Part of Being Sane is Being a Little Crazy

Morning Games

2012-02-10T13:13:00.001+05:30

I woke up with a start. Finally managing to see the time after several attempts, I practically leapt out of bed. Or tried to at any rate. I'm not one of those people who jump out of bed in the morning and sing along with the birds. In that respect I’m more Rachel than Joey. It usually takes me some time to adjust. So the fact that I tried, even just once, must be enough to tell you that it was eight and I was unpardonably late. Making my bed and brushing my teeth took the usual 15 minutes.

Most people begin the day by wishing others good morning. My mother, on the other hand, makes a resolution to tell me to do something exactly 30 seconds before I drag myself to do it. It's a gift; one which most mothers seem to have, especially mothers with lazy children like me.

As per schedule then, she popped up in the mirror behind me and said,

"Drink your lemon juice and wash the glass when you're done."
"Already did."

Ha! score one for me.

The glow faded when the realization dawned on me that Fate was likely to be waiting around the corner to ambush me someplace else. Fate is always like that, its motto being 'live and let die.' Or something along those lines anyway. Brushing done, the next order of business was taking stock of who has finished the morning shower and who hasn't. The three women of the family (namely my mother, her mother and my aunt) having, as usual, finished by 7 or there about, leave the floor free for my seven year old cousin to take bath. As the only one still going to school, he finishes up by 8:00 and is not to disturbed till he's done.

So by the time I'm awake, the field is usually down to my sixteen year old cousin, my uncle, my grandfather and me. Now there are two bathrooms in the ground floor and only one aging water heater between them, which normally takes up to half an hour to heat enough water for 2 people. By the time 8:30 rolls around, the water is just about done.

As if on cue, my grandmother yells out, at no one and everyone, "Go take a bath, breakfast in 30 minutes!" Just because she says so doesn't necessarily imply that she means it. What she's really saying is that whoever wants to take a shower next, better make sure that grandfather is not in line. If he is, then you wait. I scan the field and spy my grandfather shaving. That usually meant there's a clear 30 minutes before he heads inside.

I ask my mother,"Should I try for my morning walk or do I take my shower?"

She said hop to it. So I hopped to it. After I went inside I realized my fatal error. I had started the game without checking the positions of the opponents. Of my cousin or her dad I hadn't heard a peep. Until I did. There I was, peacefully taking bath, when I heard the tap being opened on the other side (the bathrooms are built back to back in this house). To my horror even as I watched, the hot water slowed to a trickle.

Through the wall, my cousin yells "Are you done yet?"
Thinking dark thoughts, of my mother and her family, I yell back "Almost." What else could I do?

Finishing up with cold water, I was in a black mood against Fate. Fate does not play the game. What I dislike most, next to waking up and singing with birds, is taking bath in cold water. The least it could do was let me have the hot water, but no! Fate being what it is, must have it's fun. Getting back at me seems to be it's chief form of amusement and when I'm in my better moods, I don't object much.

Then comes the Russian Roulette that is breakfast in this place. Ten minute after my grandmother has yelled for us to come down to breakfast, my cousin and I scramble to the table expecting to see a half dozen dosas in various stages of cooling. I expect in vain. We instead sit down to empty plates and wait our turn. After exactly 2 dosas, taken by my mom and my cousin respectively, my grandfather breezes in and I go farther down the line. Still it was pretty good dosa, even after all the waiting and scrambling. Quite some time later, I stagger out, victorious at last!

Bovine Rites

2012-02-07T17:35:00.001+05:30

The Date – 4/2/2012

Time – 8:30 AM

Venue – Front yard (My grandparents’ home in Guntur)

Scene – The space usually occupied by a white Skoda was now home to a white cow & a calf

Bovine Rites

VIEW SLIDE SHOW

DOWNLOAD ALL

What were they doing here? They were being given away (donated) by my grandmother. What their feelings were on such a momentous decision I do not know. Why was my grandmother doing this? She just bought a place in heaven for the next 7 generations of this family! (promised by the Brahmin).

Don’t follow? Neither can I. The little I know of Hindu philosophy tells me this is not possible for the simple reason that every person’s sins is his/her own little burden (as evidenced by Valmiki himself). It’s also highly improbable given that we don’t even have a concept of heaven/hell in the first place. Glossing over all that, it got me wondering what gave birth to such a concept.

Note - The following is purely fictional but something similar probably happened in history

Think back to the time when all religious activities & the livelihood of their practitioners depended solely on charitable donations from individuals. Temples were built by kings & maintained by contributions from ordinary individuals and noblemen alike. Imagine a hapless priest looking to ‘touch’ a wealthy man for a head of cattle or two. How do you persuade a person to give away a cow when a man’s worth was measured by the number of cattle he had? Promise him heaven, of course. Not only him but also his entire family unto the 7th generation!

What an idea Sirji! And it probably worked. Unlike most other ancient civilizations whose kings/pharaohs/noblemen claimed to be God/descendants, Indian kings had to work to get into heaven But how to donate a cow in an age where we don’t own any? This was solved rather neatly if you ask me. You see, this particular priest was actually rearing some cows for his temple. So my grandmother forked over 10k to buy the cow & donated it to the temple again! In other words paying for the maintenance of one cow earned my grandmother a passport upstairs. Talk about return on investment . Of course given the rate at which Indians are being produced and killed off, it might not be a bad idea to book your seat in advance.

Now comes the best part. The whole seven generations shebang does not apply to me. The beneficiaries would be my two uncles and their sons (thanks to the whole male chauvinistic rules of Manu), all of whom weren’t even present at the ceremony. I don’t care about that, what with being an atheist and all but I do object to being forced out of bed at an ungodly hour on what was supposed to be my vacation just to capture the whole thing on camera for my grandmother!

People tell me the reason they don’t donate blood or their organs is their religion. Funny that donating a cow or doing a pooja can get you so much goodwill but you’re barred from giving away what’s probably the only thing you truly own – your body. And that after you’re dead and won’t feel a thing!

Without religion you’d have good people doing good things and bad people doing bad things. But for good people to do bad things, that takes religion.

I also found out that you’re supposed to give away a cow along with her calf (don’t ask me why, haven’t been able to find out) but during the ceremony we found out from the cowherd that these two aren’t even related! Now what that does to the probability of the whole brood going to heaven, would some expert let me know?

Reality Check

2012-01-31T17:32:00.001+05:30

Two things I really really hated to hear when I was growing up – ‘You’ll understand when you grow up’ & ‘That’s what you say now, but just wait.’ The first I stopped believing quite a bit before now, seeing as I’m now 25 and still don’t understand things. I don’t get why staying up past 10 is a punishable offence or why I need permission to get my hair styled even though I’m 26 going on 27. I’m as grown up as it is possible to get & no closer to enlightenment.

As for seeing things differently when I’m older or in this case when I have my own kids, there’s just one way to find out. One sticking point between my mom and me has been how much control parents should have over the behaviour, thoughts & feelings of their adult offspring. I say none while she says all. Will I be singing the same tune when I’m 50 and my kids 20? How do I find out? Time to put my money where my mouth is & my words on paper aka my blog. Reality Check time. Will an older & wiser me look back & laugh at my naiveté? I rather hope I can point to this post and laugh in the face of all who predicted otherwise

The 5 Commandments

Do not go to jail.
Do not get addicted to drugs/cigarettes/alcohol/money. Ain’t worth it kid.
Love is worth it. Sometimes. You decide which times.
Never change yourself for others. Do it only if you’re convinced you were wrong.
Subject to the above, Be Happy & Enjoy Life!

I’m pretty sure that covers the lot. I hope I can raise kids who can figure out the rest by themselves. Now if only I can remember this list and keep things in perspective while my 5 year old empties the ink bottle on my cashmere or the 20 year old wants to pierce an eyebrow!

P.S: Remember that jewellery is just carbon and gadgets just silicon. Now you’re all set.

To Be With Shoes Or Not To Be?

2012-01-28T16:33:00.001+05:30

Guess whose birthday it is today? He was a music legend (south of the Vindhyas) and was born long long ago. Still nothing? Today is the birthday of Tyagarajar, one of the greatest composers of Carnatic music along with Muthuswami Dikshitar & Syama Shastry aka the Holy Trinity of South Indian Carnatic music. By a curious coincidence all three were born in Tiruvarur. Wikipedia says he was born on May 4, 1767 but then we all know how accurate that is. Besides, the Indian calendar is based on the moon you know, so we can just about pick any date we want

So today is his birthday. To celebrate, there was to be a procession from our school to the temple and back again (I assume, I don’t know the exact route). After all the confusion that such an occasion entails in my house, we were finally prepared for it. Mom and I left for the school but unfortunately the procession started the moment we reached. There was nothing to do but walk along with them. Then we waited for it for to reach the front gate.

While I was waiting my mom hissed at me to remove my slippers. Never mind that we were on the streets and they, as you all know,were incredibly dirty. Knowing how maniacal these religious types get, I obediently went and came back, de-slippered. That was when I noticed an extraordinary thing. All around me, the women were bare foot while the men wore shoes, slippers and what have you!

Aarti, singing and the usual stuff followed, attended by barefoot women and wearing- footwear-of-all-types men. Lacking the nerve to ask my mom, I ask the blogosphere thus: Why this pedalian discrimination? Yes, I had to look up that word but what matter. Anyone care to venture an answer?

P.S: The more sarcastic/ironic/satirical, the better!

Path to Belief

2012-01-21T11:30:00.001+05:30

Two days ago, I ran an experiment. 24 hrs. with no gadgets and by that I mean my phone, Nook & laptop. Not my idea of a grand old time but still, in the name of science and my mother I forged ahead. Now what could I do to fill those 24 hours? In a house where the average age is about 55, my options where pretty limited an anyone can imagine.

As part of Operation Rehabilitate Shilpa, my grandmother and her daughter took me to the temple first thing in the morning. Cue the usual rigmarole Hindus do in temples and hours (well more like 30 minutes but it sure felt like hours to me) later we were on our way home again. An ordeal but I managed to pull through, without murmur.

Later that afternoon, the following conversation happened between my mother and me:

Mom: I don’t like what you did in the temple.

Shilpa: What did I do? Only everything you told me.

Mom: (& I quote) But that’s not enough. You can’t just go through the motions. You have to love God and believe in Him. Being a girl means having certain qualities and believing in God is one of them, so get started on it and become a girl. Unquote.

Well color me confused! It’s not enough that I’ve kept my own beliefs aside for a morning and followed you to the temple, where you most likely prayed to get rid of me as soon as possible, and did everything I was asked to, but I’ve to also believe in your beliefs!! Mrs.Benett can’t hold a candle to my mother when it comes to marrying off her daughters.

What’s worse, being in India I can’t even get myself to a therapist. Guess this blog’s got to do the job for now Any ideas on how I can become a girl? Maybe a 10 point program similar to AA would help me check all the points listed here?

Helpful hints on how to turn an ardent fan of Einstein, Russell & Dawkins into an equally ardent believer in God are always welcome in the comments. Best I’ve got is Fake it till you’ve Made it!

Time To Grow UP!

2012-01-19T17:26:00.000+05:30

It’s been two years now since I’ve started hearing the dreaded M word, no not money but Marriage with a capital M. And of course being an Indian girl the only real option you have is to let your parents ‘arrange’ it, which by definition means

Arranged Marriage – Process by which family A condescends to let their son be married to the daughter of family B who is in turn thrilled that their precious daughter is able to marry someone who can provide for her (mostly through the dowry given by family B not to mention her salary at her ‘day’ job). In addition the son has approved the daughter’s looks while the daughter was just annoyed enough to say yes to what ever homo erectus the family B has managed to dig up.

Now come the Rules of Engagement for both the sides. Say what you will about arranged marriages you can’t accuse the family elders of not playing by the rules. Here then is an extract from the Rulebook for both guys and gals. Different rules for guys and gals, you didn’t really expect this whole shebang to be fair did you? For more on the subject read my earlier post here.

First up, Mr Perfect -

Do not go to jail. (Duh! These things can be checked)
No drugs, alcohol or cigarettes (Of course the occasional smoke or drink is ok as long as we, the parents, don’t find out, gives us plausible deniability. Plus think what a nice surprise for your wife!)
Be a virgin. (Completely optional, after all who’s gonna find out anyway?)
Do not be gay. (21st century concern for parents)

Next Ms Should Try Harder -

No jail, drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Period.
Be a virgin. (Not negotiable)
Be straight. (Girls can be gay?! What is this world coming to?)
DO NOT THINK DIFFERENT. Better yet do not think at all.
Believe in God. Not enough if you fake it, you have to really believe in God.
Be an expert cook. Again not negotiable, you don’t want him complaining about your cooking to his mom do you? (And yes, grown Mr Perfect will still go running to his mom when something goes wrong and no it is NOT a sign of imbecility)
Posses excellent housekeeping skills. Your house should look like it can be featured on the cover of ‘Good Housekeeping’ even on the maid’s day off coz that’s the time his mother will pick to visit.
Do not try to muscle in on male territory. Always be humble. Don’t you dare be better at manly stuff like thinking, driving, playing video games, gadgets, financial planning & then try to get out of doing female things like watching saas-bahu serials on TV and bitching about the next door neighbour/relative. Men > women and don’t you forget it.
Be a master diplomat & have proven expertise in reading between the lines. You can’t possibly be naive enough to think his mom will look at you as a person & not as someone who’s out to wrench her Mr Perfect away from her. Even though she was the one who okayed you in the first place.
Love to wear saris and jewellery. Profess undying love for this great country’s traditions even though secretly you’d like nothing more than to live in your jeans for the rest of your life.
Always put family over friends. Never mind that family has never stood up for you and is always judging you, while friends have done the exact opposite. After all blood is thicker than water.
Any other arbitrary rule to be made up as and when required.

There you have it folks! If anyone out there wants their marriage arranged, simply follow the above rules and unleash the hounds of Hell. Oh and also get your head examined.

Enjoy Your Sunday Before Monday Gets Here

2011-11-13T15:02:00.001+05:30

Today is a Sunday. The holy day for all those who have to work Monday to Saturday, the day we sleep late, eat comfort food and just generally spend it by being lazy. This program is not acceptable to those who stay at home, at least that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn watching my mom for the last 10 years or so. Around 12 noon, the doorbell rang. Not my favourite way to start a Sunday but I didn’t get a choice in the matter. And something told me it would be my mom. I’m not prone to flashes of intuition but when I do get them, boy am I right!

It was my mom back from a week with her parents because my grandfather just had surgery (he’s doing great, in case you’re wondering). The first thing she says is not how I am or something on those lines but I get the usual spiel of how can I be waking up just now, how could I skip breakfast (funny but she wouldn’t object if I said I’m fasting for religious reasons), how could I not take a bath etc. Yeah mom, it’s great to have you back too!

Not that it made much of a difference her being out of town and all. She can harangue me long distance too. Either 20 odd years of practice have honed her skills or there’s some sort of special initiation ceremony when your daughters are born, where they teach you this stuff. Lets go back a couple of days and I’ll explain. Friday evening I’m at the movies about to watch The Adventures of Tintin, on the day it was released when she calls me up & tells me to mail some pictures of mine to some marriage broker.

Finding out that I’m at the movies, her reaction? “How could you go to 2 movies in 2 days in a row! You’re an imbecile.” The implication of course being that the neighbours would notice and this had to be the heights of imbecility in her book. To cut a long story short, I got out of a cinema where I’d paid 250 bucks to watch a great movie to mail some photos to some guy who may or may not turn out to be my future husband (or his family) & who couldn’t wait a couple of hours for me to finish watching the movie to get them. Ironically, turns out our horoscopes don’t even match and all that drama for nothing.

And then cool as a cucumber she drops yet another bombshell on me. Apparently the broker who got my photographs told my mother that my eyes look weird in them and now he wants a whole other bunch (coz of course he’s the one who decides whether I’m acceptable or not). Every Tom, Dick and Harry gets to weigh in on how I look, except me . Why am I filled with horror at the thought of my pictures being taken yet again? Well that’s fodder for another post coming soon…Stay tuned for more while I get back to my interrupted Sunday program .

Quitting Time!

2011-10-23T20:10:00.001+05:30

The world’s best resignation letter -

Sir,

Screw you!

Sincerely

XYZ

While I didn’t give that in writing, I did quit LIC on the first of October. Seeing as how they have a 3 month notice period, I can sit back, relax & enjoy going to an office where I don’t have to work! For about 68 more days (yes, I have a widget on my home screen for it ). They’ve even announced my replacement, waiting for her to get here so I can drop the pretence of working already. The office looks way better now that I’m leaving and putting thousands of kilometres between us.

I could say I’ve learnt a lot of things working here but you and I both know I’d be lying. While I may not have learnt anything professionally, I’ve managed to figure some stuff out about myself. I’ve realised maybe a job isn’t the best thing for me. Working for someone who isn’t as smart as me but just got promoted to the level of his incompetence just pushes all my buttons. I’ve also realised that I absolutely hate filing and sending letters in triplicate. I abhor routine monotony & get frustrated when I can’t change things to make them better. Especially when I know I can make them better.

The only sad thing is that I’d be losing a great source of inspiration for my posts here but I think I’ll make do. The world is a bottomless pit of things to write about & what kind of a writer would I be if I couldn’t write?

LIC Terms of Service

2011-09-07T20:21:00.001+05:30

Any self respecting website or software service has a Terms of Service and privacy policy; they are the Internet’s equivalent of what we used to call the fine print. You have to agree to accept them before you sign up for an account. I have to ask though, when was the last time you actually read through any of those? It’s tempting to just scroll down to the end and check the little box saying “I agree”. Most of the time this is pretty harmless as they’re all standard boiler plate text, just shy of being copy paste affairs. But sometimes blindly clicking through may have consequences!

Every time you buy an insurance policy from LIC, you’re agreeing to some awful T&C. I hereby present the unwritten yet completely loophole free and airtight Terms of Service of the Life Insurance Corporation of India.

Every customer hereby agrees to abide by the following Terms of Service set in force by the LIC of India herein after called LIC, when purchasing any insurance policy -

Responsibility for any & all mistakes on the policy bond rests solely with agent/customer and not with LIC
Any changes with respect to any information provided therein would require at the minimum 3 personal visits to the servicing branch; along with any documents as may be called for at any time during the procedure by LIC, duly signed, attested by a gazetted officer & notarized, in triplicate.
All visits to the branch will be required to be during government working hours only. All national, state, religious, local community holidays shall be scrupulously adhered to. LIC also reserves the right to curtail said working hours on any day, due to any cause without prior notice.
No employee is required to maintain minimum levels of courtesy & respect towards customers and as such customers must refrain from forming expectations relative to other insurance companies.
Customers also acknowledge that they waive any & all rights to complain against any instance of employee incompetence – either wilfully or otherwise; if and when they do complain no action will be taken against such employee (as it’s against the union rules).
LIC makes no promises whatsoever regarding the security of the information provided by the customer; however LIC does say that no hacker can access the data stored in the systems (employees can barely enter it, let alone do any work).
Customers recognize that tea breaks, lunch breaks, smoke breaks, system down breaks are all god given rights which employees may use at any time to justify work shirking or doing half assed work.
Anything not covered under any of the rules above will be necessarily covered under the blanket statement – Because we can’t, we don’t.

So the next time be sure to read the fine print aka Terms of Service.

Note – Anyone who has had experience with LIC or any other government agency may sound off in the comments below!

