to Kazakhstan from a train in Japan traveling at 240 Km/hr; an Indian company building a game on “American Wild Wild West” using Google to find out what a saloon looked like. The book is laced with enlightening examples, allowing for very individual interpretations to his theory.

India benefited from the overinvestment in undersea fiber optic cables by Americans, writes Friedman. When these investments went bust in 2000, the bankrupt companies were sold at throw away prices, bringing down the cost of bandwidth and therefore, making “remote” business process outsourcing (BPO) possible and profitable in India. Friedman postulates that it started with Y2K – an acronym for the work involved in converting massive legacy systems to accept four digit dates – and spread to running American back offices today. He even suggests that Y2K be India’s Second Independence Day – a day that helped give freedom from unemployment to a large number of Indians. (While this may not be feasible, it does make you stop to think!)

But the book does offer a warning: that no developing country can afford to be complacent, that other developing countries would be more than glad to grab the Indian part of the pie. China, for instance, is “a powerhouse of low cost manufacturing….it can do high-quality low-cost manufacturing better than any country, and increasingly, it can also do high-quality higher-cost manufacturing”. Friedman suggests deeper reform – removing more of the bureaucracy that hinders business, loosening labour laws, bettering infrastructure – something he says is inevitable in the flat world. The message is simple: The more you just sit there, the more you will be run over.

Friedman also warns about the dangers that resulted from 9/11. The flat world, he says, makes it possible for the perpetrators of terror to co-ordinate in a way that has never been possible earlier. “Al-Qaeda has learned to use many of the same instruments for global collaboration that Infosys has”, he writes, but leaves the solutions on shaky ground. How can you stop the Osamas of the world from collaborating without shutting down the Internet and therefore, Friedman’s reason for the “flatness” of the world? This book holds no conclusive answers.

Friedman interviews a large number of people in very different environments – the book contains snippets from people all over the world. From the likes Bill Gates and eBay’s Meg Whitman, to Palestinian militants, to Fadi Ghandour, the CEO of Aramex, a package delivery service in the Arab World. Each interview seems to reiterate Friedman’s point, but will also give you a little more to think about.

“The World is Flat” is quite an enthralling read, filled with simple interpretations of a complex world. Running through the lively and provocative analyses, you will find yourself keeping the book down every few minutes, just to sit back and think. A very stimulating book for those who want to understand where the world is going, but don’t know where to start.

My wife thinks I'm a sharaabi

2005-11-08T22:23:00.000+05:30

It's true. I am in no way drunk, of course, since that would instantly incriminate me. I like to think I'm only temporarily OH positive. How muccchh can do ~~too~~ to two drinks do?

Sunila's finding it too funny. I should tell you about the time SHE was "inebriated" - it was at ..

DO NOT BELIEVE THIS MAN

Anything you say, or do...

2005-11-07T15:05:00.000+05:30

...or possess, may be used as evidence.

What's hilarious is: " Justice Margaret Eberhard must weigh the evidence, ..."

"Can't say"

2005-11-07T14:49:00.000+05:30

I was in Delhi, watching the cricket matches on Doordarshan. DD loves to put ads everywhere. After the cricket match I had to tear away stickers of Alpenliebe from the BACK of the TV. But I digress.

Every few minutes, Reliance had these little surveys - "Will Atapattu score a half-century? SMS A for Yes, B for No and C for Can't Say".

"Can't Say" ?????

Who the F*** is sending an SMS to Reliance, at an absurdly high charge, answering that they "can't say"? Why are these people being allowed inside the gene pool?

Well, turns out Reliance figured this out by themselves and in the last one-dayer, had only options A and B. "Are you wearing underwear? SMS A for Yes, SMS B for No". (Because you can say.)

Also they moved from :

"Who will Win the Match? A: India, B: SriLanka C: Tie"

to "When will Sri Lanka win? A:>48 overs, B: < 48 overs"

when SL still had 30 or so runs to win. (Reality: SL Won in the 48th Over)

If they're riggin' it, Reliance is diggin' it.

Five Point Who?

2005-11-07T14:34:00.000+05:30

In the light of my review of another Chetan Bhagat Book, I've decided to post my not-so-long-ago review of his Five Point Someone. Not as much a review as a reflection of my college days.

---
I read Five Point Someone a while back. I'm an RECian myself, and it was very surprising to see the similarities and differences between life at KREC and IIT Delhi. A few interesting things to note:

1) We never ever needed to study four hours a day. I have never studied four hours a day, constantly, in my entire life. Even during PL (Preparatory Leave) we used to sit at a table, and concentrate hard on Andrew Tananbaum's Networking book for 10 full minutes, and then immediately lose it when someone walked in to our room and asked, "Sutta hai kya?" IITians on the other hand, seem to study every day - even during the beginning of a semester. In my college, this would have resulted in the dunking of one's head into one's block ka fountain (if there was water there)

2) No one had any idea where they were going. No one. I mean even the top rankers were clueless, though they put up a brave face most of the time. People still don't know, of course, much after we graduated. But that, I think, is because the real world is a lemon.

