Phase I

(00:02)

Amit leaned across from his desk and dialed the number he dialed every day at precisely this time in the evening-The Goldilocks zone, when everyone required for the discussion across all time zones was awake and fresh. His fingers flew over the numbers on the phone and he stared absently at his screen as he waited for the cheery ‘Hello’ to interrupt the ringing tone.

He sat up straight and stared into the darkness in front of him. He was sure he was seeing the colours of his wall painting dripping from their canvas onto the floor. He was also sure he wasn’t. And what of that smell? There was no reason for that smell to penetrate his nostrils, where he was. But it was! This inherent mistrust of his own senses made him question whether to believe the message that the next of his senses was conveying- that noise! He reached for the button which he vaguely remembered stopped that noise. Ah, Silence.

(06:11)

The connection was being really bad today. It always happened on trans-Atlantic phone conversations, irrespective of the amount of progress that the telecommunications industry had made over the past few years. The person at the other end wasn’t helping either, with his constant mumbling. Amit looked at the clock and sighed. It had been more than 5 minutes and they hadn’t really got closure on the first issue they had been discussing. He sighed, forced himself to concentrate on the call and strained his ears to hear better.

He opened his eyes and let his mind register the dim light illuminating the room. He smiled to himself as he thought how just a single light was enough to dispel any amount of darkness. Amount of darkness? Was darkness quantifiable? For that matter, was light quantifiable? He remembered a conversation he had had a few days ago...

“What’s that?”

“It’s a lava lamp man. That’s electric arcs streaking inside”

“Sweet. How does it work?”

“So if you touch it, your fingers create the potential difference, and the electric arcs converge to it”

“Nice. But you should be able to control it remotely too”

“How?”

“With your eyes. Light is a particle right? So if you stare at it long enough, or hard enough, you should get enough light particles on the lamp to create that potential?”

“Yeah... no. Your eyes don’t emit light. They absorb them.”

"Ah. Damn”

(08:23)

Amit was beginning to wish the emotional baseline of this conversation was a little flatter. The caller had gone from monotonous mumbling to quite an excited state, even agitated. The deadlines were close and they had closed only one of the five issues they had to discuss. He didn’t like it when he had unclear issues on his hand; it messed up his mental plan. And he didn’t work well with messed up plans. He was getting increasingly impatient for his turn to speak, he was barely getting a word in right now.

He forced himself to shift his body into a vertical position. He knew he had accomplished that task when he saw himself staring at the painting again, as opposed to the ceiling that he had been staring at for the last ten minutes. The room was beginning to feel stuffy too, all of a sudden. It was so hot in there... No wait, it was actually cold. Nope, hot again. It was being... groovy. Either way he had to get out of the room but he just couldn’t make himself. He was beginning to feel mildly perturbed. Surely he should be able to get out of this room? Of course he could. As soon as he could get up.

(11:33)

Amit was relieved the call was coming to an end. They had clarified all that he wanted cleared up, though he was not sure about the confidence level of the person at the other end of the line. He wasn’t going to be unduly worried about that, he wanted to get home as soon as he could today. It was his son’s 5^th birthday, and he had already missed the 4^th birthday party because he was off on official business. He paused long enough to make sure that the person at the other end had nothing more to say as well, and then ended the call with his usual farewell message, “Alright then, Goodbye, Brian”

He rolled over and as if like a trained response, hit the button that he always did when he heard that phrase. Apparently it ended something...

Brian’s rocky journey ended twelve hours after it had so innocently begun. He was shattered by it...

CWG 'shame' is fine, but what about daily life?

The last three months have seen cringe-worthy behaviour from all fields of our beautiful, huge, over-populated, 'developing' country. First the sports bodies involved with the Commonwealth Games, then the beauracracy involved with the sports bodies, and on top of it all, the press involved with all of the above, who outdid each other in claiming the 'first to have unearthed the scam'. Clap clap, congrats to you, you are up for the upcoming Peace Nobel for this monumental achievement. News seems to be the new entertainment - always on, unearthing 'breaking stories' hour after hour involving oil spills, games scams and Deepika Padukone's cat getting stuck up a tree. This arrival of 24x7 media hasn't exactly helped the world I feel, but that's a debate for another post.