Third World Problems

2011-08-28T20:21:00.000+05:30

By now hurricane Irene would have made landfall on the Eastern seaboard of America. Enough has been said about the biggest storm to hit New York, marked by it’s first evacuation. Amid all the hysteria and confusion which usually accompanies such an event, what strikes me as most hilarious is how some people seem to be most worried about internet access. I wouldn’t be surprised if people include some sort of wireless dongle in their emergency kit! Probably want to check in to Foursquare, post retro pictures on Instagram and follow Irene’s progress on Twitter. If something is not tweeted, checked in or Instagramed, does it make a sound?

We, who live in the third world, have our own set of problems. While New Yorkers are worried about internet access during a hurricane, getting a connection from BSNL takes 3 months even without one. I wouldn’t have believed it if it hadn’t happened to me last year. And the journey to get one was both arduous and hilarious.

The first time I went down there, the very helpful assistant whatever person tried to get me to opt for a much slower ergo cheaper connection than what I wanted. No wonder BSNL is getting its ass kicked. I should have known then getting internet from here would be a road trip to hell. Three journeys to their office later, I had finally succeeded in giving my application with all the absolutely essential paperwork. Apparently I need to prove my identity, residence and what not just to get on the net. I’m surprised they didn’t ask for a Statement Of Purpose!

Then I waited. And waited. And waited some more. A reasonable time later (a month is reasonable I guess, and that was after I had paid them), I called them and was told that my application is in process, whatever that means. Maybe they were checking my antecedents and intent, I don’t know. Couple of weeks later, I called again and this time they had their ground team on it. Two months and still short one internet connection, I called them only to be told that they did not have wifi routers in stock and would I mind taking another modem instead?! Of course not, why would I mind? It’s not like I bought a laptop for its mobility. It was just so I could ground it with wires to go online.

Finally one day, or rather night, I got it! My much awaited 4 mbps broadband connection. No I didn’t. What I got was only 2 mbps speed. I had to get on the roller coaster again. I tried complaining to their office, no response. Those people might as well have been deaf for all the good it did. I called customer care (there’s a misnomer!) no use. After numerous failed attempts I had just about given up but decided to give them one last chance. I called some guy listed as GM or something to say I’m not getting the promised 4 mbps speed & his only reply is what am I doing that needs 4 mbps! If BSNL is so sure no home customer would want such speeds, why have the plans in the first place?

Finally I gave up. But only coz I found I’m getting 2 mbps unlimited rather than the 4 mbps capped plan I was paying for, which is actually more expensive. Go BSNL! The road to bankruptcy is paved with screw ups like these. Hiring stars to shill for you will only get you so far. Keeping the customers they lured requires you to do more. It’s obvious that PSUs like BSNL truly have no clue what private companies are doing right. While Airtel & its ilk create high expectations in their customers, then strive to beat them, BSNL fails to deliver even on the ludicrously low expectations we have from it. I’m so looking forward to my sci-fi future sans BSNL.

P.S: I shouldn’t be too hard on BSNL. Rahul told me what happened trying to move his Airtel connection to his new home. While one executive said Airtel does not service that area, another actually asked him if there was any chance he would be moving back to his old place, since they could very well provide service there!

The Future Is Here

2011-08-09T12:58:00.001+05:30

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C Clarke

Sometimes it’s even better than magic. Even Harry Potter had to lug books around in a bag at Hogwarts. But not me. I got myself the Nook. In a gadget the size and weight of a single paperback novel, I can now carry at least 200 books! Many a time what we wish for and what science gives us, turn out to be poles apart. 10 years ago I never wished for a pocket sized phone which lets me access the internet whenever/wherever, yet that’s precisely what I got. Similarly, Asimov’s robots & the robots we now have are poles apart. It’s very rare that you get exactly what you wished for.

But the latest crop of ereaders including my Nook is the stuff every bookworm has dreamed of. When I was a kid, I used to have to go to the library practically every day to have enough reading material on hand. I dreamed of the day when science would invent something which could hold more books than I can read! Fast forward 15 years and tech has answered my prayers .

Anyone who’s been following the ereader market knows the advantages of having one by now. Excellent battery life, E Ink, form factor etc. And many have wondered if we really need yet another device to lug around. Mostly they are right. For the average Joe who reads to while away time on a train/flight/waiting room or who reads maybe 1/2 books a month, it’s definitely not worth it.

But for people like me, who’ll read anything & everything, the Nook is a godsend. The tech blogs reviewing these gadgets can only compare the actual gadget to every other tablet or phone and pronounce their verdict. Most of them don’t cover the actual experience of using one. Even I wasn’t sure if I made the right choice. Would it have been better to get the Nook colour? It is, after all, a very good tablet for it’s price. But just a few weeks of using this device & I know I was right.

Reading on the Nook is exactly the same as reading an actual book. With an LCD screen – whether on a phone or a laptop – you’re constantly aware of the screen, what other things are going on in your browser/other apps and so on. With my Nook, it’s just me and the words. I can read books from start to finish, without interruptions, that constant nag of window pop ups and the hundredth ‘xyz just poked you’ FB update. On my laptop every time I had to turn a page, it was an intrusive break in the story. Imagine a commercial interrupting you every 30 seconds in a video or movie!

For people who started to read before the internet became ubiquitous, the feeling should be familiar – when you get so absorbed in a good story that you don’t notice the paper or ink or the rest of the world. The words fly off the paper and it feels as if the action is taking place right in front of your eyes! I used to get that experience only from a book. And now my Nook. I do not want my ereader to take notes or annotations or read my mail. My phone can do all that. I don’t want an eBook which has embedded videos or animated graphics.

With my Nook, I always have a book with me to read. And that’s all I ever wanted from an eBook reader.

Deeply Real Or Superficially Normal?

2011-07-24T16:07:00.001+05:30

Now that the puducherry fellow turned out to be a bust too, my grandfather has started championing his Salem guy again! He calls my mom, then my dad and now finally its my turn to talk to him about why I do not want to see a guy who is short, old and lives in Salem for god’s sake! According to him, I have no real reason to say no. I mean if that’s no reason, i don't know what is…I heard him tell my dad that we know the family and such (we’re actually related; but quite far off thankfully). And I'm like so what? Am I marrying the entire freaking family??!!

Of course this eventuality is covered by one of the laws of getting married.In that the only reasons I can have to say no to a guy (provided he’s rich) is if he’s a chain smoker/alcoholic/womanizer! And how would I know if he is? After all the guys my parents have sifted through so far have squeaky clean profiles. Everybody is a goddam vegetarian, never smoked or tied one on and of course never even looked at a girl in college. What are these guys? Aliens from another galaxy?that’s the only polite explanation I can think of. On a side note, every some guy doesn’t make the cut due to what ever xyz reason, the official version given out is that my parents didn’t like his profile. Never can it be said that I said no; what so ever maybe the reason. I mean to say it cannot be said that I rejected a guy coz he’s like 32 to my 26, otherwise people might think I’m arrogant!!!

Whereas the guy can reject me for my taste in jewellery, my politeness in talking English, for me working and hell even for me living in Delhi. Yes my mom actually told me that was the kind of feedback she got from some relatives. That many people do not want me coz I'm living in Delhi. Talk about provincial. I honestly don’t know whether to laugh or cry! A guy can be living outside the country for years while studying and working and I'm expected to believe he’s RAM incarnate BUT he can express doubts as to my ‘culture’ or lack thereof just coz I'm living in Delhi. Sometimes I think I should just send a link to my blog to every prospective groom out there, let them read all this. Then if you still want to talk,come on. At least I would be spared the ignominy of meeting people dressed like something from the 60s .

I, Me, Myself

VIEW SLIDE SHOW

DOWNLOAD ALL

So here’s me guys - I'm a geek, I love to drive, I read comics like these, I want to drive a motorcycle someday, I play video games, I'm an atheist, I think most traditions are downright moronic and practically a threat to the survival of our species, hate doing laundry and the dishes, extremely rational, I think keeping house is not a real job, kids are cute as long as they’re not yours to keep, and when I do have them my only goal for them is be happy. If you guys want a real person, let’s talk. If you’re just looking for a 2D ‘normal and nice’ girl, just keep moving!

The Road Less Travelled…

2011-07-13T15:50:00.001+05:30

2011 has been a particularly good gadget year for me. I started out by getting my laptop in January, followed it up with my Samsung Galaxy S 2 this June and to top it all off, I’m finally getting my Nook reader next week!

The laptop and phone acquisition process were pretty straight forward: walk into store, pay and take it home. Not so with my Nook. For starters, you can’t get it in India – offline anyway. So I had to find someone else who could buy it in the US and then getting it here. That was solved rather simply by my dad. His boss was on vacation there currently (serendipity or what!) and he bought a Nook colour for my sister and Nook Touch for me.

Now came the next phase of the problem. How do I get it to Hyderabad? Sending it through courier was not an option. Again, I found a solution in the unlikeliest of places. One of my friends Kunal, had just asked me if my dad could get a package for him to Delhi from Hyderabad. While that didn’t happen for a whole lot of reasons, I realised he could help me get my Nook in the other direction. His sister lives here and his mother was flying down to visit (again serendipitously) and voila! My Nook is finally here.

Not that I’ve actually managed to get my hands on it yet. Given that his sister lives about 20 kms away which easily translates into a 2 hour drive, I’ve still not been able to get my Nook.The gadget that crossed an ocean and continents in less than 2 days, now takes 10 days to get to me in the same city! I guess I should just be thankful that it has made it this far at least, thanks to Kunal. While he’s usually as ass, this time he was nice enough to even pick it up from my place for me. So Kunal if you’re reading this, I owe you one

Ironic that the least expensive gadget is taking me the longest to get my hands on. I’m looking forward to many many hours of happy reading on my Nook. It might possibly be the answer to my prayers. I’ve tried reading on my laptops and my phone to no avail. My laptop forces me to sit in one position which is not feasible considering I tend to read for hours at a time. My phone screen doesn’t have that problem but then again reading on such a tiny screen is painful, to say the least. I can probably read to while away the time while waiting for the doctor or something, but reading LOTR on it would be practically impossible.

Stay tuned to read more about how the Nook has changed my life next week!

Evolution

2011-07-02T23:34:00.001+05:30

It is often said that Change is inevitable. Anything that doesn’t change, dies. If you think about it, it’s self evident. A tiger cannot always outrun its prey, sometimes it has to use stealth mode. A deer cannot always rely on camouflage, sometimes it has to outrun the tiger. Every species of animal, bird, insect on earth has adapted through out millennia to occupy the specific ecological niche that they now do. Even homo sapiens changed & adapted; albeit at an ever faster pace. It took us thousands of years to come down from the trees, hundreds to evolve agriculture, decades to expand science and now technology which is changing our society every couple of years now.

Yet…certain people refuse to adapt. Not surprisingly these are the same people who stand to lose the most from any sort of change. In fact they even say it’s good to not change! This slow death is called ‘tradition, culture, morals’ and what not. When I point out that change is good, they point to our 3000 years of tradition and say that hasn’t changed. Really? I’m sure that a thousand years ago, people slept at 11 pm and spent only 2 hours a day fighting for survival . I’d love to see all these people trying to farm the land and make food from scratch (no stainless steel knives, mixers, grinders, refrigerators/ovens/stoves allowed), live without cars, computers, television and air conditioning to name just a few.

Ever since the dawn of civilization, the advance of science and technology has forced society to change and adapt to it. There has never been a time when society has changed of its own volition and science was forced to adapt. No normal person with a modicum of intelligence could possibly believe that the invention of the wheel or the discovery of fire did not profoundly change the society that invented it. Yet humans have also seemingly evolved a resistance to change, more pronounced in Indians thanks to the seductive appeal of a 4000 year civilization to look back upon. Doesn’t matter that the past has been long since dead, buried and excavated again!

Beginning of Rant - Here’s a sample. 200-300 years ago, these were the outfits worn by women in different countries – the USA, Europe, Japan, China and India.

No prizes for guessing who hasn’t changed! I’ve had several guys tell me that women look better in a saree. Yeah, well I’m not wearing clothes to make you happy dude! As always guys are so super cool with stuff so long as they’re not the ones who have to do it. It never fails to amaze me that women – emotional, weak creatures that we are – are expected to uphold the mighty tradition of Hindu culture! Why can’t the big strong men do it? Oh right, coz it’s too darn uncomfortable . And totally not worth it. End of Rant

Any which way I slice it, I don’t see what’s in it for me to keep this 4000 years of tradition going. If someone can explain,I’d be much obliged . Till then, I say Bring it(change) on!

The Origin of Traditions

2011-06-08T13:18:00.001+05:30

Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything, anything, be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in.

-Sam Harris

Tradition as a subject has always had equal parts fascination and horror for me. Fascination because it is interesting to trace their origins, the changes they’ve undergone and most importantly, how ludicrous they appear when taken in today’s context. Horror because it is now incumbent upon me to follow and uphold the ‘Great Indian Traditions!’ *cue sarcastic drumroll*

I once read this little gem of a story I don’t know where, but which will shed light on the origin of traditions -

Once upon a time, in a small ashram, there lived a guru & his students. Their days were spent in learning philosophy, ritual etc. The only fly in the guru’s ointment was the ashram cat. The cat had the habit of disrupting the daily puja at the ashram (to be fair, the noise levels were enough to annoy any self respecting feline ). Frustrated, the guru ordered that the cat be tied up to a tree just before the puja started. Thus the puja was conducted in peace.

Batches of students came and went and the practice continued. The guru died, and later on so did the cat. Now the students were perplexed. Without a cat tied up to a tree, how was the puja to go on? So they brought another cat, tied it to a tree and the show went on. Years and decades passed, pretty soon students and gurus were writing treatises on the deep philosophical implications of the tradition which dated back hundreds of years! Scholars debated on why only a cat and not any other animal was used, the timing of the puja and hell, even if the colour of the cat had any effect on the meaning of the tradition.

And thus a tradition is born!

Now not all traditions started out this way, neither are all of them this stupid. But just think for a moment on all the little stuff that you do everyday, that your mother said has to be done just so otherwise the gods will not be pleased. Tell me how much of a difference is there between the so called ‘traditions and customs’ and say my habit of brushing my teeth before I eat?

I once asked my mother why we do not cook onions/garlic for festivals? First I thought maybe coz festivals=sweets in India but that didn’t stop us from eating chillies by the dozen . It had to be something else. Then my mom told me it’s coz we eat tasty food every day and this was our forefathers’ way of ensuring we ate healthy on at least a couple of days. Now that made sense. I never heard of spinach or broccoli being banned from any Indian festival!

But it still did not explain why? In this day and age, why people still do not understand the value of healthy food & have to be coerced into it in the name of religion. On the other hand, if the original intent was for me to eat healthy, why cannot I eschew the religion backstory and just eat? By the time I get to this point in my argument, my dad usually intervenes and says (sotto voice) to just do what mom says before she blows!

The list of such traditions that I do not understand is long and extremely hilarious at places. Examples include

Tradition	Ostensible Reason	Why?
Do not trim nails after 6	might hurt myself after dark	don’t we have artificial lights?
Shower after a haircut	barber isn’t from our caste, curiously applies only to the men	neither is the doctor or the tailor but you don’t shower after you meet them
No wearing slippers in house	might bring outside dirt into the house	try doing that in Delhi’s winters!
Do not sneeze during puja	I don’t know	if I stop a sneeze, I might blow a blood vessel. Fact.

The list goes on…I just don’t have the patience to write them all down. So do you think tradition is just a habit which people will not allow to die? Sound off in the comments. As for me, I think Sam Harris is right. It’s a ridiculous world we live in!

P.S: God seems to disapprove of all the good stuff. Why make them in the first place?

To Be or Not To Be?

2011-05-20T22:09:00.001+05:30

Americans have a tradition: Grow up, go to college (if you can afford it!), figure out what you want to do with your life while you’re there and then well, you can do it or you can change course. After all that’s what life’s about. Einstein was a clerk in a patent office while Bell taught deaf people. But it’s not their day job that they’re known for.

Meanwhile Indians also have a tradition: Grow up, go to college (study that which will pay well) and go get that well paying job. If, horror of horrors , you discover that you want to do something other than what you are studying and/or working on, well tough luck. You already took the road well travelled and you are not allowed to change it willy nilly!

As if an entire society’s anti-risk tendency & fear of failure wasn’t enough obstacles, if you are a woman, then you have a whole new set of problems. Don’t believe me? Come, take a trip down the rabbit hole (bring something to eat, this will take a while )

If you’ve been following my blog at all (and if you haven’t-shame on you!) you know that I’m not exactly working at my dream job. Hell, it’s not even close to a this-job-sucks-but-I-do-it-coz–it-pays-well kinda job. If tomorrow I wake up to find that LIC imploded, I wouldn’t shed a tear. But what’s my alternative? Either I can find a new job and then quit or I can quit to preserve my sanity and then look for a job, since even quitting cannot be a simple affair @Life Is Complicated company (takes 3 months dammit!)

Of course, what I want to work on next and if I’m able to build it out into a career are serious issues that I’ve to consider before moving on, but why for the love of God do I have to worry about my future husband and his parents? Yes, You heard it right. It’s not enough that I’ve to figure out what I’m good at vs. what I like doing vs. if either of these will keep me covered in doubloons, I also have to worry about currently non existent people in my future life!

My dad’s reasoning has its merits though, I’ll give him that. How? I’ll walk you through it. Imagine you are the mom/dad of an eligible bachelor. Isn’t it reasonable for you to define the specifications of your future daughter-in-law? You have every right to know before hand if she’s going to be working or not. And some of you would be especially attracted to a bahu who has a govt. job. If she changes her mind after the wedding tamasha, well that’s her bad luck! You knew what you were getting yourself into, girl. I wanted a housewife for my son and I’ll damn well get one. I don’t blame you at all, not one iota .

So my dad has asked me to make up my mind. Do I want to be a housewife or work? Coz that will change what kind of groom he can look for. Some families want a working daughter in law while others don’t. So what’s it gonna be? For those of you who have followed me this far & still posses a functioning, reasoning mind (i.e, your brains haven’t exploded all over the place) I now have to figure out the following & in a hurry:

Would I get another job?
Will that job fit my educational qualifications?
Do I want another job?

The short answer – I don’t know, I don’t care and probably yes. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the fact that maybe, just maybe, I’m not cut out for a job. Which leaves me precisely nowhere with regards to my next job or the future. What will I do? Only time will tell.

P.S: To my future husband – what with all the variables which will factor into my decision, you kinda got left out. Don’t take it personally huh!

Top 10 Signs

2011-05-01T22:51:00.001+05:30

Geeks really love their lists. At every tech blog I read, not a single day goes by without a list of some sort – ‘Top 10 iphone apps,’ ‘top 10 Android apps,’ ‘5 things you can do to speed up your shitty netbook’ and so on. While my list has nothing whatsoever to do with one of the loves in my life (which is if you didn’t already know - Tech), it has everything to do with the blight/scourge/bane of my life! Yeah, my list is called *drum roll please*

Top 10 Signs You are an LICian

You don’t have a life. No, going home at 6 and doing nothing till bedtime does not qualify as a life.
You feel, think and act like you’re 45 years old. And do not realise it till you meet your friends IRL.
When asked for something by your boss/colleague, your first instinct is to search the paper, not the system!
Whatever query a customer might have, you start shaking your head NO even before he finishes, coz you already know it can’t be done.
If your assistants don’t work, you know you have to ‘counsel’ them, you’re not supposed to yell at them for not doing something they’re being paid to. And you think this is completely normal.
You sacrifice your pride for others’ prejudice. After all, you can’t risk offending sensibilities even if it makes no sense.
You cringe while typing your current job on Facebook and LinkIn, that is, if you’re even on those networks!
Your 50 yr old assistant sulks and throws tantrums like a 5 yr old, yet you are supposed to be the model of maturity & responsibility @25!
You are continually shocked when your friends tell you they have internet access @office!
It doesn’t feel odd to call people who are stupider & slower than you – Sir/Madam simply coz they’ve managed to make more ‘mistakes’ than you.(it’s called experience idiot!)

