What's wrong?

• We claim to be a "healthy" democracy. But people like Narendra Modi and Ananth Singh keep on eating away at this health. Meanwhile the political circus in Karnataka makes a mockery of democracy.
  
• West Bengal claims to have a communist government. Not that I am taking any sides but how ironic then of CPI-M workers fighting for an SEZ in Nandigram.
• We are around 8% GDP growth rate. Our software exports are increasing. However, solutions for smaller technical challenges like roads that do not dissolve away with the first rain seem to elude us. A largely agricultural economy lies waste with farmers in almost all parts of our country impoverished and taking to suicides. When one passes through our country side it is a sorry picture of large numbers of people tending to small patches of land. Our rural economy continues to be largely inefficient, over employing and producing a lot lesser than it could.
• We want to be like the Australia when it comes to cricket. But when an out of form Dravid is dropped the whole nation screams.
  

A lot is wrong. A lot should change.

दिवाली की शुभ कामनाएं

Happy Diwali to all!

Festival time!

दशहरे की शुभ कामनाऍ ! Happy Dasera!

My First Kerala Ayurvedic Massage.

So I just wrote an email to a group of friends about my weekend break in Kerala.. An excerpt from that email..

masseur: Remove you clothes.
me: removed shirt and pant.
masseur: ties a "nada" around my waist.
me: what is this for?
masseur: this is for your special dress.
me: ?
masseur: takes a rather narrow rectangular piece of sheer white cloth and tucks it in from the front leaving the cloth hanging over my crotch. Then says "Now remove your underpant"
me: "aa, remove ..aa.. ok.". So I removed my underpants..meanwhile the white cloth covers up my naked crotch rather precariously :)
masseur: Goes around and pulls the cloth between my legs and tucks it in from behind covering the crack :) Then gives me head massage for a while..then asks me to lie face down on a traditional wooden massage table.
me: lie down gingerly.. taking care that the cloth does not move too much :p
masseur: puts oil here and there.. then unties the nada..pulls down the cloth..
me: Think to myself.. umm..hmm..ok.. nothing much I can do since he is anyways going to charge me a thousand bucks.. so I relax and enjoy the massage.. wondering how he manages to touch and massage ugly black asses of strangers :D

Back in town!

Me back in Bangalore after 5 weeks in Mountain View. Meanwhile stuff that Megha was working on secretly for a while, Amazon Flexible Payment System, has been launched. More later.

The iPhone feels real cool

As it so happens I got the chance to hold and play with the iPhone a week back here in Santa Clara. As a lot of people have already said before..it is super sexy. The high res screen is real real crisp. And the hand gestures like flipping through photos and CD covers is just awesome...feels like its out of a sci-fi movie. Would be interesting to know what happens to the iPods now. The Mac OSx based ones have already been announced.

And thus we riot

In the beginning there was independence brought about by a largely non-violent struggle. Sometime between then and now the non-violence got lost in our protests. Almost all of our social/political protests nowadays take violent turns. The recent Gujjar protests in Rajasthan are a prime example. The question to ask is who is responsible for this state of affairs, people or the rulers of our country i.e. the political class who take turns at the job.

It seems like a chicken and egg problem. Either can be blamed.

One can say that the protesters are not prepared to engage in non-violent civil disobedience and the state is compelled to respond to the violent protests given the loss of life and property that might result if they don't. Seeing the Gujjar protests one feels this.

One can also say that the state never listens to non-violent civil disobedience and hence people are compelled to protest violently since that is the only way they will be heard. One just has to look at the apathy and tyranny of our state in case of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (that for the last several years has engaged in non-violent protests and has been meted out injustice and apathy even by the Supreme Court) and there is a strong case for blaming the state.

Maybe its best to see India as a violent India and a non-violent India rather than just people and state in the context of this issue. We as a society seem to have lost the ethos for non-violent civil disobedience, and having lost it, we find that most of the political class and a lot of our protesters are firmly in the violent camp. Its a shame that the two biggest parties in our country have a history of violence, anti-Sikh riots being the Congress party's achievement and Gujarat the feather in the BJP's cap. Given this then the state is to blame, right? But then it is also said that people get the government they choose and deserve and so the people are to blame. And thus we go round and round in the blame-circle of life. And thus we riot, kill and destroy.

We need one of them to step in and have the patience to break this cycle.

Now that you 've called him Sir, we 'll bomb you!

If you proclaim that two people are your enemies and one of them honours the other, should you raise a storm over it? NO NO NO!! But apparently the Muslim extremists the world over do not get this. The knighthood of Mr. Rushdie is an insult to us and our religion, they say. Here we have a nation that has a colonial legacy and imperialist present (read support for the war on of terror :-) ) , conferring a title on a writer, who in the first place should not have accepted it, and instead of looking at the whole thing as an exercise in stupidity it is perceived as an insult and a hue and cry is raised over it. Someone has also called for a strike in Kashmir, he he he. I wait to hear the liberal voice, preferrably Muslim, denouncing this on national television.

Jesus Stop!!

