Part Of Being Sane Is Being A Little Crazy

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 we...

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! F...

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? 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 coll...

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 reaso...

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. 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 ...

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...

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 traveled 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...