Recognize all the top 10 signs in yourself? CONGRATULATIONS!

You’re a fully fledged member of the Leeches In Comfort Club aka LIC! For all those who read the above and are now shaking in their boots (coz you have 3-4 of the signs on this list), RUN! Before it’s too late.

The ‘n’ Laws of Getting Married

2011-04-27T04:32:00.001+05:30

Way back in 2009 (Feb to be precise) I wrote this post on the Great Indian Tamasha aka The Arranged Marriage. At that time, it was merely a rant brought on by reading some random blog I had come across. I was just getting acquainted with the theory of marriage – as concerning me – while my parents were about to embark on the Search. Almost exactly two years later, my parents are still looking while I’m getting a crash course on Marriage 101.

These then are the first 5 Laws of Getting Married – applicable to most Indian Girls -

I have to tone myself down – far as I can tell, it means I talk too much. Once upon a time, my mom used to bemoan the fact that I don’t talk, now she wants me to shut up. Go figure! Of course what she really means is that I’m way too outspoken and frank which do not bode well for my future as a wife.
I am expected to demonstrate my ability to talk in Telugu while conversing with prospective grooms; never mind that the groom is an NRI and talking to me in English. Apparently, in my culture, if a boy talks in English it implies he’s educated, smart and modern (note:modern is not a dirty word here) whereas if I speak English it implies I’m incapable of speaking Telugu, disdain tradition and am modern (note:it is a dirty word now!) I wonder why it is that a man who has spent 5 years in the US is forgiven for using English & can openly admit he takes a while to talk in Telugu again while I, who have spent 25 years of my life in places where my native tongue is not spoken, am expected to be word perfect in it?
I have to profess a keen belief in God and undying devotion to Puja. So when I’m talking to the guy, I have two choices – I can either drop hints as to the extent of my ‘belief’ (depending of course on how much he believes) or I can lie and stick to it the rest of my life. The last time I met one, he told me quite frankly that he’s not much into daily prayers and such. Seizing my chance, I told him the same goes for me. But what I didn’t count on was his mother! She immediately remarked to my mom ‘Your daughter doesn’t seem to believe in God?’ (which in case you don’t know is a criminal offence when you’re trying to get married)
I am to respect the right of the other party to make snap judgements of me while I am not supposed to return the favour. How do I know that? In my last encounter, his mother did not like my white jewellery (never mind it was the only one my mom had with her or that it matched the silver embroidery of my dress). So she made a snap judgement that I despised tradition, which while true, I never realised was so morally wrong. I simply thought it was a matter of personal taste. Stupid me! She has every right not to like me based on even this one observation while I can only imagine the horror of my parents if I told them I rejected the guy coz he wears yellow jewellery!
I’m expected to show off any appropriate talents that I might have at the meeting. Seriously. How else am I to interpret my own mother asking me to sing at the table of a high end restaurant where all the tables are crowded? Now don’t ask me why only my skills are called into question here. If the guy claims to be a cricketer, may I ask him to bowl for me? I’ll even say please… Note the word appropriate above. If I’m an award winning debater or computer geek, never mind…

These are just a few laws I’ve learned thus far. I’ll make sure to note more of them down as I stumble upon them. Somebody has to, maybe I can spare some girl the necessity of learning this all over again! I am after all, one of the first in a brand new breed of girls, into whom the above Laws haven’t been built on manufacture (sort of like Caliban! )

P.S: The ‘n’ in the title is coz unlike The Three Laws of Robotics, these are innumerable!

Palms Away!

2011-04-01T13:36:00.000+05:30

Something unusual happened recently. My mom and I visited a friend of her brother, who just happened to be a Palmist. (See Palmist). He has some rather sensible T & C before he agrees to read your palm; sensible for a palmist anyway ! Although my mom was pretty disappointed with his ‘predictions’, I was fascinated by his description of my personality solely by looking at my palm. Here’s a short version of what he said, translated from Telugu:

Revolutionary..not a general hand..High level of self respect..no need of external validation..as long as I’m convinced I’m right, I don’t care for the majority.. feminist.. dislike explaining myself in respect of allegations.. love driving, like solving puzzles.. good cook but do not like to cook.. strong sense of justice.. retribution rather than mercy.. loyal, hate traitors.. frank and straight forward.. do not like hypocrites.. good managerial ability.. talker.. high levels of persuasiveness.. aptitude for marketing,judiciary,military/law enforcement.. will not interfere with others and not tolerate interference from others.. self reliant.. has to have financial independence.. self defence.. thinker.. explore possibilities.. love playing devil’s advocate.. problems with authority and dictators.. dislike working for someone else but will prefer that as an alternative to authoritative husband/in laws.. will accept no solution even the right one if it’s forced down my throat.. show me it’s right, never tell me it’s right.. “Coz I said so” is not an acceptable answer.. self confident to a high degree.. want to travel and explore the world.. should’ve been born a boy.

So, what do you think - does it sound like me? I have to admit, he freaked me out!

Who knew?

2011-03-12T16:41:00.001+05:30

I was getting ready to go to the office today when I saw an article on Wikipedia in the paper. Not the latest news or anything considering it wasn’t even today’s paper but it caught my eye. I tend to notice tech related articles in our papers, since they’re usually hilarious. Not in a ha ha funny sorta way but more along the lines of ‘OMG! are we still in the 20th century?’

In fact this particular article was so poorly written and obviously a fluff piece, but I’d have thought even those have some standards. Apparently not. The article was titled ‘The Downside of Wikipedia’; fair enough, every website out there has one – at least. But the first sentence was enough to give me an idea of what followed. The writer said users frequently complain of errors and/or incomplete information. And who else but Raveena Tandon would qualify as a typical user of the site? She complains about some films said to be on her currently working list, which were in fact her husbands’. Next up, a student complains that her teachers didn’t allow students to list Wikipedia as a reference source. Another one says she couldn’t find all the information about her textiles project there.

I honestly didn’t know to laugh or weep. I mean what do these people think Wikipedia is? As far as I know (& I quote this from Wikipedia itself) –

Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopaedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 18 million articles (over 3.5 million in English) have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world, and almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site.

The whole point of Wikipedia was to collect as much information on as many topics as possible, all of which can be accessed by anybody, unlike the offline versions. It replaced the expert driven intricate process with user edited content, free for all. Wikipedia is supposed to help me with casual knowledge, say I want to read about philosophy, I just hit the link & off I go into the unknown. It was definitely not meant for the student of philosophy to base his/her thesis paper on!

Who knew? If this is quality journalism, I think I’ll stick to my blogs.

Elephants in Chains

2011-02-20T20:43:00.000+05:30

Once upon a time, a tourist was wandering around a temple and came across an elephant. It was a huge beast, munching on his food, flapping his ears and generally being an elephant. Then the tourist noticed that he was tied to a post with a rather flimsy metal chain. He was aghast and asked the mahout if it was safe. The mahout said it was perfectly safe & that he would not try to break free. The tourist was surprised & asked why not. This is the reply he got: “When this elephant was a baby, this chain was strong enough to stop him. However hard he tried, he couldn’t break free. So after some time he stopped trying. With time, he grew stronger than the chain but he will never try to break free cuz he’s used to it!”

Once upon a time, while men hunted & gathered, women protected & raised the young. Naturally the former was far more exciting than the latter. In order to give their women something to do (& probably to transfer their fears/headaches to someone else), they invented the Holy Trinity – Religion, Tradition & Custom. Granted, they might have even served some sort of purpose when they were established (hey, it’s just a theory), but as the centuries passed, it became apparent that they were nothing more than chains. But like the elephants, women have become used to it !

Why do I say this? Quite simply its what I observed in the women around me. Granted it is not a scientific study nevertheless, bear with me. Whenever I ask someone why a certain thing is done, especially why there are so many things for women to do but never anything for the men, stock reply is that we have to (as if that’s any reason). Of course this whole charade is enforced by means of the so called elders of the family. So far so good. But how can I explain why these women continue to do the same things even when their men are not around? Its not because they sincerely believe in them as they don’t even know what the customs mean or accomplish anymore, if ever they did. Then why?

Because they are used to it! To borrow a phrase of Rousseau -

Woman was not born free, and she is everywhere in chains. No woman thinks herself the master of others, and so remains more of a slave than ever.

My Valentine’s Day Debacle

2011-02-17T07:31:00.000+05:30

This V-Day was supposed to be different. After all, it’s been 24 years in the making, at the very least. What we didn’t suspect was just how different! Since in all probability we’ll all have our very own ball & chain in place for the next one, it was supposed to be the one V-day to rule them all. There we were - single, swinging & loving it! In theory. Instead it simply served to accentuate just how different our lives had become from what they were meant to be.

Onward then, to how it came about. For Khushboo and I, it was the first time we were on our own. Literally. In a strange city, with a place of our very own, and most importantly no relatives cluttering up the place. An adhesive family can be quite hard on a girl. The exception for Shruti being of course, that she did have relatives messing about in the city. Not that we were expecting to whoop it up, but somehow doing the same everyday things on a special day makes it worse.

Let’s get to it one by one. Shruti, quite unexceptionally, spent her V-day working late at the office, yet again. Khushboo was forced to have dinner with aunties while the GH caretaker took the night off to celebrate! See what I mean about doing ordinary things on special days?

Finally we come to the piece de resistance – my story. Me, I couldn’t just be satisfied with doing the ordinary stuff I would’ve done any other day. Nooo. I spent the evening gasp *cooking* for my grandfather. As you can guess, I object to those circumstances on several levels. If I have to spend it with relatives, why did I have to cook? And if I was going to cook, why for a septuagenarian? Again doing this on any other day wouldn’t have been so bad (I like to think so…maybe I’m wrong).

The irony of it all isn’t lost on me. Of all the hordes of relatives, my grandfather is the least objectionable one. Or he used to be . I used to love him see. I was his favourite coz I didn’t prattle (his words – in telugu of course), I read books and wasn’t generally a nuisance that most kids are, at a certain age. Then began the Great Search. The entire family decided it was time for me to marry. Unless you’re a girl born into this “great” country, you wouldn’t understand what a hellish nightmare it can be. Let me amend that. Unless you’re a smart, reasoning girl, you won’t understand.

Nightmare how? I’ll show you. What are the first words you’d expect a grandpa to say to his favourite granddaughter, seeing her after a long time? Maybe ask how I was, or how’s my life or something along those lines right? Wrong. You don’t bother with little things like that when you undertake to marry a girl off. He tells me, and I quote “What are those bags under your eyes? Why have you lost weight? We’re trying to get you married and you look like this?” I ain’t kidding. I was sorely tempted to tell him by the time any groom sees me like that, it would be too late for him. Poor guy, I really do pity him. The groom I mean, not my grandfather.

Any wonder then that after the Great Search began, I’m no longer on easy terms with any relative, not even my grandfather? Even if they’re not aware of it. So far though, things have been working out well for me. It’s been 18 months since the Great Search began & they haven’t managed to find even one mildly interesting character for me to inspect. At this rate, I might even get another V-Day. Till then, a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do!

A World of Difference

2011-02-16T13:09:00.001+05:30

A couple of days ago I got a forward in the mail. You know one of those things which always seem to make the rounds of the internet. Usually I let these things by but this time I saw red (of course didn’t hurt that I never have anything to do in the office). So off the top of my head, I just dashed off a few lines and hit reply. And the rest, as they say, is history. Not quite, but I’ve always wanted to say that.

Q:Thoughts from Man's heart
When we are born, our mothers get the compliments and the flowers.
When we are married, our brides get the gifts and the publicity.
When we die, our widows get the life insurance.
What do women want to be liberated from?

The average man's life consists of:
Twenty years of having his mother ask him where he is going,
Forty years of having his wife ask the same question;
and at the end, the mourners wondering too where he is going.

A:Thoughts from Woman's head
When you are born, we get the pain and the drugs,
When you marry, we get the drudgery & slavery,
When you die, we are forced to wear white,
And yet you ask why we want liberation?

The average woman's life consists of:
20 years of wondering where her son is going,
40 years of wondering where her husband is going,
and at the end mourning where they ended up...

I know this is not the story of my life & I’m forever grateful for the all the women who have made my life possible. Sadly this is the story of millions of women around the world. Agree with me or not, let me know in the comments.

LIC Ads–Coming of Age?

2011-01-30T22:32:00.001+05:30

The Life Insurance Corporation of India has been around since the dawn of time, well not exactly the dawn of time but to someone like me born in 1986, 1956 is the dawn of time! And its ads have always seemed to reflect it. Of course, considering it was the undisputed king of the hill – much like Microsoft once was – it didn’t need the ‘fancy new ads’ used by others. All that changed with the entry of private players. Not that they were any better than the state insurer, but their ads sure were. For the first time people started to notice insurance advertising.

Gone were the days of staid, stale run of the mill ‘We take care of widows’ spiel (not all employees got that memo though! ). Yet, while competitors ran ads emphasizing financial security & independence, disaster planning and being prepared, what was LIC doing? It was running ads which looked like they were made for and by 50-55 year olds. Like someone in my training batch said “LIC ads are like art movies while the rest are like commercial cinema.”

Remember the ad showing a widow explaining how ‘Sharmaji’ made sure his daughter got married and son got an education? Coz of course a daughter doesn’t need an expensive education & a son’s wedding doesn’t involve any expense for him! An ad which was called out by the AIDWA for blatant discrimination and furthering the assumption of dowry.

What never fails to amaze me to this day is how no one at the company saw it. Surely at least one person might have seen the ad and thought “Wait…What??!! But apparently no one did, the ad was run and history made …sort of. I’ve lost track of the number of people who have told me it sucked. It definitely did not help the insurer’s image & even worse, it wasn’t even portraying any clear message, apart from the standard relief angle.

Fortunately though, LIC seems to have learnt from their mistakes, if their recent ads are any indication. The ad below for jeevan saral is nothing short of brilliant, coming as it is from LIC. It was simple, had a high ‘cuteness’ factor and after grabbing eyeballs conveyed the message. It also utilised children in quite a different manner than is usual in insurance ads. Children are usually shown as recipients of the returns from insurance (witness HDFC’s ad where the kid gets a bicycle from grandpa). Rarely as in this ad, are they used to make a point so effectively. In fact I’m hard pressed to see how any other demographic could’ve been used to showcase the simplicity of the product.

cute, direct and most important–effective.

Another example is the ad for jeevan tarang. The visual representation of getting more than you bargained for was superbly executed and could be understood by anybody. Plus it doesn’t hurt that the kid was extra cute!

very evocative and gets the point across

So are we seeing the state insurer catching up to the big boys in terms of advertising? Sure seems like it, especially when I see such ads like Future Generali’s convoluted ‘ghost’ ad. Now there is an example of what not to do in an advert. In fact it took me a full 20 seconds to realize it was an insurance ad, which is the exact length of the LIC ad. Looks like someone could take a leaf out of LIC’s playbook (frankly that’s a sentence I never thought I would ever say).

Here’s hoping we finally see a real battle between LIC and the rest & not just in advertising. With the majority in the country yet to be insured, the Indian Consumer can definitely use it.

Phase I - The Honeymoon

2011-01-19T16:51:00.001+05:30

I just bought myself a brand new laptop, plunking down 50k of my hard earned doubloons. Months of wanting it, weeks spent researching it, and one trip to the mall later, I’m now the proud owner of a Dell XPS 15. To say I fell in love at first sight is an understatement.

The specs alone were enough to make a girl drool. But the extras? Now they were something else. JBL speakers deliver sound that’s out of this world. 1 gig NVidia VRAM to play anything my lil heart desires . HD Skype certified webcam and mike mean video calling is a cinch. And the HD screen? 15.4 inches of pure gorgeousness! After the mandatory oohing and aahing, I unboxed it and started making it mine.

And wasn’t this a doozy, by a long shot. First I had to de-crappify it, which took me the better part of a day. Then I had to scour the interwebs for my favourite apps and install them. Then I had to transfer all my media across from my old laptop – surprisingly took only a few minutes. Finally I set up my backup with Genie Timeline and I was all set! Well, not yet, I still have to install Linux on this puppy (see what I did there? I crack myself up )

Of course I’m still in the honeymoon phase with this one (for context read The Oatmeal). Considering that the last time we skipped right past the honeymoon to the Behold the dinosaur stage, I hope this time, it lasts . For what it’s worth, a laptop capable of playing Arkham Asylum without breaking a sweat, should last a couple of years. I hope.

Now I’m off to find me some games for my shiny (won’t stay that way for too long) new toy…

5 Commandments of Laptops

2010-12-15T11:14:00.001+05:30

The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. First, I find out I can neither cook nor keep house. Why is that? Coz if I can’t make idly, that simplest of breakfast dishes, it means I can’t cook. At least not yet. Then came the dreaded ‘C’ day – 14th Dec 2010. I’m now a permanent employee of this great insurer LIC . Through it all, the cauldron of confusion & befuddlement that calls itself my workplace kept throwing up one emergency after another, which is pretty much par for the course.

So what’s a girl to do? Shop, of course! I tried the Holy Trinity of Retail Therapy – Shoes, Clothes & Bags. By the time I got to bags though, I realized I was thinking small. I needed to think big and geek. Enter my first New Year Resolution ever:

Buy a new laptop

And this one I intend to keep. There’s nothing I love more than shopping for gadgets, especially when they are for moi. But as I would soon find out, never was the path to Nirvana so crooked or bewildering. Here’s the result of my tortuous path through Laptop land -

5 Commandments of Laptops

Google is your God – You should know by now, gadget shopping without Google by your side is a sure way to overspend and/or get ripped off. Research your options, prices, places, specs, brands etc. beforehand.

The Holy Budget – Draw a line and say this is it. When shopping for a laptop, it is easy to get carried away by specs, more RAM, faster CPU and so on. Before you know it, you’re spending way more than you can afford.

The Big Brands – Quality of build and technical support offered by the bigger brands are worth the extra money you may pay for it. The day you spill coffee on your keyboard or the monitor goes blank, you’ll be thanking your warranty.

Specifications – Try to balance your needs with your wants. Getting just what you need right now means you’ll have to upgrade in a year while going all out could mean you cannot replace it willy nilly for the next technology. For example 2 GB RAM may be enough for you while 8 GB RAM is truly drool worthy. But 3-4 GB RAM is the best best so you don’t have to add RAM for the next 3 years at least without breaking the bank now.

Buy Online – Electronics is one of the few things you can buy online without fear of getting the wrong item. As long as you know your specifications & the market price, you’re good to go!

Back to the Future

2010-12-03T20:19:00.001+05:30

Where things are as they once were. Philosophy? Nah, I’m talking about backup & restore! A couple of weeks ago I wrote Newbie Guide to Windows Backups, listing the 3 apps most useful for the job. A lot of people backup their data onto CD/DVDs & it is the best option for one time backups of your media – like say your vintage music collection or pictures of the last 5 years of your life. But what about the files you use on a daily basis – like documents, software applications, notes et al?