This is what happens when god is publicised overzealously :-) They end up asking him to stop.. The Jesus sticker can nowadays be found on most of Bangalore's traffic signs.

What Arundhati Roy gets right and what she gets wrong.

I have read two of her socio/political books, The Algebra of Infinite Justice and The Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. Both are very well written as is expected from an author of her stature. Her tongue is sharp and the vivid picture she paints about the capability of our government for repression of its own people in the stories about the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the dirty world of big business behind it, the IMF, the World Bank and most depressing of all the Indian Supreme court's cavalier judgements in the matter leaves one with a lot of questions. Questions about our way of life and about the crazy comfort zone that we the privileged few live in. And most of all one is left with a sense of helplessness, of frustration and of anger. All this she gets right, spot on.
However, on reading both of the books one cannot but disagree with her views on globalization and private enterprise. It just feels that she does not get it at all. She is critical of the government in almost every paragraph of her writings. However in the same breathe she is also critical of globalization and privatization. I am not claiming that privatization is without its evils. However for me it is the lesser of the two evils where the second happens to be complete government control. I do not want to go into why private enterprise is better. It has been argued and documented by better people before. However just for quick examples look at the telecom industry in India, compare it with the times when about 7 years ago one used to wait for late night calls to ones home (and they still used to cost more than what a prime time call today costs) and you ll know. Her commentary assumes that private business and earning money is inherently vulgar and evil. It is hard for me to digest why she has such an irrational point of view. If one does not approve of private enterprise and also not approve of government enterprise, what is the alternative left, whom do you trust? Should we go back to being a hunter-gatherer society? I remember a certain IITB professor once saying that the industrial revolution has been the single biggest mistake in the history of mankind. Maybe Arundhati Roy will also support that view.

Sacrifice?

Its that time of the year when the media does the annual academic results dance and props up all and sundry e.g. Seen on NDTV..a girl chose to not do some dance with SRK and concentrated on her studies ..when interviewed she said thus "My sacrifice really paid off...." Sacrifice?? Hello?
On a related and more serious note the IIT-JEE results are also out. Those lucky few who made it are of course happy and should be. The news stories point out that about 250000 applicants vie for the ~4600 seats and then go on to how difficult it is to get through the test blah blah. None however raises the more serious issues of why in our country is there a shortfall of quality education. Why should we be able to grant the best engineering education to only 4,600 students every year in a country of a billion people? Where's the rot? What's stagnating the education industry? Who benefits from this constricted supply? Why do most of the engineering colleges in the country have a politician connection? These are the questions that they need to probe and air rather than the banal stuff that they dish out yearly.

Modi, Art and Lions

A lot of the (very few remaining) Asiatic lions in Gujarat's Gir sanctuary have recently died raising alarms with the conservationists. Some therefore asked for some of the lions to be moved to another sanctuary. But the Gujarat govt said that these lions are the pride of Gujarat..well that is true you know...a pride of lions living anywhere would be a pride of that place then won't it :-).
Elsewhere in the state right wingers called out an attack on an art exhibition alleging obscenity. We all know that our tradition and religion "was open" in matters of sexuality. Go to Khajuraho towards the north, Halibeedu and Belur temples (Note: _temples_ ) towards the south and plenty more I guess and you ll know. (I hate to repeat these examples again and again but in the interests of contributing to the collective liberal voice I shall do it anyways.) Look at the site Kamat's Potpourri for a collection of images and essays describing our rich and open heritage. But we are digressing here..
I want to add another reason for the movement of lions out of Gujarat. Given the ideas of obscenity that some people have in Gujarat I am afraid that the lions there might soon stop fornicating..what if some wild VHP-BJP animal takes objection about the pride of Gujarat indulging in indecent acts and gets them jailed or killed :p. I say get lions out now.

God exists, sometimes

When you postpone a visit to the dentist for treating a cavity and you do so by 4 months and then get away without a root canal...you are inclined ever so slightly to believe that HE is looking out for you!

Publicizing the joy

The joy of using eclipse across two side by side vertical 24" flat panel LCD monitors is worth publicizing :-) It is a serious productivity booster. Larger views, less scrolling, more info. Imagine not having to scroll your variables view even when the string representation of a var crosses 80 chars! This and other joys..some the +ves of working at a great place :)

Lost

So recently I had been to Mountain View and things started going bad the moment I reached there. Indian team lost in the preliminaries. And while they were busy losing games, I was busy losing my gadgets. First came the digital camera. To make matters worse it was a borrowed one :(( Then a bit later my pride of not having lost a single cell phone was broken too. Story goes that I was in the loo and you know..was just catching up with a game of "Worms" on the Sony Ericsson w550i as a parallel activity and then as I proceeded for the "post" rituals I kept the phone on a mantle and there it stayed till some dishonest ass flicked it. So currently I am without a cell..so dont bother calling on my number. Just ping me on mail/chat or something and I ll call you.

Of course I shouldn't be ending a blog post without calling the BCCI a bunch of jokers. Seriously they are all men-in-plights lost in a dark room. I wonder what stops the top players of the country from forming an independent association or if not that from atleast taking on the BCCI for the lack of professionalism once and for all.