2.5) Everyone was "insane" - one way or the other; Each person I knew had his or her eccentricities. IIT doesn't seem to be very different. Today, it's those idiosynchracies (sp?) that bring us together - it's all I remember. From doing the planchet drunk, to pushups on the highway, walking down the haunted beach road, playing teen patti till 3 in the morning and ending up owing 23 paise to someone who still wants it back 10 years later. It's all we had - yeah, there was the education thing too - but today, 10 years later, it's all I have.

3) The food was bad. It's always bad. We got bulletproof idlis and high tension chapathis. We got "tomato pachix", which noone ever wants the ingredients of. We got stuff that was hard enough for use as those clay pigeons that those olympic shooters shoot at. Just that these things would probably reflect the darn bullets.

4) The friendships last forever. It's just unbelieveable, but they do. They may fade away, but one reunion of sorts and you're out there, talking about those days, forgetting we have spouses and other paraphernalia, forgetting our mundane lives for a while through those insignificant but very real moments .

5) RGs are bad. Relative Grading simply sucks - we never had it while I was in my college.

In all, the book was fascinating - not as much about the content, which I believe was fairly mediocre. Chetan'll do better in his second book (*), I think - because there are those times when he runs away to some distant land where there's a surreal element that us non-IITians can't grasp. You had to be there types.

And the whole Neha element - it's disconnected, disjoint and left me feeling like she was schizophrenic. Not very nice, yes.

What I found amazing was where it took me back 10 years. Those were good days - and the book triggered the collapse of a wall I'd built around me since. And that, in my humble opinion, is always a good thing.
--

(*) NO.

The zero point call center.

2005-11-07T12:15:00.000+05:30

I've decided I don't like Chetan Bhagat's one night (at) the call center. No not just because it's about follicle attraction or that it's not literary. I don't even know what being literary means, which is perhaps for the best.

If you intend to read the book, stop right here and go do it. I'm going to reveal its deep, dark, secrets.

What's lousy? The plot. Story is about a few call center people that have different problems, and then the call center itself has problems, and so on. Few things I couldn't digest:
- The saving of a call center by putting "fear" into Americans by telling them - hold your breath - terrorists have attacked you by putting a virus in your computer. Okay, so many Americans are paranoid: but this borders on the INSANE!

First, Americans, despite their reputation, do have friends and someone is bound to talk to someone who realizes this is hogwash. Second, this someone will most likely sue the pants (or panties) off the call center. This will soon be the do-not-call center.

Third, and most important, this is the stupidest idea I've ever heard.

- Chetan asks you in the beginning to answer a few questions, like "What do you hate most?" etc. , giving no reason for this survey. I guess it's because the book is supposed to touch a chord someplace. The only way it will do that is if someone uses it to pluck a guitar.

- The whole God thing. When I picked up the book, I thought it was something fascinating because I'm an atheist, but this is not even a god worth believing in. God calls a mobile phone when four people are in a qualis that's hanging precariously off a few rods....and tells them to make a left. Oh, wrong story. God tells them to be themselves and make changes and they agree, and then live happily ever after. (Puke)

- Blackmail by accusing Boss Sexual harassment by sending an email from his computer. This is justified because Boss is a prick and uses management jargon. What's this, a call center for vigilante cowboys? We're going to encourage such pathetic forms of fraud? To all call center bosses out there, don't worry - Systems can find the arseholes that do something like this.

I've seen a lot of SH cases in call centers, and most go through a thorough investigation before blame gets assigned.

- The love story ending of running and proposing at red lights. Which brings a whole new meaning to the term "Red Light Area". I frankly think that love ish-story was nicely put, although the use of font changes to depict a flashback is mildly unnerving.

That's the bad part.

What's good?
- The price. I love Rs. 95.

- The Indian Author that's trying something different. We've had sordid tales of the partition, suitable boys, small things in kerala, profound utterances about cities and their sex lives...I find them all of a genre that is somehow ....whatdyacallit... boring. Although this book is not that great, I find books of this kind a welcome break from the pseudo-ness of the "literary" Indian author.

But don't include Shashi Tharoor - I really like "The Great Indian Novel".

Language barrier

2005-11-04T00:05:00.000+05:30

But this could not happen.
But this could not happen, and the now the verdict is
that if there's no you, there's no sense of loss or desire for you either
life goes on in this manner,
that there's no desire for anyone's support anymore
No road
no goal
and no way to light
my life roams about lost in a dark tunnel
it'll stay in this darkness forever perhaps
i know it well, my lady love,
but just like that
sometimes, sometimes,
a thought comes to my heart.