The best bet for that is to backup to an external hard drive. Now you could just connect your HDD to your laptop daily and manually copy *all* the files & folders over but not only is it tedious, you’re also more likely to put off doing it as much as possible. Wouldn’t it be easier to have an app do it for you? Not only take the backup but also keep the various versions in order? Such an app does exist and it’s called - appropriately enough – Genie Timeline.

For starters, it is free. It is also the simplest & thus most effective backup software I’ve ever seen. I’m known for my bigger, faster = better philosophy (as regards to hardware & software) but when it comes to taking backups, simplicity is perfection! Setting up your backup shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

After you download and install it, you’ll see the main window called the Dashboard. There isn’t much you can tinker with. Just open up the modify data selections link & choose between the default smart selections (which include such common culprits as My Documents, My pictures etc.) or go ahead and select your custom locations from the My Computer tab.

VIEW SLIDE SHOW

DOWNLOAD ALL

The best part of Genie Timeline is of course The Timeline! The hallmark of a good backup software is not just the way it lets you take backups, but also the way it lets you restore your files as painlessly as possible. Genie, I think, achieves this spectacularly well. Most other software will let you browse through your compressed backups & chose which file you want to restore but it’s definitely painful (try sifting through 30 GB backups for a 12 MB exe file!).

Genie on the other hand uses the Timeline. The timeline appears as a bar across the top of the regular explorer windows. So it essentially allows you to look at how your hard drive was organized at different points in time. Its one of those features which make you go ‘Well duh! That’s because while you may not always remember the name of the file or where you kept it, you’ll always have a vague sense of the last time you saw it. And the timeline makes it a very visual process, so even if you forget, getting the file back is a cinch.

So there you have it. A 3 step process taking all of 3 minutes to setup. From that point on, every time your external drive is connected to the laptop/PC, your files & folders are automatically backed up. Truly set and forget!

The Giving Pledge

2010-10-15T10:55:00.001+05:30

Bill Gates Convinces 40 Billionaires to Give Away Half Their Fortunes

Quite an attention grabber don’t you think? Even better it’s actually true. Bill Gates & Warren Buffet (both gave away their fortunes) have added 38 other billionaires to their project ‘The Giving Pledge’, including such names as Larry Ellison (Oracle), George Lucas (Film Director), Michael Bloomberg (New York Mayor) and many others.

Interesting nugget – if every person on the Forbes 400 richest Americans list gave away half their wealth, charities would be richer by 600 billion dollars!!! This got me thinking, how much money could the 400 richest Indian raise?

Zero. That’s the first answer that popped into my mind. I can already hear the outcry how dare I attack the Indian philanthropic impulse? Question the generosity of my compatriots? I’ve had people practically jump down my throat to defend Indian billionaires. I’m not ignoring the huge wealth of time, money & energy devoted by millions of Indians who in their own ways give back to the community. People & the companies they’ve started do undertake grand philanthropic ventures.

But guess what? There aren’t many rich people who have given away just 50% of their wealth. In their will, charity does not rank as high as family. Compare that to Warren Buffet who has pledged to give away 99 freaking per cent of his wealth. His rationale - keeping an extra 1% of his wealth would not increase his or his family’s happiness in any way. But imagine how much the underprivileged can benefit from just that 1%? You can read his letter here.

The way I see it, the difference lies in the way Indians & Americans feel about their children. Americans see their children as, well, children. You help them grow up and hopefully they’ll grow out of your house too . We Indians on the other hand view children as an extension of ourselves. They are as much a part of us as our arms/legs. Americans look down on the so called trust fund babies – kids or adults whose parents have created a trust fund for them, so basically they never have to work – and Indians aim to create as many of them as possible.

Which is why Americans create institutions, philanthropic ventures, even foundations for charity (coz that’s my legacy) while Indians pour the same amount of money, energy & time into raising kids (coz that’s my legacy). I’m not kidding. Just compare the number of colleges/universities started by individuals in America vs. India. Et Viola! America gets Duke, Stanford etc while India gets a 1 billion population.

No doubt this is an extreme simplification but if the shoe fits…Now I’m not saying we should not send our kids to good colleges or gift them a house. But leaving them 20 houses on your death? Think about it.

Coming back to the question that started it all – How much can the richest Indians raise?

The Answer: The top 100 Indians can raise over 150 billion dollars if they give away 50% of their wealth!

Newbie Guide to Windows Backups

2010-10-09T20:18:00.003+05:30

Imagine if every Thursday your shoes exploded if you tied them the usual way. This happens to us all the time with computers, and nobody thinks of complaining.

So its Thursday and your computer just exploded – no, its not your fault, this time – what do you do?

If this your reaction to “Do you backup?”, this is the guide for you. Some of you might have tried Googling how to backup and restore & gotten plenty confused in the process. The world of backup software is as vast and pothole ridden as the world of anti-virus/anti-spyware/anti-malware software. What kind of backup do you need? Which software will you pick? Paid or free? are just some of the questions you will have to face. Fortunately for you, I’ve written this guide to help you through it all.

What kind of backup do you need?

Basically there are 3 kinds of backups -

System Images
Backup & Restore
Online & Offsite

System images simply mean that the software takes a snapshot of your entire system (one or all partitions) so that if you ever need to, you can just restore your computer to that image. Think of it as a sort of time machine for computers. Anytime something goes wrong – there are plenty ways it can happen – you simply go back in time to when everything was working! These images can be saved to an external drive or DVDs.

The Catch: Any & all changes you made to your data/apps since that time is lost.

Backup & Restore is what most users are familiar with. Some version of it ships with every OS. Just point the software at your data partition & it will compress those files and save them as a backup set. While the first backup can take a lot of time (hours, if you have lots of media files), subsequent ones are faster since only the files that have changed since then are backed up. These programs can also save to external hard drive or DVDs.

The Catch: Wading through all your backups to find the one file you want is a time sucker.

Online backups are often painless and easy to setup. You download the software and it uploads a copy of your most important data ‘in the cloud’, so in the event of a crash, you can just download them and start working. Your backups are also away form your home/office, so in case of disasters like fire or flood, your backup is safe on servers located far, far away.

The Catch: Storage space is expensive & you have to trust someone else to keep your backups safe & secure.

As you can see, each has its pros and cons. The safest option is to use a combination of all 3 kinds of backups. Now I know you’re thinking “Oh crap. That is going to take a lot of time/energy.” Never mind, there are plenty of software that are ‘set & forget.’

There are several options in each category – some are free while others are not.

System Imaging	Acronis True Image, Paragon Backup & Recovery, Windows 7
Backup & Restore	Genie Timeline, Norton Ghost, PCBackup
Online	Syncplicity, Dropbox, Sugarsync

All of the above programs are reliable and get the job done. I’ve tried all of them at some point & I personally use 1 from each category. I use Windows 7 to create my system images, Genie Timeline for data backups to an external hard drive and Syncplicity for my most important files (I can access them anywhere I have Internet).

In my next post I’ll explain how and why I use each one of these applications. All 3 are free and I feel there is no reason to drop hundreds of bucks for the advanced versions. Most importantly, they ‘just work’ and don’t require any interference once the initial setup is done.

Users who don’t have lots of media/data can just use Syncplicity (which gives 2GB of space for free). Those who have movies/pictures/music etc can use a combination of Syncplicity and Genie Timeline and the paranoid ones – like me - can use all 3 options!

Oops…I did it again!

2010-10-02T14:23:00.001+05:30

No, I definitely don’t mean that song. It’s what two of my friends said to me when their Vista crashed (yet again I might add). So like the good tech support gal that I was, I sat down to fix it for them. Guess what I found?

That horror of horrors, that evil monstrosity that all PC makers foist on unsuspecting non-geek buyers – yes, I found just the 1 giant partition into which all system and their most important data/media files were thrown into. What’s a geek to do? I did end up fixing their laptops but it got me thinking my help shouldn't stop with just fixing up their laptop. Et Viola! I hit upon the perfect solution – Blog it!

Newbie Guide to Windows Partitions

The Problem: Millions of users storing their precious documents, pictures, videos, music etc. in the most vulnerable place on their systems – user/my documents/…

The Culprits: Windows OSes which insist that it is the best place for data (all the shortcuts point there) and PC makers who can’t be bothered to partition the hard drives, so users don’t even know they have an option.

The Solution: This blog post!

Real Solution: Partitions.

What are they?

Well partitions are like the walls of your home. They divide the space into rooms where you can put furniture (folder & files), so every room has a different function. In the case of computers, partitions keep everything neat and tidy & as an added bonus, the next time your OS crashes (it’s inevitable, you know), at least your data is safe. In fact if your data is in a separate partition of its own, you can safely reinstall/format the system drive without touching your personal files.

How can it be done? Although windows has partition software built in, it is clunky and not that good. However there are some excellent freeware alternatives as always. The easiest and one that I use is the Easeus Partition Manager. Download it from here, unzip & install and off you go!

Word of Caution: Partitioning should be done very carefully because if something goes wrong, you could lose your data. Preferably move your files onto an external drive or back them up to prevent tears later.

Run the program and you should see this screen:

The toolbar contains icons which launch the respective wizards like resize/move/create/delete partitions. The same options are given in the sidebar on the left. The above screen shows 3 partitions in my hard drive, but yours would probably have just one. Now the first thing is to shrink the existing partition to make room for additional ones. So click on the Resize/Move icon and you’ll see this:

The small arrows at each end can be dragged to change the size and move the partition but manually entering the size of the partition is more precise. Just remember while calculating how much space to allot each drive, multiply the size (in GB) you want by 1024 to get the figure in MB. Click ok & you’ll come back to the main screen. Here you’ll notice that the big drive has shrunk and the remaining space is greyed out. That’s where we can create the new partition. Now click on the Create partition icon and repeat the earlier procedure to create a new partition. Once you’ve created all the partitions you want, click Apply & sit back. Depending on how much data has to be moved, it can anywhere from 5 minutes to half an hour.

And that’s it! You now have 2/3/4 shiny new partitions to store your data.

Regardless of how many partitions you have, it’s always a good idea to have backups (on CDs or an external HD). Want a good backup solution? Newbie guide to Windows Back Ups coming soon!

Linux/Mac users: Linux uses have the excellent GParted tool for their partitioning needs (I’m assuming Linux users don’t need a newbie guide!); as for Mac users, well, since your OS never crashes, you don’t need partitions!

A Safari on Windows

2010-09-26T14:35:00.001+05:30

I have a confession to make. I am a geek, or to be more accurate, I’m a female geek. And as you can see from some of my posts earlier, I tend to experiment a lot with software. Still, I do have my favourites that I absolutely have to have on my rig like Firefox, Find and Run Robot, Evernote etc. These are the applications that I practically have long term relationships with. I had tried out most if not all the alternatives available out there before settling down.

That however doesn’t mean developers stop making competitors in the hopes of enticing me to switch. Particularly in the case of browsers. Where once I had just 2 choices – IE or Firefox, now its a battle zone with new versions being released practically every month. The list continues to grow with IE 9, Firefox 4, Google Chrome 6, Opera 10, Safari…Although I’ve had brief flirtations with all of them at some point or the other, I kept going back to Firefox.

A couple of days ago,RS suggested that I give Safari a try. Now I did take it for a ride when it was first released and frankly while it was good, it didn’t blow me away like Firefox/Chrome did. But his suggestion intrigued me. Had I missed something the last time around? Am I missing out on something good in the pursuit of my one true (browser) love? So I did what any sane person in a committed relationship would do, I took a peek .

I went shopping down to the Apple website and met with my first roadblock. Safari for Windows can only be installed with Quicktime, Bonjour and Apple Update . If there is one thing I despise, it’s software which piggy backs on others. Whoever told Apple that was a good idea needs to be sacked. Strike one.

Still I persevered. I downloaded it, installed it and fired it up for a test drive. Then I uninstalled all the crap that decided to make itself home on my rig. No doubt Safari looks good, like all Apple products. But I have to say it looks very out of place in a Windows 7 world. And the girl part of me likes good looking. Strike two.

Safari boasts of over 200 innovative features packed into its latest release, 90% of which no one would notice or care about. There were 3 which had me curious to try. One was the Reader, clicking on which strips a webpage to its bare essentials to, yup you guessed it, focus on the words. Although it was good, I already had this feature in Firefox for ages thanks to the Readability bookmarklet from which this was actually ‘inspired’ *cough* read copied from. As usual, where on Firefox I had the ability to customize how the words appeared on the page, Safari had a ‘take it or leave it’ attitude.

Second was the Top Sites feature. As you surf, Safari keeps track of the most visited websites and pins them on the home screen or loads it when you open a new tab. Again, this feature was first given to the world by Opera and in my opinion, implemented far more elegantly in Chrome and Firefox (with many add-ons).

Third was browsing through your history/favourites CoverFlow style. I admit this one actually got to me, until that is, I actually tried to use it. I’m not a typical web surfer who goes to the same couple of websites everyday. For me to browse through every site visually takes up way too much time. I also realized I can’t remember the last time I actually went through my history trying to recall a particular page. I just Google it.

When it comes down to features Safari has all the standards in place. Minimal toolbars, great tab handling, excellent page rendering and it is fast. But (you knew there was a but, didn’t ya?) it has nothing to make it stand out from the crowd. Every browser has its ‘thing’ like Firefox’s customizability and extensibility or Chrome’s minimalism and speed. 30 minutes into using Safari and I was wondering “What’s your thing?”

Now that IE 9 actually looks promising, I’d say that the average user can just forget about switching. For power users or those concerned enough about security, there’s always Firefox/Chrome. As for Safari, Strike three. And you’re out.

To paraphrase Caesar - I came, I saw and I moved on!

Women, Wine and Song

2010-09-22T00:56:00.001+05:30

Those of you who actually read my blog would have noticed a dramatic decrease in the frequency of my posting in the last few months. Heck let’s face it, I barely blogged at all. So what happened? I have 3 letters for you – LIC.

Life's junk will suck the will right out you
Hold on Lord I can't do it with out you
Seems like a lot of grey in the world
Women Wine and Song, Women Wine and Song
Will make you all move along to a lovely beat…

Replace Life with LIC and you’re all set. Anyway now that life’s settled down – somewhat – I’ll be writing more often. Speaking of life, it’s been great living on my own. Finally, now that I’ve cut the cord, I get to put my money where my mouth is. I’ve my own place & I’m even learning how to cook! (yup Hell has frozen over ). A girl could get used to this stuff. The only downside? Now all my friends are long distance calls away . Oh well gotta take the good with the bad.

And there’s plenty of the bad, mostly to do with work. Working in this organisation is like trying to bring down a brick wall with nothing but a nail file. If I had a dollar for every time I cursed, I’d be Bill Gates by now. I just hope I don’t get used to it!

Coming up next: Safari for windows, how good is it really?

How much space does a AAO need?

2010-09-21T23:19:00.001+05:30

Once upon a time - like before you and your parents were even born – this was the question facing the LIC of India. You see, the powers that be were deciding something called the Staff Rules & Regulations, xxxx. Part of which was to decide how to allocate/price lease agreements.

*Cut scene*

It’s evident that a great undertaking is in progress…Four & twenty men, gathered round a huge table, papers scattered everywhere…Their faces lined with stress, the atmosphere fairly crackles with the unspoken tension…The terrible question faces them all: Will the Staff Rules & Regulations be ready for the unveiling in just 2 days?

Note: The following dialogue has been translated from Hindi to English for our readers’ edification.

Fat Old Man 1: Now let’s concentrate people! We have got just two more days before we hand over this complicated set of rules to the employees. We need to draft them and we don’t have much time!

Fat Old Man 2: All right! Calm down. There is no need for panic. What else do we need to decide? How many more hoops can we make the staff jump through?

Thin Old Man 1: Let me see. Here we have already fixed the amount to be granted – cadre wise of course – for leased accommodation. But I feel there is something still missing. It is too simple, what will people think? They won’t believe that we came up with something like this!

Balding Old Man: Yes, yes. We have to justify all those meeting expenses & time we ~~wasted~~ ahem..I mean to say utilized effectively.

Fat Old Man 2: Now why didn’t I think of this sooner?! Why don’t we make a committee (how I love that word!) which has to visit the staff’s house and confirm the size & that they are indeed living there?

Thin Old Man 2: That’s pure genius! Wah…The employee and the committee members both have to work & the members won’t want to waste time by going after office hours! Diabolical!

Fat Old Man 1: That’s great. How about we add this too? Just to make sure the employee is not cheating and trying to get more money out of us, why don’t we fix a ceiling for the size of the house also? Because obviously why would a lowly AAO need to live in a 1200 sqft flat? He/She can live very well indeed in that space. Besides no employee of ours can afford that much. We’ve made sure of that haven’t we? *muahahahaha* (translates into evil laughter)

*Cut Scene Ends*

Thus spoke the committee and it came to be! To this day, as they have commanded, we - the employees - have obeyed. Also we are greatly indebted to this committee for letting us live (included here as per rules )

P.S: The answer to the post title is 600-1000 sq feet.Bet you didn’t know that!

Passwords, passwords everywhere…

2010-06-05T22:35:00.001+05:30

And not a single one that I can remember . This was the problem facing me not that long ago. On one hand it’s not a safe practice to use the same password for every website you use. Obviously I wouldn’t want to use ‘password’ on a random forum as well as for my internet banking website! But on the other hand making up and remembering ultra secure passwords containing letters, numbers and symbols for every website out there that I use is also not quite my cup of tea. Here’s how long a hacker would take to crack your passwords wide open:

So what’s a geek to do? Find an app for that of course. After my usual extensive research, I finally narrowed down my field of candidates to two: Roboform which is paid software and Lastpass which is free. Both not only let you create unique and secure passwords, they also help you to store them all in one place so you don’t have to remember.

Apart from the price, the major difference between them lies in the way they handle your passwords. Roboform functions mainly like a desktop app and your passwords are stored on your pc only. Last pass on the other hand, stores your passwords online which is a deal breaker for many, including me. But that is not to say it is insecure. The geek part of me prefers the control which Roboform offers over my passwords. You can read more about these two apps here and here.

Both are popular with users and in the end it just comes down to which app you are comfortable using. For me it was Roboform (the online storage and sync component didn’t work for me so I cannot comment on that). I’ve been using it for some time now and I believe I’ve finally found

One password to rule them all!

Stubborn Little Penguin

2010-06-04T16:11:00.001+05:30

Ubuntu 10.04 a.k.a Lucid Lynx dropped right round April but I didn't get the time to test drive it till now. So the other day, I downloaded the.iso file (which took just over an hour by the way, a remarkable feat for my little photon+), installed it and thought I was ready to go. I even said a long heartfelt goodbye to my Windows 7 (my exact words were f*** off M$ but lets not quibble). I mean Windows 7 was nice and all but Linux is something special especially when it looks as good as the Lynx.

Let’s compare shall we?

Here are the two side – by – side:

But alas this too was not to be. The last time I had to drop the penguin as it refused to work with my wi-fi connection, this time it wouldn’t detect my Tata Photon+. What is it with Linux and my internet? Without the ‘net my laptop is just a plastic box anyway. Unusable. So once again Windows wins. For now. You might have won the battle Microsoft but I’ll win the war yet!