The end of Imaginathon?

Has the nuptial knot nuke led to the end of Imaginathon? Suhail where are you dude?

A little thing that had to wait..

The little marathi caption to the last (slightly distasteful :-)) post came in quite a few days after the video was posted. It had to wait because there was some little bug that prevented me from posting transliterated text with a video. Needless to say it has been fixed now!

Holy Cow!!!

Google Cricket World Cup site launched.

Join in the cricket fun on Google!
This is a world cup special launch by Google.

Every once in a while..

the अर्ध-सत्य guy comes up with a gem..here is one of them from last October.

A five-year old tot
Mailed Kalam, a Viagra dot
He'd heard that the missile man's gun
Took more than two decades to come

It relates to the development times for the much hyped Trishul missiles.

हिंदी ट्रांस्लितेरेशन

हिंदी ब्लॉगर लॉन्च हो गया है :-) परंतु क्या इसका मतलब है कि मराठी भी लिख सकते है?
कदाचित लिहू शकतो असे वाटत आहे :-) This is pretty cool eh!

define:cruelty

Creulty is working at the Googleplex and being afflicted with GERD . I reached Mountain View about a week back and my amazement still continues. The food is awesome here. Its like eating in a 5 star restaurant day in and day out, breakfast, lunch and dinner and all times in between :-) It is hard to keep your hands off food..the cafe that I go to serves Italian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican and Continental along with a salad bar and 3-4 desserts. I invariably hog and keep on chewing antacids between the meals. God help me gain some control please. In other non-cruel news just the second day of the working week I had the opportunity to go on the Google Ski Trip to the Squaw Valley Resort. It was a lot of fun..skiing during the day and an awesome party at night.

VISA interview, Kingfisher flight and dental floss

Last Wednesday I was in Delhi for a VISA interview at the US consulate. After going through the whole process it felt like an anti-climax..do they call you all the way from your city of residence to the consulate just to ask you banal questions like "Where do you work?", "Why are you travelling?", "How much do you earn each year?" etc and taking two finger prints? Agreed that I was applying under the BEP program that makes it a bit easy for the applicants to go through the process but then if you can make it so easy then why not just call for my documents and passport. Why do they need me to travel personally for all this. The whole process is just stupid and wastes productive time.

Anyways, while in Delhi I took the opportunity to meet with Chirag and Prateek. I saw Webaroo's Delhi office and it looked much better than what we had when we all used to work for firstRain :-)

On the way back the stupid flight was delayed and it was pretty sad for me in the meantime see the Indian team going down in a heap. The real fun however started when I boarded the flight. There was gentleman next to me who was according to my breathe analyzer a bit drunk. Well nothing wrong with that..I am drunk too quite a few times..infact on international flights they like you to get drunk..but that's not the point. What was surprising was that this person kept on eating some sort of mouth freshner all through the 3 hrs of the flight :o And not just that, he occasionally also spat out the remnants of his freshner in the air sickness bag..arrggghh.. but the worse was yet to come..at the end of the flight out came a floss and the mouth freshness freak flossed his teeth right next to me..aaarrrghh aaaarrgh aaarrgh..and then very coldly stuffed the used floss in the seat pocket.. so much for being suited booted and all that..

PS: BTW I took the Jet Airways flight from Bangalore to Delhi and they have pretty cool touch screen in-flight entertainment systems with nice content.

Still a quitter

For Prajakt's satisfaction, I hereby ascertain explicitly that I am still a quitter :-)
And news from the Google joining front is that I would be traveling to Mountain View late January if the VISA gods bless me favourably. Most of my time nowadays is spent reading through piles and piles of documentation which is great since I am learning a lot of new and really interesting stuff..I won't be able to reveal about what though :-) but you can take reasonable guesses! Life is pretty cool here..there's a pick up and drop service and there's breakfast, lunch and Subway sandwiches in the evening..and lots of snacks and drinks for the intermediate times not covered by the above three :-) That's all for now..more updates later..

From the inside

I joined Google yesterday. From the inside the first impression is "AWESOME"!!! The place is lively , the colors are bright and the people are great...and ya the food and drink stuff has been keeping me quite busy :-) Of course its a small world nowadays..so I ran into a team member who has worked at Webaroo and another one who comes from Trilogy and was talking about a tool that Megha had worked on in SQATech..I think the days to come will be quite exciting.

You and I, in this beautiful world..

The Hutch campaign with the pug following the kid is back on air. Its a nice ad, little boy, cute dog, nice jingle but the truth is that the "our network follows" claim is utter bullshit. I think it is so very bullshit because in my office on Airport road right in the heart of Bangalore city where all other networks follow you without explicitly saying so, people with Hutch connections have plenty to cry about! And its not as if we are in a deep cave of something..shame on you Hutch..your network symbolizing omnipresent wrinkly toy doggy just cannot get past the access control in our office..
Update: And of course here is some trivia about the dog.