Poetry should never be translated.

SONY puts virus-like software on your PC!

2005-11-03T13:18:00.000+05:30

Read Mark Russinovich's article on Sony's DRM CD applications. To you non-techie readers, the concept is:

a) Sony, in it's fight against piracy, decides to implement Digital Rights Management (DRM) on it's CDs.
b) It creates CDS that won't run directly on your PC - you have to run a special media player (from First 4 Internet (F4I) ) to play these files.
c) How does F4I do it? When you insert your CD into your PC, the CD will "autorun" - in this case, a special software is installed on your PC.
d) This software is dangerous: It hides files on your own PC, eats system resources, and is running in your PC in the background even when you are not using a SONY CD.

You can't uninstall it normally. If you try deleting the files, your CD ROM drive will stop working. Ha.

Do you know if your PC has been attacked? Create a file called $sys$test.txt - if it vanishes, you're "infected".

How could SONY do something so stupid? Has DRM gone too far? Now they will tell us what files we should be viewing and what not, just because some people have copied their CDs? I refuse to buy Sony CDs anymore.

Murthy vs. the mad dog?

2005-10-24T14:25:00.000+05:30

I got this on email and I'm going to shamlessly post it:

Now, back to reality. Bangalore is flooded. Water, water everywhere, not a drop to drink.

IIPM Update: Businessworld investigates. (Needs free registration, but you can use bugmenot to avoid) Essentially:

1) AC asks BW to investigate "independently". AC promises to provide answers etc. BW asks for details on placements, faculty, study tours etc. and gets a statement saying someone is a liar and a thief, and they replied "But I only lied about being a thief"...or maybe that was another movie.

2) BW gets irritated, and conducts its own investigation. Notes that hi-fi stuff like swimming pool, amphitheater, minigolf course etc. only exist at Delhi "campus", which IIPM claims is their only campus, the rest are "branches". How stupid do they think we are?

3) IIPM faculty is almost entirely ex IIPMers. That's no big deal. But funda is - this is how they're employed. Planman consulting hires them and contracts out to IIPM to teach. "We use consultants with vast consulting experience" says Arindam Chaudhari - more like "waste consulting experience" if teaching at IIPM *is* the experience. External faculty is a sham; they do a one show at their auditorium. If this is the criteria, my college has had "faculty" from every corner of the world.

Isn't the earth round? They why the F do they call it "corner of the world"? Which dumbfuck invented the term?

4) Placements are a no no, says BW. AC says he never claimed these companies come for campus placements - only that these companies have IIPM students. Some companies allegedly had IIPM students, but they allegedly applied independently. IIPM allegedly doesn't know their salaries also, or didn't want to tell. We've decided we don't like the word "allegedly" so we will stop using it.

5) IIPM doesn't like rankings because "they have a mindset problem" but claims #2, #8 etc. positions on any ranking that will place them in the top 10. (That's because they can only count till 9 I guess)

It's actually worse than this, in the sense that Arindam Chaudhari's repus-tation is mauled in the article. But in true filmy parlance, 'Be-izzat to woh hote hain jinki koi izzat ho'.

The world's worst surveys

2005-10-22T18:58:00.000+05:30

In no particular order I am going to list the world's worst surveys, conducted for the supremely satisfying purpose of turning your brain into jelly.

1) http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-sex18.html
This says "Obese people enjoy sex after losing weight". Er...Duh?

I am a pathetic googler today, so I'll stop there for now. Keep coming back for updates.

"We don't like you, Wikipedia"

2005-10-20T18:36:00.000+05:30

It seems some "joker" tried to delete all the information of the controversy from Wikipedia's IIPM page. Turns out the joker is from the iipm.edu domain - check out the Alert section. I don't blame 'em for trying but you know what, Wikipedians weren't born yesterday.

(Or maybe there were, and they're going to come for me when they're old enough to.)

Thalassa Mikra has done some astounding Google + Email + FriendCircleInBarcelona research. I'll summarize:

IIPM's alliances page mentions "Mr. Roland H. Baumberger (Vice-President & Head HR, Sulzer, Europe)" and he says they let IIPM students visit their HQ in Switzerland. Same kinda thing with the Jean-Daniel Pasche, President, Federation of the Swiss Watch Industry.

Nestle's Niels Christiansen (Director, Public Affairs, Nestle Worldwide) denies any association, and Mr. Thomas Schelling (Head, Asia-Oceania-Africa, Nestle Worldwide) is going to take up the name-on-site issue.

Dr. Miles Dodd (Senior Advisor, INSEAD, France) seems to have No links anymore, only a lecture six years ago in Geneva. He doesn't like the IIPM guys using his name, no sir.
--

It's starting to smell.