Survival Guide to LIC (Part 2)

2010-05-24T16:51:00.001+05:30

4 More Simple Rules to Survive in LIC – (…continued)

SIDS – System Is Down Syndrome

Say you want to check how your policy is doing. You go down to your branch and ask them. Couldn’t be simpler you think. Instead, hilarity ensues -

You: “I want to check my policy status.” (he looks like he wants to kill me)

LIC: “Policy number?” (jus coz you’ve got nothing better to do…)

You: “xxxxxxxxx” (he really wants to kill me, but this is his job)

LIC: “System Is Down!” (serves him right! wants to know does he…)

You: “Is there nothing you can do?” (please let there be)

LIC: “No, System Is Down.” (don’t you get it? its code for GO AWAY)

You: “I’ll get it if I come back tomorrow?” (please say yes)

LIC: “Sure, why not?”

Next day – Lather, Rinse, Repeat!!!

BIAR – Boss Is Always Right

Familiar to all the people who have ever had a bad boss (seemingly most of us), LIC is chockfull of ‘I’m always right’ bosses and ‘Yes Boss’ suck ups. This is a mystery I would give my right arm to solve. Why is it that the inefficient, incompetent and idiot boss always insists on this rule and the smartest boss never does?

Ergo test for a good/bad boss -

He says: ‘I’m always right’ – bad boss

He is mostly right – better boss

KAT – Kill A Tree

Clerk at check out counter – “Kill a tree or choke a fish?” (paper or plastic)

LIC picked kill a tree. What? Yes you read that right. Everything, and I do mean everything, that passes through the portals of LIC has to have a physical paper copy, preferably in triplicate. Sending a letter to a customer? one copy for your files & one for customer (don’t forget to enter into the register). Sending a mail to head office? print it out, how else will you prove that you sent it? (sent items? what’s that?). Here I was, labouring under the misconception that email was invented to curb the use of paper…Hmm maybe I should keep printouts of this blog, just in case!

NTTT – Never Tell The Truth

Because your average LICian can’t handle it. Sugar coat it, white lie your way out of it, avoid telling it,pass the buck to someone else whatever…but never ever tell the truth. It hurts!

Sample truths to never tell:

I think you’re wrong, ***. (insert boss/colleague/junior)
It’s my/your/his/her fault.
I’m sorry.
There’s a better, faster & easier way to do this

This last one maybe the most dangerous of them all, coz you’re sure to start someone off with the Good Old Days Story. It goes something like this “Back when we didn’t have these fancy computers, we had to do everything by hand…”. Yeah whatever, you’re telling this to a generation to whom doing research means Google!

Survival Guide to LIC (Part I)

2010-05-14T22:59:00.001+05:30

Many of you must have wondered - so how do I survive in the cult? I won’t change and the cult cannot, so what happens when the irresistible force meets the immovable object? Well they adapt and they survive. So, if god forbid, any of you want to join LIC even after repeated !Do Not Enter! signs posted by yours truly, here’s the ultimate survival guide to LIC - applicable only if you are not already an LICian.

Caution: Read and apply at your own risk. I declaim all responsibility as to what will happen to you in spite of / thereof.

5 Simple Rules To Survive in LIC -

CYA – Cover Your Ass

This corporate acronym actually had its origins in LIC, where it is taken to new heights never before seen by the private realm. The ultimate pinnacle of achievement – do something wrong and let another take the fall and then you say “wonder why some people do things like this?”

10CoT – 10 Cups of Tea

Official drink of LIC. Don’t drink tea or coffee? What! Surely you jest. How will you claim chai/kaapi reimbursement? LIC does not offer FROOTI reimbursement. Ahem, vulgar money matters aside, how else will you avoid work? How will you cool off an angry customer, which species appears more often than you would think? (only offer, do not contract!)

SYW – Shrink Your Workday

Official timings: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM Lunch: 1:30 PM – 2:15 PM

Number of working hours – 6 hrs 15 mins

Your timings: 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM Lunch: 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM

Number of working hours – 3 hrs 30 mins *

* This does not include chai/kaapi breaks – see 10CoT above

(@1 cup = 15 mins, 10 cups = you do the math!)

NCC – No Customer Care

View Full Album

Kotler’s mantra: Customer = king!

LIC’s mantra: Customer = kasht se mar!

Other Insurance Companies

LIC

Air Conditioning

Fans – Broken or absent

Plush sofas

Invisible Chairs

Brand new offices

50 year old offices

Customer Care Executives

We Don’t Care Officers

RGG – Rumour Gossip Grapevine

Newly discovered, this closely guarded secret is the fastest constant in the known physical world. Light year? Mach5? The Rumour/Gossip Grapevine leaves ‘em all in the dust. *itching constantly is the key to keeping this vine alive and LICians do it uncommonly well. In fact this, along with 10CoT, is the top sport/life force of employees. As a bonus it can be done while pretending to work – whether on the monitor or head buried in a musty old notebook.

To Be Continued…

Life@ZTC

2010-03-24T20:00:00.003+05:30

The Long Version:

What can I say? The 3 month theoretical training at ZTC, ostensibly to educate us new recruits about insurance in general and LIC in particular, turned out to be more like cult initiation rites.

Cult??! Stop the presses…

I was supposed to be joining a professional organization which has stood its ground against the onslaught of private players and managed to beat them at their own game too, not some weird cult. So which is it? You decide.

What I found about LIC during my long and mentally exhausting (for being way too boring) training:

The Guru aka LIC is always right.
You are always wrong.
Cult-speak.
Group-think, suppression of dissent, and enforced conformity in thinking
Irrationality.
Suspension of disbelief.
Insistence that the cult is THE ONLY WAY.
The cult and its members are special.
Unquestionable dogma, sacred science and infallible ideology.
Indoctrination of members.
Dual Purposes, Hidden Agendas and Ulterior Motives.
No Humour.
You can't tell the truth.
You must change your beliefs to conform to the group's beliefs.
Newcomers can't think right.
Intrusiveness.
Ideology Over Experience, Observation and Logic
Thought-stopping language.Thought-terminating clichés and slogans.
The cult takes over the individual's decision-making process.
Members get no respect. They get abused.
Inconsistency. Contradictory Messages.
Hierarchical, authoritarian power structure and social castes.
Belief equals truth.
Inability to tolerate criticism.
Don't trust your own mind.
Hypocrisy.
Newcomers need fixing.
Black And white thinking
Making cult members work long hours for cheap.
Total immersion and total isolation.

So what? Every organization has its own culture and new recruits take time to adjust. But what if the defining characteristics of the organization resemble those on a “How to tell if you have joined a cult” list? This one even has a song and language…

So I joined a cult. Being the die hard optimist that I am, I set out to enjoy myself. The only two mind saving features of 3 wasted months in my life – new friends and a library. They made what would otherwise have been hell on earth into something tolerable, even enjoyable. When I look back I will have great memories – playing bingo in class, wearing clothes that shouldn’t be worn, surfing during presentations, making up those very same presentation as we go along, pretending we have never heard the word ppt, passing notes et al.

The Short Version:
Apart from the atrocious food and appalling classes & the whole cult thing, I had a blast!!!

Hiatus

2009-11-30T11:33:00.003+05:30

Dictionary: hec·tic

adj. Characterized by intense activity, confusion, or haste.

That's exactly how the past week has been. Not that I would exchange it for anything in the world. I've got 2 weeks to leave Delhi and report at Agra and I can hardly wait. Far enough away to escape and close enough for essentials like access to good food and a washing machine. But before I run away there's a looooot of things to be done like bank accounts, phone numbers, shopping and what not. Unlike what they would have you believe in Bollywood or in any of the other woods for that matter, running away takes a lot of prep work and/or careful planning. Especially if like me, you are doing it in broad daylight and with the full co operation of your mother!

In between all the madness I need to somehow make time to go to Gurgaon to meet, greet and treat my friends. They are, after all, one of the few things I would miss about this heap of stones called Delhi. Them and my unlimited broadband internet connection. Who knows what kind of net access they've got going on in the ZTC(that's code for Zonal Training Centre).

Which brings me to the point of this post. No more blogging till...well till the next weekend I'm home of course! Let the mad mad games begin...

Jobless No More

2009-11-13T23:30:00.000+05:30

After months of incessant ‘Job O Job, wherefore art thou?’ ing, I got one, even if it did take quite a while. And at LIC no less. Phew, now that that’s over, I can look forward to the training and getting paid for doing something rather than the other way round. Aristotle might have said ‘All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind’ but I say, if I’m going to be absorbing and degrading my mind anyway, might as well get paid for it!

Besides the more I like doing something, the less I call it work (don’t remember who said this one). And to think , I was on the verge of applying for the Indian Bank and Bank of India POs. In one month I’ll have to move to where ever the training is scheduled and of course the biggest headache is getting a new cell phone number. Let me rephrase that. Getting a new number is not the problem but switching to it certainly is. Gah! Where is number portability when you want it?

So how do I feel after getting a job? Excited, ecstatic, nervous (jus a lil’ bit) I could go on and on, really (I know a lot of adjectives!). Many people have warned me that getting a job and holding it down are too entirely different things, that the initial euphoria will wear off, that it is not all as it’s cracked out to be, that…oh and a lot of things. Who knows, maybe I’ll get to that place myself eventually. But for now I can hardly wait!

The God Delusion

2009-11-10T19:53:00.001+05:30

That’s the name of the book I just finished, by Richard Dawkins. After a long time of reading religious apologist literature in everything from newspapers to magazines, Richard Dawkins came as a breath of fresh air. And it’s not just me who’s impressed. The New York Times Book Review has hailed him as a writer who "'understands the issues so clearly that he forces his reader to understand them too"' & he was recently awarded the distinction of "'public intellectual"' in Britain.

This is a summary of the book, from his website:

He critiques God in all his forms, from the sex-obsessed tyrant of the Old Testament to the more benign (but still illogical) Celestial Watchmaker favoured by some Enlightenment thinkers. He eviscerates the major arguments for religion and demonstrates the supreme improbability of a supreme being. He shows how religion fuels war, foments bigotry, and abuses children, buttressing his points with historical and contemporary evidence. In so doing, he makes a compelling case that belief in God is not just irrational, but potentially deadly.

And even though he says very little about Hinduism or any other Oriental “religion” for that matter, most of it could well be applied there too. But what he wrote about being an atheist in an increasingly religious world, especially in America, sounded bizarre to me. Bizarre to a person such as myself, born in and brought up as part of the oldest religious systems in the world!

Not that being an atheist in India is a cakewalk. But it’s a different sort of difficult. People don’t hate me, or hurl insults at me or anything overt for that matter. In fact most people don’t mind at all. While I’d like to say it’s because it’s possible to be an atheist and a Hindu, I know it’s because for the most part they don’t care. But you can’t certainly say the same for family. And because they care so much, they keep trying to make me ‘believe’. I wonder can you start to ‘believe,’ just like that?

So my mom and I reached a truce, sort of. I do all that she tells me to do and she gets that I’m doing it for her, not because I believe. Works for everyone. So far. Pretending to be deluded is rather fun after all!

Got Mint?

2009-10-28T19:55:00.001+05:30

Finally I did it. I made myself a bootable USB flash drive which can run Linux. I’ve always been a fan of Linux and wanted to try it out. Kubuntu, using Wubi, was my first foray into Tux land. While it went quite well, I lost the installation to a format. Then I tried Ubuntu, this time by actually installing it on my HDD. I did find Gnome better then KDE, but there was still something lacking; not to mention the fact that my wi-fi didn’t work.

Then last month I stumbled across Mint. It seemed like a good alternative for me to try, it looked way better than the default theme that Ubuntu comes with. So off I went & downloaded the ISO. Little did I know that my CD drive had decided to take a hike, leaving me with an ISO image and nothing to burn it onto. I thought my Mint foray was doomed.

Except I found LiLi (Linux Live) Usb Creator. From the website:

LiLi USB Creator is a free software for Windows that allows you to create a bootable Live USB key with a Linux on it.

This software also offers an exclusive option of automatic virtualization to directly run Linux in Windows without any configuration nor installation.

create bootable Live USB of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Mint, CrunchBang, Kuki and Fedora

enable persistency of your data

launch Linux directly in Windows with a special Portable Virtual Box

hide created files on the key

Anybody can use LiLi USB Creator. It's really easy to use and you don't have to be a computer geek !

What really caught my eye was the last bit about not needing to be a geek to use it. If it was that easy, surely even I can’t mess it up. So I downloaded it, fired it up and in roughly 10 minutes, I had myself a bootable USB drive which I can use as a portable OS (it has a persistent layer to store data) or even just as a live CD. Oh and of course, if I wanted to install Mint on a pc, I could do that too.

All I can say is, this was way easier than I thought it would be. Here are a few screens from my efforts:

The Da Vinci Code II

2009-10-23T22:31:00.001+05:30

I just finished reading Dan Brown’s latest effort ‘The Lost Symbol’ and it feels exactly like my post title implies. One explosive secret that could destroy society, a secret society that protects it, one man who is determined to find it and our professor who must stop him along with the subsequent chases and thrills. *Spoiler Alert* In fact, it differs from the previous book only in that the murder isn’t in fact a murder and the possibility of marriage for our irrepressible bachelor hero. *End*.

Looks like Angels and Demons will continue to rank as my favourite book from Dan Brown, even better than The Da Vinci Code. Sometimes I wonder if the only reason I once thought highly of that book was because I read it before its predecessor. Angels and Demons was a riveting, action packed thriller with quite unexpected twists and turns. While The Da Vinci Code had an explosive secret at its heart, it definitely lagged behind in the action. And The Lost Symbol comes across as a college lecture rather than a racy action saga.

I see why Dan Brown is called Ludlum – Lite.

The Day After Yesterday

2009-10-18T12:31:00.001+05:30

What does it mean? It means no newspapers. That’s right. Nothing. Zip. Nada. ET, The Hindu, Eenadu or The Daily Mail. It’s the worst nightmare to be stranded on a Sunday without the morning paper(s). Those papers would have normally kept this family of four busy for at least 3-4 hours. But alas! We might have to look at other avenues for entertainment.

View Full Album

What happened? Diwali happened, that’s what happened. Thankfully this is one of those festivals where the puja is at a minimum. Deepavali in Chennai is a feast for the eyes and ears…or maybe not. But it was definitely more fun. Festivals are supposed to be occasions of joy, celebrations and thanks. When I was still officially a kid, it meant all that and more (school holiday for example). Now all it means to me is yet another opportunity for tempers to flare, tensions to run high and moms to get exasperated. As far as I’m concerned, Indian festivals have way too many rules, at least in my house.

Every festival now my mother tells me that I’ve got to learn the rules. After all, this is part of the ‘Things a married woman has to know ’ book (I’d like to kill the guy who wrote that one). All part of growing up she says. She only forgets one thing.

I’m never growing up.

P.S: Apparently, buying & eating ice cream on a festival day is a strict no-no (although we did). Yet another item on my ‘Things I don’t know’ list. Who makes these rules anyway?

50 Posts and Counting…

2009-10-15T19:59:00.001+05:30

I just noticed that my last post, Who needs God? was my – get this – 50th post here! And of course this is cause to celebrate. Not only do I get to write about it but I also increase my post count by 1. *insert maniacal laugh here*. Ok. Gloating done.

When I first started this blog, I probably didn’t imagine that I would actually stick with it. After all I’ve started blogs before and abandoned them just as quickly. I’m one of those people who has a great idea/insight whatever (imagine a bulb lighting up over my head), rushes off to do it and then because it takes a lot of effort to keep going, I quit.

Nowhere is it more obvious than when it comes to video games and web projects. My sister and I will both start off a game at the same time. I usually stop playing once I hit a difficult level and start looking at another game. My sister on the other hand will not only keep playing till the end, but she will also replay it till she makes expert on all levels *shudder*. That just isn't me.

And yet, months after starting I’m still here. While the idea to start blogging again came from MG, I should say it was probably RS (the one follower I got) is the one who kept me at it :). And I’m glad I did. How else would I get to write a post titled 50 posts and counting?

P.S: Want to bet I will make it to 100 posts? Anyone?

Who needs God?

2009-10-12T16:23:00.001+05:30

I just ran across this blog post on a subject close to my heart. It is about the book Society Without God: What the Least Religious Nations Can Tell Us About Contentment, by Phil Zuckerman (New York University Press, New York and London, 2008.)

What I noticed first was that the title of the book is ‘Society Without God’ not ‘Life without God’ or some such nonsense. I've always found it curious that while many people would readily admit that their lives could be happier and certainly more convenient without a constant presence looking over their shoulder (aka “God”), the very same people are reluctant to admit that society itself could be better off without Him. It’s the ‘holier than thou’ attitude that always manages to annoy me. As in “I’m good enough that I don’t need a moral compass but the rest of humanity sure does!”

Which reminds me of a sentence from the book ‘The Necessity of Atheism’ by David Marshall Brooks. In the book he asks ‘If religion really helps us be better people, why is it that the percentage of believers in jails is far higher than the general population would indicate?’ Good question. Now if only a believer would care to answer that one for me…

One of my friends, when he found out I don’t believe in a deity, wondered aloud just how do I manage to be a good person? Apparently either I’m lying about my beliefs or I’m not a good person! or rather more logically, both.

Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other ‘sins’ are invented nonsense. - Robert Heinlein

I quite simply refuse to acknowledge that a belief in god is necessary to be a good person.

The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good. - Bertrand Russell

Truer words were never spoken. All this makes me want to read this book really bad. I’ll post a review if I can get my hands on a copy. Apparently, the author is careful not to extol the absence of religious belief as preferable for a society, while arguing strongly that when religious belief (or dogma) is absent, society can crank along just fine. I’ll personally have no problems extolling just that.

To And Fro

2009-10-09T15:43:00.001+05:30

Well after an exhausting trip down south, I’m back! But not for long. I’m leaving tonight for my interview at Kanpur. Yet another nerve wracking trip. *Sigh* What with all the tension and pressure, it is a wonder I haven’t lost my already tenuous hold on sanity. Hopefully I’ll get this job and put an end to all the uncertainty.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

The Middle of Nowhere

2009-09-26T15:21:00.001+05:30

Yup, that’s were I’m off to. At least that’s what it feels like. No phone (roaming ain’t cheap) & no hi-speed internet (I’ll be lucky to get dial up) means no chatting & talking to friends (I’ll miss you guys), RS(S), email and all the rest. I cannot even imagine the avalanche of feeds that’ll be waiting for me when I get back *shudder*.

On the other hand, maybe this time away will do me good. Online is not my life after all. I could read dead tree books, watch a movie on something more than 14” & meet long lost relatives – who should have stayed lost – and …oh what the hell,who am I kidding!!? Its my worst nightmare come to life and then some.

I know God won’t give me anything I can’t handle, I just wish he wouldn’t trust me so much.”

–Mother Teresa

Remember, she said it first folks…and I’ll be back on the 8th of next month. Ciao!

The Graduate

2009-09-20T21:27:00.000+05:30

Yes! that’s me. Finally, two years of hard work & toil (read: fun & games) have paid off. My 20 year career in the field of education – 2 years of kindergarten, 10+2 years of school, 1 year of engineering, 3 years of bachelor studies and 2 years of graduate school, phew that is a lot – is now complete (hey, kindergarten counts too).

So how did all this go down? At a solemn ceremony called the Convocation, I and the entire graduating class of 2009 were conferred our degrees on September 19, 2009. It was a page right out of my dreams as I walked up on stage & received my diploma while my parents, teachers and friends looked on. Of course, I felt like singing and yelling that I finally finished school, but I settled for taking pictures and laughing my head off.

And thanks to my sister, my day was chronicled right down to the minute. And what a day it was! Meeting friends again (some of them for the last time, maybe), favourite teachers (definitely not the last time we meet)…its amazing how nostalgic people can get after just 5 months. Then came the rehearsal, the waiting and finally the Last Mile ;). After the official class photographs were taken, we threw our hats up in the air, (yep I finally got to do that!) and then the real fun began.

In the midst of all the confusion and cameras flashing I managed to get photos taken with all my friends and then some. I even got a picture with Meenakshi mam and Arun sir, who are on my All Time Favourite Teachers list (its a pretty short list but hey at least I have one right?) I was so excited I could barely eat. Reliving it now, I’m so excited I can barely type!

The day was nearly perfect. One of those days where I felt like I was on top of the world. I felt it 5 minutes after I arrived. If only RS had been there. Yeah, the guy who convinced me to make the trip was MIA. I just know karma’s going to come back and bite his boss in the rear or maybe god will rain down with fire and brimstone (did I get that right?) or …something.

Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence.

Robert Frost

If nothing else, at least I’ve got this!

Kodak Moments below!

View Full Album

P.S: I cannot believe I got through this post without once mentioning Dustin Hoffman or Anne Bancroft! Oh wait, I just did…

What’s your persona?

2009-09-13T20:39:00.000+05:30

Personas is a component of the Metropath(ologies) exhibit, currently on display until Sept 09 at the MIT Museum by the Sociable Media Group from the MIT Media Lab (Please contact us if you want to show it next!). It uses sophisticated natural language processing and the Internet to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. In short, Personas shows you how the Internet sees you.

Intrigued? So was I. Enough to check out the website and I came away impressed. Go ahead, check it out. I’ll wait. Once there, enter your name. Then sit back and be amazed. As is explained on the page, it is not meant to be utilitarian or even accurate. After all, unless you are relatively famous & have an obscure name (like say Lifehacker founder - Gina Trapani), it cannot build an accurate description. But the process itself is amazing to watch.

I for one, learnt that most of my doppelgangers are doctors (my pet hate in school was biology, quite the irony). They sure make some interesting things over at MIT don’t they?

Video Games vs. Real Life

2009-09-10T21:32:00.000+05:30

Why I prefer video games to real life:

Someone has already written a walkthrough, FAQs, guide or something.
If you don’t do well, you can always delete your profile and start over.
If you don’t get expert score on a level, you can replay it.
If you still don’t make expert, it doesn’t matter.
If you don’t like one game, just move on to another.
If you do really well, you get shiny trophies.
Practice does make perfect.
You know how its going to end.
You have to pay just once for a game (or even free).
You can always RTFM!

Gadgets of the Future

2009-09-07T18:02:00.001+05:30

What do you get when you mix technology and food? Why, cool futuristic gadgets like the ones below of course!

Guess what’s in the pictures above. Go ahead, I dare you. Give up? The first picture is of a Self Contained Biosphere (from Philips) while the second one is ‘le petit prince’, a miniature greenhouse for - get this - Mars.

Biosphere:

This Philips non-spherical-biosphere is a self-contained farm that produces hundreds of calories of various food sources a day. Its five-level design breaks down like this:

Levels 1 and 2: Plants
Level 3: Algae
Level 4: Fish and Shrimp
Level 5: Organic Waste

The system is designed to cascade nutrients from the top to the bottom (back to the top). Optical fibers capture and redirect light to the plants during the day, while methane capture from organic waste can power lights at night. The algae create oxygen for the fish. Cool or what?!

Le Petit Prince:

We all know that high solar radiation on Mars means even plants would have a difficult time growing. So how do we solve that problem? Use robots! This concept robot was designed so it could walk around the Red Planet looking for optimal condition for growth. After it has mastered the surroundings, it could share growing tips with a whole swarm of plant growing bots. Aside: these are definitely some of the best looking bots I have ever seen! Below is a video of the lil’ guy in action.

So, do you like the future?

Happy Birthday Internet!

2009-09-05T15:45:00.001+05:30

September 2, 2009 was the fortieth birthday of an invention (do inventions have birthdays?). Well this one sure does…if I can figure out when it was actually invented.

40 years ago, on September 2, scientists connected two computers together which could communicate. The talk was meaningless but hey, at least they talked (kind of like kids?!) So would this be the birth of the Internet? Of course, technically the World Wide Web as we know it was invented in March of 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee.

We’ve come a long way since then. The WWW was born 20 years after the first ‘communication’ between two computers. The first email was sent in 1971 while the first free web based email service, Hotmail, was launched as late as 1996. Mosaic became the world’s first browser in April, 1993 while Firefox – King of Browserville – was launched only in 2004. Currently of course we’re rather spoilt for choice here with Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari and definitely last on my list, IE.

So what’s the next big thing for the Internet? Only time will tell…or maybe Google will. (cue ominous music)

P.S: Today is Dr.S.Radhakrishnan’s birthday. So Happy Teachers’ Day everyone!

On the First Day of September…

2009-09-01T22:01:00.001+05:30

…my true love gave to me - two interview calls from LIC & Federal Bank! Well strictly speaking not my true love & it was more like the last day of August but this just sounds better. After the looong and I mean really long wait, I’m getting results so to speak. 2 out of 3 isn't so bad right? The interview for LIC is on October 10, while Federal is still unclear. And certainly the odds for LIC are pretty good in my favour. At the very least 1 in 4.

And to celebrate,RS had the day off and he came to Noida and we watched the Taking of Pelham 123 (predictable storyline but some scenes were pretty good). Too bad the day started very late and had to end early (by normal standards). At least I’ve got the Sunday to look forward to…Movie Time!

Back to the Future

2009-08-28T19:23:00.001+05:30

Well maybe not but remember back in school, when you wondered what exactly an atom look like? You didn’t? Well I did. Looking at bugs under the microscope in biology was exciting for sure, but what I really wanted to see were atoms, at the very least molecules. After all how was I supposed to understand how they work when I cannot see them?

Well it took a long time but it’s finally here. IBM has gone and done it now.

This is the 3D image taken by an IBM scientist. Unimpressive huh?

Now lo and behold!

This look familiar? Impressed now? I was. The above image was taken by what is known as an atomic force microscope.

Like the venerable electron microscope, but more powerful and with an eye for the third dimension, the AFM is able to make the nano world something we humans can appreciate visually. Using a silicon micro scale cantilever coated in carbon dioxide (tiny, tiny needle), lasers, an "ultrahigh vacuum" and temperatures that hovered around 5 Kelvin, the AFM imaged the pentacene in nanometres. It did this while sitting a mere 0.5 nanometres above the surface and its previously invisible bonds for 20 long, unmoving hours. The length of time is noteworthy, said IBM scientist Leo Goss in statement from IBM, because any movement whatsoever would have disrupted the delicate atomic bonds and ruined the image.

And that's the real beauty of this image. For the first time ever we can see where each of those carbon and hydrogen atoms line up, and the overall symmetrical shape they create. In 3D.

Kudos to the IBM scientist who sat staring at the specimen for “20 straight hours”. The specimen was a 1.4 nanometre-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms. Sigh! I can already hear the kids go “Tell me again how you had to imagine atoms and molecules…”

(via Gizmodo)

Partly cloudy, chance of labels

2009-08-26T18:21:00.001+05:30

Google Blogger is turning 10 this week and the celebrations have already begun folks! After the teaser announcement a couple of days ago and an impromptu blog post later, we finally get the first gift in the form of label clouds.

The label widget was woefully inadequate, with only two ways of showing labels. The blog post goes on to say that this was the most requested feature (why am I not surprised?) and now we finally have it. Not only is it possible to show the labels as a cloud, you can also select which ones you actually want to show up in it. Yippee!

I’ve been waiting for this feature myself but for better or for worse, just last week I found this fantastic flash cloud widget for my blog from Blogger Buster. And while this new feature is definitely news, I think I’ll just keep the one I’ve got.

Here’s how they both look:

What do you think? Should I keep the old one or toss it?

Profile: Vinayaka

2009-08-24T20:36:00.001+05:30

Name: Ganesha/Vinayaka/Ganapati (don’t recall the rest)

Parents: Lord Shiva & Goddess Parvati

Residence: Kailas (unverified)

Email: None – (please get with it! Gmail is good)

Festival: Vinayaka Chavithi

In short, this is the Ganesha whose birthday we celebrated yesterday. While the precise origins/cause/reasons of this festival are as yet unclear to me (more on that later), it definitely is one my favourite festivals. “Why?” you ask…for the same reason I don’t like most of the others. Food! (what were you expecting? some deep philosophical treatise?) Most Indian festivals usually demand lots of sweets, not this god, leastways not in my house. This is one occasion where I whole heartedly & unabashedly dig in.

Another peculiarity about this festival in my house is that my dad gets to do it! And here you were thinking that festivals are a universal celebration of religious fervour. No sir. Not here. According to the in-house religious expert a.k.a my mother, the majority of festivals require only token participation from my dad, whereas even the faithless (my sister and I) have to fully participate at the risk of hell fire and brimstone on earth. C’est la vie.

At least this festival has some good stories which I can poke holes in. I’m assuming that most of you would know them, if not you can always read up. Why in the name of Kailas does a goddess need a watchman? Having cut off his head, why doesn’t Shiva just re-attach it, instead of an elephant head? Neither does this answer the question of how a god or at least the son of a god can die in the first place. There’s another version of Ganesha’s birth where a rakshasa asks a boon of Shiva (he’s getting pretty predictable by now isn't he?) and Vishnu-as usual-has to extricate him from it; resulting in the substitution of the asura’s head for Ganesha. Why? Don’t ask.

There are some more - like the one where this puja is supposedly better than anything else a Hindu can do (funny how they all claim to be The One ) but the leaps of logic required are too much, my head hurts . Finally after much laughing from me and much glaring from my mother, we managed to finish the puja and move on to the reason we even celebrate this festival in the first place – the delicious, made once a year only food!

Answers or more questions welcome in the comments…

How did I get here?

2009-08-22T21:18:00.001+05:30

Ever since Firefox introduced me to the world of tabs, I’ve often asked myself this question. There I am just browsing, maybe looking for something when a video or link grabs my attention. And before I know it, I’m off on a journey into the unknown …or a wild goose chase as the case may be. Usually I can get back to where I started without much ado but that’s only usually. The hardest route to trace back is when I get lost in Wikipedia, that vast black hole of time.

And today I finally have my app for that ;). Wikipedia Diver is a Firefox add on that answers my question.

From the add-on page:

This extension creates an sqlite database in your profile directory, and then logs all clicks between pages on Wikipedia to that database. It adds an item in the tools menu titled "WikiDiver Graph," which loads a page that allows you to see a graph of your Wikipedia browsing, arranged into "dives" (where a dive is a series of links through Wikipedia).

What this means is that you can see how you ended up at a particular wiki page from your original mission. It only works on Wikipedia pages (hence the apt title) and no data is sent to any servers. It’s all stored locally, which means that while it doesn’t offer always on/anywhere access from the cloud (disappointment for the web 2.0 crowd) you also do not have to worry about Big Brother (score one for the paranoid crowd!).

As for me, I get to see how I ended up at anaemia from the movie An American in Paris…or from Lord Voldemort to Shakespeare!

IE 8 safer than Firefox…?

2009-08-21T20:21:00.001+05:30

Couple of days ago, my sister came down with fever. Kind of sudden too, no heed, no warning. Tuesday she was fine and she had even gone to college in the morning. When she came home in the evening she had fever and wasn’t able to eat anything. At least eat and and have it stay inside. Pretty soon that night she had a fever of 103 F. After the usual round of doctors and tests she seems to be well on the road to recovery. But quite a tense couple of days. Good thing we’re not the panicky type of family!

Moving on from the serious to the absolutely hilarious. Techcrunch ran this story on how Yahoo website users are directed to upgrade to the new safer IE 8. Now leaving aside the dubious and debatable safety of IE 8, it definitely makes sense to show this to the millions of IE 6 & 7 users. But surprise surprise, this is shown even to users of Firefox users! While just last year, Yahoo was touting the Firefox 3 release. Guess I finally found out what ‘alignment of business interests’ means!

Fair Use Policy

2009-08-20T11:31:00.002+05:30

A couple of weeks ago, I found on Airtel’s website that they had introduced new (unlimited) plans for broadband users. I was very excited since it meant I could upgrade to higher speeds for the same price. Unfortunately I also found out that they had imposed bandwidth caps in the guise of ‘Fair Use Policy.’ I was puzzled. Had Webster’s changed the definition of unlimited? I hurriedly googled it. No, the definition was the same, so what was this all about?

I decided to find out something about this so called FUP. What I found was horror, anger and betrayal. I’m not talking TV soap, just the reactions of consumers to the FUP. I found this petition going around with around 2000 signatories. Also one user had deciphered the FUP to layman’s language right here. Be sure to look at the spreadsheet showing deficiency in service. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so real.

As I see it, the company can either remove the unlimited plans or at least charge us half the rates for half the speeds. I do not understand in what world is it ok to charge consumers for service you aren’t providing. Since the rationale is that they cannot provide the consumers with more bandwidth than the limit arbitrarily imposed, then what are we paying the company for? Charging customers the same price regardless of service smacks of profiteering and not a genuine technical problem. It looks as if Airtel is punishing the customers who actually expect to use the service.

Apparently Airtel thinks that I need 512 kbps speeds just to browse and check my mail! If I actually use the bandwidth I need and paid for, I’m probably misusing it…they cannot think of any other reason I might want to use the Internet. What era are they still stuck in? I might as well check out YouTube, while I still can.

Tweetotaller…I’m one too

2009-08-18T13:03:00.001+05:30

I just read this Why I Don’t Use Twitter post by Devin Coldewey on Techcrunch. He managed to articulate most of my doubts on Twitter’s value, way better than I ever could. And he might have just invented a new word while he was at it. Impressive!

But the reasons why I don’t ‘get’ the whole Twitter train are different. For one thing none of my friends are on it, which is not surprising (for most of them, Gmail is still the ‘latest tech’). As for news, I still get mine the old fashioned way via the paper. For another, I cannot post from my mobile as it is too expensive, so real time is out of the question. The best use I’ve come up with so far is to pass around links, sort of like a bookmarking service.

Like most people, I have a lot of ways I consume information. For local news i.e about India (right now, national is local), my best source is still the newspaper. My favourite paper, The Hindu, still delivers the best content unlike the other gossip tabloids masquerading as papers (I’m looking at you TOI and HT). Techcrunch and Lifehacker and some other blogs keep me informed of tech and Valley news. My friends keep in touch through IM, mail or even, hold your breath, the phone! As for things that I have to say to the world or even just to a select few, I have a blog and a tumblog (that is one too many according to some people). Twitter just doesn’t have a place.

I know you shouldn’t knock something if you haven’t tried it, but I have tried to work with Twitter. I came, I saw and I wasn’t impressed. Maybe one day though. Till then, I’ll just entertain myself with reading the many many Twitter posts which seem to appear with almost clockwork regularity.

P.S: If for some reason, say you want to follow me (hey, its possible!), my Twitter handle is @sugarcandy243.

Funny Bones

2009-07-23T13:23:00.001+05:30

My sister and I just finished watching all four seasons of this fantastic series. One marathon viewing session with breaks for sleeping and eating, but now at last it is done. The series is called Bones, similar to police dramas like CSI, Numbers and the like. But what makes this different and infinitely more likeable is that it is funnier, more interesting and easier to understand.

For someone who cannot even watch someone else being injected/operated upon on the TV , its amazing that I could actually laugh through an entire series where they show more dead bodies than a zombie movie. This series is definitely a must watch for anyone who likes funny and science! Now I get the unenviable task of waiting for the fifth season to premiere on September 17. Too bad.

This one is right up there with my favourites like Friends, Happy Days, Gilmore Girls, Sabrina the Teenage Witch etc…

Next up, I just downloaded Farm Frenzy 3 and it’s great! It’s a nice twist on the classic game and has a more interesting variety of animals. Cannot wait to finish it :). I’m off to feed some animals on a screen…I’ll be back!

Retail therapy

2009-07-14T19:30:00.001+05:30

What is it with women and shopping? Any time I step foot into a mall/store, I see the women marching towards the merchandise with their men trailing behind. The women are intent on their next acquisition, the men on their ever diminishing wallets. Of course, come to think of it, Delhi isn't a patch on Chennai, where men can age visibly when they see their wives shop! Point of fact, I have seen stores where the management has been kind enough to provide chairs for the men and kids while the women exhaust themselves (mostly sari/jewellery shops).

My mom aims to follow in the footsteps of her forefathers (or should I say mothers?!) How else can an innocuous request to shop for veggies and fruits turn into a 5 figure bill on my dad’s credit card? Gather around folks and I’ll tell how this came about.

Once upon a time… Oops! wrong line. Ahem. Just last week, my mother asked “Take me shopping (veggies).” Simple enough. So I took out the car and we set off. Once we’re on the road though, she says “Go to The Great India Place first. I want to look up a couple of stores.” I’m surprised, but where my mother has a will, she will find a way.

So we finally get there and she goes into a store and starts looking around. Since this is normal re-con for my mother, I didn’t take much notice. Then she drags me over to a section, takes out a couple of clothes and asks which ones I like. I try them out and select a couple. Then another section. Rinse, lather and repeat. Then we hit other stores! My mind still reels from the whole experience. Although to be fair, considering the bill she rang up, this expedition was less excruciating than it could have been (and I actually liked the clothes).

In fact I would even go as far as to say that I had fun. In spite of that, I learnt a valuable lesson. Never go shopping with my mother (or any woman) without adequate preparation! Forewarned is forearmed folks .

The longest birthday ever

2009-06-29T16:51:00.001+05:30

Every year, my mother’s birthday is the longest ever. Why? coz she was born on the 21st of June that’s why! This year, my sister decided she would make something for my mother as a gift. So she came up with this:

It was really difficult to sneak away from home and get everything together but through sheer lying, we finally managed to get it framed. It did pay off in the end; my mother could not have been more surprised! And best of all, I caught the entire episode on video :).

What with the laptop giving up on me and having to be repaired, plus a couple of exams and what not, I’ve barely been able to catch my breath, let alone up with my blog.Next up – last date for Central bank is tomorrow and I’ve yet to take out the draft. Yikes! And so I go on another round. At least I have the trip to Manali to look forward to. If it decides to happen of course.

Once I’m back and played with Shiretoko a bit (yes, Firefox 3.5 releases tomorrow too!), I have a huge project coming up. What is it? Ya’ll just have to wait and see…

Up the Hill and back again

2009-06-13T17:41:00.001+05:30

I think I now know what Jack went through when he came tumbling down the hill. It’s no fun at all. Of course I didn’t exactly tumble down, rather I took the bus but it was still uncomfortable. And I like my comfort.

Why am I referencing nursery rhymes all of a sudden you ask? Remember the ill fated Haridwar trip that got postponed? Well I went and this time it was cut short and not even for a worthwhile cause. Let me begin from the beginning.

Once upon a time, there lived a girl…oops wrong beginning. Two days ago, that is on the 11th of June 2009, an air conditioned Innova left Delhi on its 5 hour journey towards Haridwar. It contained 8 people plus the chauffeur. Also included one 6 – foot monstrosity called my brother, who poor thing, had to practically bend over to fit in the backseat. Even then, we had a fun time yakking away nineteen to the dozen. Reached just in time to catch lunch at the guest house and off we went to see the temples (supposedly the reason we went, you will soon see why I say this).

To cut a long convoluted tale short, the two temples require ropeways to go up and down. (why do gods like hill tops so much?) One even comes with landscaping! We took near about 4 hours to cover them coz the ladies as usual cannot, I repeat can ever not, resist shopping. And they say I’m the irreligious one :( sigh. Just another of those things I’ll never get.

Finally we were about to go to the river banks to watch the aarti, when I get a call saying I’ve got an interview tomorrow. So my Dad and I rush back to Delhi, by bus. We spend an uncomfortable night trying to get some winks, get down at ISBT at 4 freaking AM in the morning and rush to the interview, which mercifully was close by. Then – drum rolls please – and only then do I find out that as usual my college placement cell has sent me on a wild goose chase (I’d probably have been happier to find a wild goose!).

So bottom line – total waste of money, time, energy and my dad’s 3 days off. On the plus side though I did learn a couple of things. If ever again I have to choose between work and play, I pick play (apparently that works for me). AND God himself doesn’t like me on His turf! Not to worry big guy, I’ll keep out .

There is a God

2009-06-08T14:13:00.001+05:30

There is a god. And he hates me. That’s right. The big guy from up there wants his revenge. How else do you explain the fact that just as I was getting ready to enjoy the weekend alone, sans parents, their trip gets postponed? Now not only do I lose my hedonistic (rather optimistically titled) weekend but I also get to go along on the 11th to Haridwar. Yaay! NOT. So now you know.

Besides this isn’t the first time this has happened. My dad was to visit me at hostel, when Mister I Run The Country (aka the PM) all of a sudden wants to review BHEL, weak knees notwithstanding. Funny, last time I checked, it was doing great without any interference from him. So no trip.

That last was quite some time ago. More recently it was the turn of the CM. I had planned out my entire trip to Jaipur with my friend MG (after spending the mandatory 2 days with the parents of course). Of course the CM picks this exact weekend to visit the site and view progress, when there is nothing to see but a boundary wall! (maybe he’s never seen people work before, that explains it)

Next time you wonder why I’m not too fond of the big guy – Its not business, its personal!!

P.S: Also one of the many many reasons I detest politicians.

Chronicle of Clichés

2009-05-28T13:58:00.002+05:30

A couple of days ago, I ran across this funny little piece & just had to share it– What we learn from the movies.

An excerpt:

-- It is always possible to park directly in front of any building you are visiting.
-- A detective can only solve a case once he has been suspended from duty.
-- If you start dancing in the street, everyone you bump into will know all the steps.

And so on. It also got me thinking how many equivalent clichés would I be able to find in India Cinema, which to some people is like the mother lode of all clichés & stereotypes? So far here is a small list I’ve been ale to come up with. Of course it goes without saying that this is by no means a comprehensive guide, just something I could make up off the top of my head; I’m sure that others would be able to come up with better. This list is also not exclusive to just one language, having watched movies in not less than 4 Indian languages, I can assure you that almost all transcend boundaries of language. They are sprinkled in various degrees and forms throughout the history of cinema.

Answer to the Ultimate Questions of Life, Love, and Everything Else

-according to Indian Cinema: (forgive me for mangling a classic quote)

The poor little rich guy/gal always falls in love with the really poor guy/gal. Why? because apart from our hero or heroine, every other rich person in the movie is an ass, that’s why.
The best friend is always in love with the hero/heroine. The above holds true even if they don’t end up together.
The hero will never use weapons he could’ve got easily, he will discard them for hand to hand combat. Either that or he will run out of ammunition anyway.
The heroine’s dupatta/scarf/sometimes even the girl herself will always land on the hero, when knocked off by the wind/bad guys.
The hero/heroine will always choose family over love and by the end of the movie, of course will be rewarded for it.
Songs can interrupt the story at any time for any reason. Never mind that the grandmother is dead in the next room, we could always use a song.
No matter how bad the bullet wound is, the person will always survive to mumble a few words or till the hero arrives.
Poor people are always good and kind hearted while their rich counterparts are always heartless, unless of course there are no poor in the film. Then the rich can be good.
Even though the majority of these clichés have appeared in countless movies so far, everyone in the film will pretend as if this an entirely new experience for them (don’t they watch movies in the movies? lol). This can be seen form the fact that the hero will never think to protect his family from being kidnapped and held to ransom or thoroughly investigate the guy in love with his sister.

Can you think of some others? Leave 'em in the comments.

Elvis has left the building

2009-05-19T14:47:00.001+05:30

…I’m not kidding. Only in my case it is the painters who’d literally taken over my house for the last month or so. Finally the deed is done. The walls are a riot of colours, almost like a rainbow threw up in here; but I love it. My room makes me feel like I’m on the Starship Enterprise, looking out.

Actually the whole painting thing wasn’t so bad to start with. They pushed the furniture out of a room, painted while my mom watched TV and I, well, I played games and read Star Trek. But then came time to paint the inside of the cupboards. It was a massive undertaking the likes of which I’d never (and never will again, god forbid!) seen. It is quite amazing how much ‘stuff’ and I use the term loosely, can fit inside such a small space. Imagine if you will, rooms filled with plastic covers and bags and suitcases. There was stuff everywhere. On the bed, on the floor with just barely enough space for one person to walk.

All the time I kept wondering, where did all this stuff come from? I mean what is a family of four, three of whom do not drink coffee/tea and the other drinks tea once a week, doing with four tea sets? In different pattern & colours no less. And for a vegetarian cook, my mom sure does have a mean set of kitchen knives! Hmm… maybe I should look into that ;).

And the fun part is yet to come. Yeah, the fun part is now putting them all back together. If they had tried longer, just maybe they could’ve put Humpty Dumpty together again, but putting my house together again is going to take eternity! Even with all the King’s men and I don’t even have them.

And I’ll put one myth to rest at least; painting does not, I repeat, does not drive away the lizards or roaches. They always come back, unlike Elvis. A pity!

2009 - The year I…

2009-05-16T11:16:00.001+05:30

…voted, for the first time. And actually cared about the results. Well the UPA seems to be winning & that’s that I suppose. All the wishing in the world cannot change things as they are (how I wish!).

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.

– Anon

Now I can only wait & watch how this plays out for my Dad, which of course is actually the reason I cared. Coming back to the media circus that is the elections, the two most common scenarios propounded by the ‘experts’ was either an NDA victory or at worst a highly fragmented LS. Turns out they were all wrong and the UPA is laughing all the way to power.

While these elections saw many campaigns to ensure higher voting turnouts than previously see, it seems they failed to make an impact where it is needed. Many districts in the southern states especially TN, voter turnouts were a high as 67% while up here in UP, it was as low as 52%. Again as expected the urban middle class refused to participate in force thus losing their right to complain, not that it’ll stop them! Apparently I’d asked for too much (I tend to do that!)

All in all a total bummer of a post I know but that’s all I’m getting right now. The only consolation? things can only go up from here .

Is that an App I see?

2009-05-12T11:14:00.001+05:30

Window/Mac only: Social networking site Wakoopa tracks the applications you're using through a small utility and uploads that information to its web site, where you can track what programs you use, review your favourites, and find new software through recommendations based on what others use.

When I read this piece in Lifehacker, I knew I had to try it out. I love trying out new software and applications, this app seemed to be a perfect fit. I signed up at the website a couple of days ago and the graphs it throws up are very interesting. I found out that I spend a lot of time using Firefox, duh! no surprise there. Still, I found the website quite good and it suggests new software for me to try out, which is probably why I’m going to keep it around.

Lifehacker threw up another suggestion for me today and it was something I had always been on the lookout for.

If you're looking for a simple way to catalogue your piles of movies, music, books, games, and software GuruLib is a handy tool for cataloguing them all in the same place.

Now while there are a lot of media cataloguing software out there, from offline to online solutions, they usually focus on just one category say books (think Shelfari/Library Thing) or movies (Griffith/DVD Corral).

For my extensive catalogue of books (2.93 GB thanks to RS, and growing), I’m using Calibre which has a feature set that seems made to order for me. The most important one is that it physically re-organizes the books on my hard drive (9000 files and 667 folders say it is a must have feature). Also it has built in viewers for most formats including .lit for which I needed MS Reader before.

But I did need an app which would let me keep track of games, movies and software. Gurulib was perfect (tried Mediaman but it does not track software plus it is a paid app) and free!

Now I have just two requests for the developers –

update the UI (it is so web 1.0) and
a desktop app would be just great.

Well I’m off to play with my shiny new toy…um..did I say toy? I meant seriously review an application which will help people. There, that sounds much better!

Update: I’m sticking with Calibre Gurulib did not work out for me…

Painting, quests and …Zombies?

2009-05-08T14:52:00.001+05:30

How do I distil all the craziness of the past week into words? So many thoughts tumbling around, rushing to get out, of which barely one or two make it to the page. I’ve been meaning to get around to writing something,anything, at all these past few days and damn if something or the other doesn’t keep popping up to interrupt me while I’m only thinking of writing, let alone actually get down to it.

If it’s not the painting, then the IPL. Or maybe the elections. Or the looking for a job. Or the oh..just forget it. Suffice it to say the interruptions were many and varied. The house is shaping up quite well, in spite of the freaky colour scheme my sister and I came up with (some might say a marked lack of one). I’ve managed to get my purple walls in the end and the whole exercise should conclude over the next week.

After a long time, I’ve also found a game worth getting excited about, make that two games. Both are casual games (avid gamers can roll their eyes and move on) and a lot of fun.

Wandering Willows is a casual RPG, if there is such a thing. It has an engaging storyline, cute animations and quite a bit of questing involved. It starts out small and before you know it you’ve lost a couple of hours (or even days). My sister finished it in just a couple of days but there’s no rush. The overall goal is to get off the island and if you feel like sightseeing for a while, there’s nothing stopping you.

The other game is Plants vs. Zombies. I won’t get into the storyline because there isn’t any. It’s pretty straight forward. You have plants which shoot ammo and you’ve got to stop the zombies from reaching your house through the yard. Not much to it but it’s surprisingly addictive (watching the zombies drop limbs, heads and turn into ashes is a plus). Also, if anyone is a fan of the Diner Dash series, Diner Town Tycoon is all set to release sometime soon. I played a demo version and cannot wait for the game to come out.

I’m off to play some more…while I try to come up with some more coherent sentences for this blog!

Yet another change in Paradise

2009-04-28T21:30:00.001+05:30

The past two days have been kind of hectic, what with illness striking my sister and all the painting going on. Now that things have settled down, I have some time to write.

One my favourite apps that I use all the time is Launchy. Its small, skinnable and does what it is supposed to do very well. The only flaw if you can call it that is, it uses way too much RAM and sometimes (very rarely) locks up my CPU with high usage. Considering that I don’t exactly have a high end PC, I was always looking for a replacement. Well, my search has come to an end (for now).

It is Find and Run Robot or FARR in short. It has all the advantages of Launchy, without any of its drawbacks plus some very useful features. It is also way more customizable than launchy. Even with all these inducements, I was reluctant to ditch my favourite app.

But my ‘AHA’ moment came when I found out that it has a plug-in which integrates FARR with one of my other indexing app that is Everything. So what is the difference between all these apps you ask? they all pretty much do the same thing, they index your hard drive. But where they differ is the way they do it. Launchy builds an index of all the folders and files you specify which means it scans your pc quite often in the background.

On the other hand, FARR uses a heuristic model and scoring system to give results close to what you want (the system can be modified for your needs). And Everything does real time search of literally everything on your pc. I have never seen it take more than a few seconds to find anything I can throw at it. So now I have ditched Launchy to use a combo of FARR and Everything.

If I want to launch any app, then FARR does the job. If I want a folder/file, then everything to the rescue (all I have to do is type ‘en’ then the name of the folder/file name). Yet another change in Paradise!

P.S: The painters moved out of the room today. It is looking very good (even with peach walls! you heard me right). I’ll post some screens soon.

The Trek continues

2009-04-26T18:57:00.001+05:30

It has been quite some time since I started Star Trek: The Original Series. So where am I now? I’m on my sixth book.What? just the sixth? I know that is a tad slow (duh! understatement) but it isn’t all my fault. We started painting the house at just about the same time, so I keep getting a lot of interruptions plus all the dust on my laptop screen plus science fiction naturally seems to take me longer than the usual. Yet, I soldier on. Coz this series is quite unputdownable (is there such a word? the red squiggle says there isn’t).

A word about painting your house. Never paint your home when you are in it. Boy does it create a mess. Never seen so much dust, even for Delhi. The painters are going room by room, working from inside on out. Once the rooms are all done, I’ll put up some pictures, kind of like a before and after. God knows if my purple room will come out all right!

Linux on the Go

2009-04-22T13:37:00.001+05:30

Generally when I don’t keep up with my Reader subscriptions, like if I don’t access it for a day or so, the unread RSS feed items pile up. Usually they number around 50 or so. Well yesterday, I went to the National Museum on Janpath road with RS (as an aside, we had a blast!), so didn’t check in on my RSS feeds. Imagine my surprise when I logged in today to find more than a hundred unread items! well 120 to be exact but who’s counting?

Anyway the first item that caught my eye was an article over at Gizmo’s Freeware on an easy way to use Linux in windows itself. That triggered my memory on a similar article I had read at Lifehacker some time ago. So i checked it out and landed up at the Portable Linux homepage. Seems a pretty nifty way to run Linux without messing up your windows system, I’m always on the lookout for those.

For someone who wants to try out Linux, or only needs a few particular applications or even someone who’s bored and simply wants to mess about with something (hmm am I describing myself?), this is an ideal method to get your feet wet. It is a lot better than many other ways of trying out Linux simply because

Its only a 450MB download and installed takes up about 2GB, although you can increase it later
Its portable, so if something does go wrong (which is highly unlikely) you can just delete the folder and start over
It runs all the software inside your regular Windows windows, like in the screenshot, so you do not have to worry about UI or customizing any menus etc
It can access and work on your windows files and the changes are persistent

Also if anyone does install this and start working in Linux, don’t forget to read the comments over at Lifehacker, which detail how to access your Windows drive and files from within Linux. As always, before doing anything that you’re not sure of, Google and read it up, you’re bound to find advice from someone who’s been there and done that. Remember Google is your friend!

I’m in love…yet again!

2009-04-20T14:11:00.001+05:30

Its true. I’m in love. Or rather I’m back in love. Now what am I going on about you wonder? Well for some reason or the other, for the past 2 years I haven’t read a lot of books. Either I didn’t have the time or the inclination or didn’t want to read on the computer screen. Anyway, a couple of days ago, RS suggested that I read Star Trek: The Original Series or Star Trek: The Next Generation.

And well, the long and short of it is, I fell in love again! I started off with the Original Series, which is the adaptation of the TV scripts and hence they’re more like short stories than anything else.

But boy does reading those bring back the memories. Quite frankly I’m barely even coming up for air. Its a lot of fun and just like in the old days when I used to read in the bathroom, under the bed covers, the staircase and while walking to school! I even took books to read in my coaching classes for the boards. And probably as a reward for all my hard work, I didn’t do that badly in the exams either.

I’ve drawn varied reactions from people to my quite innocuous and ubiquitous habit. My mom used to get very exasperated when I didn’t show up for dinner coz I was too busy reading, people have wondered if I’m crazy coz I would suddenly burst out laughing while reading (esp with Wodehouse it’s always likely) and my friends have been amused that I’m not even in this world when I read.

I’m so looking forward to the next few days! Wonder how long it will take me to finish up the entire series…

A God for everything

2009-04-17T13:19:00.002+05:30

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any. – Russell Baker

Written with me in mind? So often I’m left wondering just what am I doing here? Trying to write a blog about, well, everything. Quite ambitious and probably just a tad too impossible. So far I’ve written about software that I use, the things I’ve done, opinions, rants…everything and the kitchen sink. Not only does it feel very confused and mangled, I have a feeling I’ll be doing this for a long time to come, like now for instance.

Is it true that the more you want something to happen, the lesser the probability of it actually happening? I mean like are we subconsciously jinxing it or something? Where ever you may be from, if you are an Indian this has probably happened to you. You’re reading or watching a movie and you start thinking and you wonder what if that (insert appropriate catastrophe/accident here) happened to me? Just normal run of the mill wondering. But woe betide you if someone overheard, especially if that someone happens to be your mother. He/she will immediately say don’t say stuff like that, it might just happen.

This has happened to me at least a dozen times, all within earshot of my mom. Co-incidence? Maybe. Anyway it made me curious enough to ask her another one of my why questions that she despises. And what I found from her was nothing short of hysterical and it also answered another of my questions that has always bothered me. Apparently there are a few gods out of the whole pantheon, whose sole job is to eavesdrop on unsuspecting humans and just as we say something to make it come true. Aha! you think, so that’s the secret, the Indian version of rub the lamp and genie appears. Not so fast. These gods also have a few caveats.

For one, they never grant you something that you actually want like an Xbox or or a Kindle. They just go after the bad stuff like what if I had an accident or what if I died tomorrow. And even the bad stuff is no sure thing. They’re capricious these gods of ours, Zeus and his gang don’t even come close! Finally, a couple of more gods I’ve got job descriptions for.

What other gods do we got? Well there is this Visa God in Hyderabad that specializes in getting H1-B visas should you so want. Now I’ve heard everything! A god for visas? You bet. Our gods already do the weirdest of things like inspect our cars and bikes before we ride them, help us pass exams (a little bribe wouldn’t hurt either, say a special pooja or 101 coconuts?) et al. Why, did you think they won’t be as up to date as us humans? I’ll say this much for our gods. They change according to the times, even if their devotees do not!

India 2050…Part 2

2009-04-13T19:11:00.000+05:30

I recently came across this article - Playing God in caste-crazy Bihar in the Hindustan Times.

An excerpt from the article:

Couples opting for sperm donations in Bihar are demanding to know the donor’s caste before they go ahead — and often getting their answers as well.

“Neither features nor height nor even IQ concerned us as much,” says Anuradha Rai (36), an Internet marketing manager from the Bhumihar community. “My husband felt if the sperm donor was from a different caste, the baby would not get the right genes.”

I couldn't believe my eyes. This is urban, smart the next generation of India? The so called hip Gen-X? The same generation which was supposed to finally throw off the shackles of colonialism, step out of the shadows of Partition and take its place on the international stage in an age of globalization? Where has that generation gone? I thought education was supposed to enable people to think differently, analyze and decipher the meanings of thoughts and most importantly, inculcate the courage to question old dogmas and reach out to others beyond the time honoured artificially created boundaries. Apparently not.

I used to think that those in urban areas who are educated would lead the charge towards a caste free nation. Even here obviously the change has been slow. Marriages are still arranged within the narrow confines of caste. The day should come when a person is unable to name his caste simply because various members of his family belonged to as many different castes once upon a time. That day I think, the question of reservation will become completely irrelevant. Instead of moving forward to this goal, we seem to be determined to find new ways of preserving the caste structure intact and passing it on to the next generation.

What else can explain the fact that even childless couples, who are looking at the last option available to them simply refuse to let go of such outdated and insane notions? The right genes? 'Purity' of blood? What on earth are these people going on about? It seems instead of making people think logically, education in our country is enabling us to come up with creative new excuses to legitimize age old, and in my view positively retarded, customs!

And the most appalling and troublesome fact in the article is that these people get the answers they are looking for! I mean what the hell?? Why is there a need at all for sperm banks to keep information beyond medical history? While I do not believe that laws are very effective agents of social change, in cases like these they may be only hope. It is the simplest solution in the world to ban establishments from asking and maintaining this information. True, banning sex selection and selective abortion hasn't corrected the skewed sex ratio, but just imagine what would be the state of affairs if it was not explicitly outlawed. It does not even bear thinking about.

In the end, I am quite shocked at the fact that while we continue to debate the ethical implications of genetic engineering or in other words 'made to order' babies (want a baby boy with blue eyes and six feet tall? coming right up) and cloning which frankly are quite some way off in the future, we could not be bothered less about what is happening now in our backyard.

What should I wear?

2009-04-10T20:03:00.000+05:30

These 4 little words are enough to drive any man to despair; they're right up there with "Do I look fat in this dress?" and the dreaded "Is she prettier than me?". Of course, the right answer is yes to both, but if you like your life, you'll say no. Which leads me to my current post - what should my blog wear? and my tumblelog too while we are at it.

Till I plunged headlong into the wild jungle that is otherwise called blogger templates, I had no idea there were so many. I literally spent hours trying on different themes to pick out one which offered me both functionality and cool. To be quite honest, I haven't tried on so many clothes for myself in my entire life!

Finally, as you can see, I settled on The Reflections template by Cebong Ipiet for my blog, as it had all the functionality I wanted. It could auto summarize posts, display a thumbnail of the pictures, had a space for featured content and to top it all off, it was a combo of my favorite colors – black, blue and white.

Then started my next foray into the theming jungle. This time for my tumblelog. This was a much simpler task as the number of themes were less and applying them is a snap vs. - a - vs. Blogger. Anyway to cut a long story short, I ended up with a black theme here too. This particular theme called ‘Mac envy’ is part of the default template collection offered by Tumblr itself. The best part of this theme was that it could display quotes in different sizes according to the word count and since quotes make up the bulk of my posts, it suited me perfectly.

India 2050

2009-04-07T18:32:00.000+05:30

Aah, it is that time of year again. When roads are laid, flyovers get completed, the garbage actually gets collected and storm drains get cleaned. Just what exactly is the magic that causes all of this to happen? No, it is not the road pixies or the garbage troll, it is the humble Election Fairy. That magical, mystical and maybe soon to be mythical creature that ensures we have a democracy, ostensibly of course.

Quite apart from all the election perks that we get to enjoy, which ironically enough is what we rightly deserve throughout the year, these elections got me thinking. And before you ask - no the Apocalypse isn't just around the corner, this just happens to me sometimes. I try not to let it interfere with my life as I know it, but this is one of those times. So just bear with me all right!

Now what was I saying? Oh yeah, the elections got me thinking. Just for this achievement they deserve a medal, but I digress. With all the election posturing on TV and other media going on, this quote just popped into my head (another nasty habit of mine, says RS)

Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve. - George Bernard Shaw

So, I asked myself is this what we deserve? Politicians making hate speeches, pitting one group against the other on whatever flimsy grounds their fertile imagination can come up with, promising all the things that we do not want or need but just because it is what they think we need, oh and the list goes on. As if the divisions of religion, caste, class, sex, education et al that we had before weren't enough, they come up with new ones all the time. Now we can look forward to hating each other on the lines of state, language, dress, why even on the basis of the urban vs. suburban vs. rural. Kind of makes me wonder, what next? Maybe the smart vs. the stupid, the honest vs. the dishonest (wait, don't we already have that in the form of the public vs. the political class?). I have full faith in my political leaders that they can come with even better ones or worse ones depending on how you look at it, of course.

If this is how far we have come in the last 50 odd years, I shudder to think what's in store for us in the next 50. Exactly at the time when we all need to work together in the face of innumerable global crises (environmental degradation, economic instability, water scarcity are a few that come to mind), we still continue to bicker like little children. Right from the international arena where we cannot even reach a conclusion on agricultural subsidies, within countries where states cannot share water resources peacefully, within states whose people want yet another state, to neighbours who cannot share a boundary wall without dispute, we still continue to view the world as a perpetual war of us vs. them. Never mind who falls within the ambit of us or them, because we need a them against whom we can define an us (just like god needed the devil).

To be continued...

Earth Hour 2009

2009-03-29T23:02:00.000+05:30

Yesterday, March 29 of the year 2009 A.D was a historic one. We, the people of Earth - at least the estimated one billion of us who participated - raised our collective voices against the destructive havoc caused by Man in his pursuit of progress and comfort for himself at the expense of all other species of this blue planet. So what does Earth Hour look like?

It looks like this in Toronto, Canada.

Sydney, Australia. I can almost feel the difference.

It isn't surprising that Australia is leading the charge for Earth Hour. After all, the movement was born here in 2007. Earth hour was conceived by WWF and the Sydney Morning Herald in 2007, when 2.2 million residents of Sydney participated by turning off all non-essential lights. Following Sydney's lead, many other cities around the world adopted the event in 2008. Earth Hour 2009 was from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. local time, March 28, 2009.

Over at my house, we took Earth Hour pretty seriously. By 8:30 p.m all lights, fans and electronics (non - essential or otherwise) were switched off. We spent the one hour sitting around, talking and watching the news coverage on TV. All said and done, it was quite the 'illuminating' experience. I'm quite sure we'll go dark next year too. So who out there is with me for 2010?

Show & Tell – My Desktop

2009-03-23T01:29:00.000+05:30

I was feeling a bit bored the last couple of days, my semester exams not withstanding, so I decided that my desktop needed a makeover. My previous desktop sojourn was fairly simple which was probably why I was feeling that itch again. After a lot of reading, browsing, downloading, editing and tinkering, here's what I came up with:

Looks amazing right? right?? oh well, it works for me. It didn't take that long to get it looking like this either. The row of icons on the left was achieved using Rocketdock. The system stats on the right is courtesy Rainmeter (a very small but useful app). Now just to show how easy it was for me to get this screen and for anyone who wants this for themselves (once you get the apps, play around with the options, there are plenty), I'll give it the old 1-2-3. So here goes.

For Rocketdock:

Download the two apps I mentioned earlier and install them, usually they would go into your Program Files folder
Now get the Reflections Icons pack from here and extract them to a location you remember.
Fire up Rocketdock, get rid of all the default icons given there (just drag-n-drop out of the dock) except for the settings icon (you will be using it a lot) and click settings.
For styles, select blank and check the box where it says 'minimize windows to dock', this enables the previews you can see in the screen above.
Add shortcuts to your favourite folders and change the settings for each, using the icons from the pack extracted (accessed by a right click).

For Rainmeter:

Rainmeter skin Geosans Light minimal has the same style of icons, so get it, extract it to \Program Files\Rainmeter\Skins folder
Right click the rainmeter icon in the system tray and click config and select the skin you want.
Each one of the counters is a separate config, so you can enable and disable them selectively if you'd like and even move them around (they appear at the top left corner by default)

Et Voila! You're done.

It may seem overwhelming at first, but once you explore all the options, its pretty easy to configure the apps the way you want them. If you like more eye candy, especially with rocketdock, you can go to their website and browse through their add-ons collection. Many of them are quite awesome! I would personally recommend the 'Stacks' docklet by Matonga and the 'KKmenu' docklet which emulate the 'Stacks' option from Leopard like this:

Bouquets welcome! (Brickbats a lil' less welcome)...

Prayer in the Twenty First Century

2009-03-18T11:41:00.002+05:30

Now I've seen everything. I'm sure this global recession that we've been having lately has driven a lot of people to prayer. But paying for prayer? (Isn't money what we are praying for in the first place?!!)

That's right. A new service called Information Age Prayer offers to do exactly that. Here is what they advertise on their website: "Information Age Prayer is a subscription service utilizing a computer with text-to-speech capability to incant your prayers each day. It gives you the satisfaction of knowing that your prayers will always be said even if you wake up late, or forget."

And continuing the grand tradition of 'something for everyone' on the Internet, the prayers are not only for those who walk in the footsteps of Jesus. Jewish? No problem. Muslim? Come on up. Here is a screen shot:

Of course, the service comes with a 'disclaimer':

"At Information Age Prayer we think our service should be used like a prayer supplement, to extend and strengthen a subscriber's connection with God. Traditional prayer is an integral part of this connection and should never be forgone, even after signing up."

Got that last bit? Good. Now that you have promised to say your prayers, like the good person that you are (you didn't really think you could get off that easy did you?), go ahead and sign up! They've got a special promotional discount for new users for a limited time only (what self respecting promotion isn't?!!).

The world is coming to an end people. And just as predicted, the Internet did it!

Wake me when it's over.

One App to Rule Them All...part 2

2009-03-14T11:55:00.001+05:30

Well I put Digsby through its paces for the last couple of days. I should say I'm impressed with it. It offers loads of pretty skins, which is very important to me (you can laugh all you want RS), is very easy to setup (I was up and running my Google,yahoo and MSN accounts in minutes) and does a fantastic job of consolidating my online communication. It almost makes me want to twitter just so I can check out what it can do.

After all the tweaking, here's what it finally looks like:

I got to admit it looks good and works even better!! But, unfortunately there are two bugs which make it quite unusable for me.

File transfers across networks or even the same network does not work (I tried gtalk to gtalk-failed, yahoo to yahoo-failed, and gtalk to yahoo-failed). For all I know this could be a problem with the respective networks, it still means I cannot use it
Running digsby puts a serious load on my laptop and that is definitely a drawback to this otherwise solid app. The only program to use more memory was Firefox, which is already known to be a resource hog. I cannot have two hogs on the same machine now, can I?

Well so much for consolidation. Looks like I have to wait some more to get to that particular nirvana! P.S: For now I've settled with Pidgin, but if anyone knows of any good IM clients (multi protocol), let me know. I'm always on the lookout for something better.

Update: For those who are interested, Digsby is now available in a portable version.

One App to Rule Them All

2009-03-12T12:09:00.001+05:30

Finally It happened.

I thought I had safely corralled all of my friends into the same IM network, thus ensuring I could survive with just one IM client (for the curious ones,GTalk). As for email, I got it all together in two accounts (Gmail & Hotmail). Thankfully I use just one social network. I thought I was king ahem *cough* no, the queen of consolidation.

Turns out I was wrong. I still have a ways to go. Enter Digsby. What can it do? In a few short words: IM+Email+Social Networks. For those who are interested, click through for a download - Digsby

It has quite a few unique features, not that I've used many multi-protocol clients. Apart from being able to chat across various disparate networks, you can check your mail from different accounts and keep up with all your friends on twitter, Facebook and what not. You can reply to messages from the pop up, so you never have to switch from what you were doing and have multiple conversations in the same tabbed window. And to top it all, it is completely customizable.

Keep reading...Review and screens coming up!

In defence of Reason

2009-03-09T12:06:00.000+05:30

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. - Galileo Galilei

I have often wondered why people object so often to the use of sense and reason. Many people when even asked this question will probably claim that yes, they do value rationality and reason. But dig a little deeper and I often find contradictions.

Take religion, why that almost always requires a suspension of reason and intellect. Oh! if I had a nickel for every time I've heard the sentence 'You have to believe'. One of the more interesting arguments I have come across to prove the existence of God is that of the empty room. It goes something like this. You are in an darkened room. There is another person inside with you whom you cannot see because it is dark. Does that imply that the person is non-existent? Surely not. Invisibility does not imply non-existence of course. Presto! God does exist. Not so fast. The invisible and the non existent do look awfully similar. How do you really know?

Faith is a cop-out. If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can’t be taken on its own merits. - Dan Barker

Precisely.

Next up on the table, culture & traditions. Both are evolutionary manifestations of changing societies. They are ever changing from one generation to the next, they are dynamic. Yet strangely enough people insist that their traditions have been carried on for years and will be continued as such even if there is no reason to do so in the present. So, is culture a static phenomenon then? Surely not. No rational person can say that he/she follows all those traditions that their parents/grandparents followed decades ago. Reason dictates that culture evolves to accommodate change and progress. But then, when is Man ever reasonable?

One is tempted to define man as a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. - Oscar Wilde

Well said!

And the saga continues!

What's the world's cheapest car?

2009-02-28T12:16:00.001+05:30

Of course it is the Nano. Everyone and their dog knows it; unless you aren't an Indian or have been living under a rock for the last two years. But imagine my surprise finding it on the How Stuff Works website (one of my favorite reads, title is self explanatory). Call me weird, but it actually had me feeling all warm and fuzzy.

In spite of all the hue and cry about congestion, traffic, pollution etc., I'd really like to see this car succeed (and before you ask, it has nothing to do with the car being 'Indian'). Maybe then, these issues will finally be addressed.

HowStuffWorks "What's the world's cheapest car?"

Scribefire vs. Windows Live Writer

2009-02-26T12:32:00.001+05:30

As you can see, I have started blogging only recently. So far I have used the native platform offered by Blogger to create and edit my posts. But it's kind of limited in scope. Uploading pictures is a long drawn out process and also a bit wonky (sometimes it works, other times not) plus formatting options are limited. So, I started looking around for blog editors.

Only two really stood out from the rest. One was Windows Live Writer.My first reaction? Microsoft? No way could it be good.But after downloading a hefty 17 MB file and installing it (beware! as usual, MS tries to install other 'Live Apps',) and playing around for a while, I had to change my opinion. The wizard is very helpful and a breeze to follow. Setting up a connection to your blog is very easy and takes just a few steps. Creating, editing and formatting posts is also a snap. In fact, this is one of the few apps that Microsoft gets right. Live writer also connects to your blog and downloads the CSS, so you know how your posts look even while typing.

The other editor I tried, Scribefire took a different route. It is not a standalone piece of software, instead it is an add on for my favourite browser - Firefox.

Downloading it took only a few minutes. Pressing F8 brings up the editing windows in the bottom half of my open tab. It handles all my posting needs in such a small interface. It has some additional benefits too, being browser based. Reading something interesting on a page? I can blog right from there. Pictures, text etc can all be dragged and dropped into my post. It also does not add any overhead to my CPU. I do not have to open up a separate application just to blog. Scribefire even sucked in my previous posts so I can easily edit them, should I chose to.

So which one am I going to use? Well, in spite of all the bells and whistles offered by WLW, Scribefire it is for me. Nothing quite beats it for quick blogging-on-the-go. Why I picked Scribefire:

Quick
Integrates easily into my work flow
Compact appearance and small footprint
Drag and drop feature

Update (12 April, 2009): Looks like I’ll have to eat my words. WLW is far better than Scribefire for blogging. It has many advanced options absent in scribefire, especially image manipulation and formatting. Also, inserting URLs manually was a pain in scribefire. Besides, WLW fits my workflow a lot better, I spent way too much time on formatting than actually writing in the other one. Yes, RS you can say ‘I told you so!’
I also found a portable version that is perfect for me (it means I can get rid of all the crap that MS installs).

Making Rasagullas

2009-02-25T11:38:00.003+05:30

Making Rasagullas | The Imagined Universe

If ever I round up the courage to step into the kitchen and actually make something, this is the way it will go no doubt!

Most efficient free market...

2009-02-24T12:50:00.001+05:30

Intrigued? Who wouldn't be? After all, this comes at a time when even the biggest proponent of free markets, that giant capitalist engine called the US of A, has admitted to market failures and errors. So what market might I be referring to?

But of course the great Indian Bridegoom market/mela!!!

Before I go on, I'd like to point out where this rant is coming from.

Blog: GenX and the Dowry Demon

Also be sure to read all of the comments. They make for quite good reading.

This is no doubt a very efficient market when it comes to arranging marriages. All the variables are priced properly including salary & family background (for the boy); beauty and 'acceptable' level of intelligence (for the girl). Doctors and IT engineers are more expensive of course, even better if you are an NRI. Exactly what you would expect.

If the girl is beautiful, then the price drops a bit. If she has a job, (which by the way, she should be ready to quit if it interferes with her 'wifely' duties), then again price drops. I wonder if anyone noticed I put acceptable in quotes. What constitutes acceptable level of intelligence? It's pretty simple. She should be intelligent enough to be able to converse with the boy's friends and hold down a job (usually in the good 'ol US of A), but not smart enough to think for her own or make decisions!!! She should be able to hold her own against everyone except the boy and his family/relatives. The girl should be able to cook, clean and keep house with the best of them (popular euphemism is 'homely' or 'traditional values' as if honesty,courage,competency are not traditional values) & also be a whiz at computers, driving, corporate networking and what not (aka 'modern', while independent thinking, decision making capacity or rationality are not acceptable).

If the laundry list for girls seems to be a tad too long, I apologize, but as my mother says, welcome to reality! Once all these criteria are satisfied, the price is fixed. If this is acceptable to both sides, then the marriage is finalized. Isn't this a most efficient market? Even I must admit, I admire its working. And the best part is, no market failures, at least according to my mother because there are no divorces.

Aah I hear protests. Shouldn't the real test of the market's efficiency be if the couple is actually happy? No divorce doesn't necessarily equate to happiness. That's like saying I love my job simply because I haven't quit. Pooh pooh says my mom, as long as there are no divorces nothing else matters.

(Now be quite, you have asked enough questions now. Good girls don't ask questions, of course if you are a guy, go ahead. YOU have every right to!)

Frankly it seems about as complicated as a corporate acquisition, although I do wonder who is the buyer and the target considering both the value and the cash paid is in the same direction! Usually, one party sells the goods/services while the other one pays money for goods/services. So what can I say when the parents of the girl have to part with her and pay money to the boy for this supreme privilege?

I can only conclude that I, just myself, as a girl, am not enough to tempt any guy to marry me which means my parents have to offer money to convince him to do so! I am not even going to get into what that implies right now. And the best part of this whole circus – nobody and I do mean nobody seems to mind it one bit!

The more things change the more they remain the same…

Linux Machinations

2009-02-21T12:55:00.001+05:30

Kubuntu Rocks!!! - Ubuntu+KDE for the uninitiated

It really is amazing. I used to think Linux as similar to kung - fu. Arcane language, command line acrobatics and what not.

Now, I'm not unfamiliar with computers but I'm no geek either. Yet I was able to install Kubuntu all on my own. My laptop was up and wearing its Linux cool within hours (it took just under 3 hrs). In fact the longest time was taken for downloading the CD image of the distro.

This says a lot about how far Linux distros have come, especially a specific few like Ubuntu. This has got to be one of the most accessible distros out in the wild. Yet this not to say that Linux can compete with windows any time soon. It's not even close. While installing apps and games has been made more streamlined, it is still confusing for the average person looking to switch from windows.

While everyone may vent at Microsoft's crappy software, they still expect things to work with minimum effort from them. A typical user does not want to hunt around for packages and software to do even the basic things, figure out internet settings, Wifi, Bluetooth etc and do all this all over again every time Linux is installed.

To add to all of this, every new install is different. What worked for me on my computer may not work for you and vice-versa. Got Linux working on your laptop? Don't expect things to be hunky dory on your PC.

Still I have to say, it's very satisfying to install Linux and see it working. All I can say is that if I can do it, most anyone can. I wonder what adventures await me in Tux land!

Now That's Advertising

2009-02-20T12:58:00.004+05:30

In December 2004, a two-page ad ran in The New York Times promoting Firefox. The main text read:

Are you fed up with your Web browser? You're not alone. We want you to know that there is an alternative.

The sponsors of the ad were more than 10,000 Firefox fans who donated money to promote their favorite indie browser. The ad was intended to coincide with the release of Firefox 1.0 in November 2004, but publication was delayed -- it took until December to figure out how to squeeze the names of more than 10,000 underwriters into the spread.

Via HowStuffWorks

Now that is definitely one for the nutty bin...

Other Insurance Companies	LIC
Air Conditioning	Fans – Broken or absent
Plush sofas	Invisible Chairs
Brand new offices	50 year old offices
Customer Care Executives	We Don’t Care Officers