So, as I was saying, there has been approximately INR 20,000 crore siphoned off the games so far. I have no clue how to type the new Rupee symbol - a symbol which represents our arrival on the world stage, our economic clout, and in this case, our unending corruption. It's a crying shame that the first widespread use of the new symbol was when those news items about 'Treadmills for INR 10 Lakhs' were splashed all over the pages of one of the above 'we saw it first' media houses. Just goes to show, you can change the symbol, but you can't change the people.

So now, unlike Beijing and later South Africa, the hosting of a games has mostly pulled down any respect India gained over the last 10 years. It's just been a case of the Emperor's New Clothes all along, India Shining, India and China, Neo-liberalization, all other associated bullcrap. And while all the attention has been rightly focussed on this monumental mess up, I have one minor question to anyone who cares to listen - What about the smaller people and the smaller 'somethings' that are given everyday.

Here's a small experiment. Someone please tell me the exact fee, as laid down by the law, for:

1. Getting a driver's licence from a state-established RTO.
2. Changing registration/paying a state's road tax (I don't get why the heck Road Tax is a state subject in the first place, but again, I digress)
3. Getting a passport, including that very famous step of 'police verification'
4. Getting a birth/marriage certificate.

Rates aside, I have one other question for the list. Why does it take, and is accepted as the norm, for an Income Tax refund to come after 3 years of the year of Assesment? I mean, it's the age of the TDS and NEFT transfer. I should pay my taxes promptly before I even receive my salary, but if I have to get a refund I wait 3 years? Heck, I probably belong to a very small percentage of our Billion+ sweethearts who even pay the friggin tax at source. The least that can be done is settle my accounts at the end of every fiscal.

I guess my point is that unless we stop this 'thousand for this saaar', 'chief officer will also have to be satisfied saaar', 'it will take 3 months to get this signed, but I know a way it can be done quicker saaar' habit of ours in our daily life, practiced by a million people every day, there's no point losing sleep over all those crores that went down a few very fat pockets in Delhi. Between us, India's famed New Middle Class, would've hit the total amount of the scam over the course of barely 4 years of our lives. We really can't complain about someone thinking they can get away with doing it over 4 weeks.

Sigh.

Another bag - and a very strange look

In keeping with the usual Indian habit of not practicing what we preach, I almost stepped out yesterday to buy my breakfast items without a bag. Thankfully I was reminded of my preaching by my very alert roommate and I succesfully stepped out with what has now become my shopping cover (a plastic bag admittedly, but it is reuse!)

Note, this shop is different from the one in my previous post. It's smaller, family-run and less crowded than the retail chain. So with all required items purchased, I stepped up to the counter again. Again, just as the items were about to be bagged, I pulled out my own bag and presented it to the man. The look that I got from him at that moment was somewhere between what E.T got when it first landed on earth and the look that George.W.Bush has got throughout the time he has been on earth. In fact, if I weren't a regular customer, it seemed pretty sure he was going to label me crazy and chase me out of the shop.

If you're the logical type, it is an irrational act on many levels. I am saving them one bag, irrespective of how miniscule that cos saving is. This shop did not have any branding on its bag anyway, and neither did the bag that I took. Hence there is no marketing loss. And yet, from an anthropological perspective, it was a perfectly natural thing to do. It is called inertia. Or 'status quo' bias. I ticked him off so much simply by breaking his process of grabbing a fresh plastic bag from his stack, blowing it open, dumping the things inside... the whole line. I broke the process, with an 'unnatural' act, and hence it became extra effort for the person.

Any object at rest or motion will continue to remain in rest or motion unless acted upon by an external force...

I saved one plastic bag today

Every time I go to a retailer, I get the mandatory plastic bag in which to put the items I have purchased. This happens repetitively, the bag is in use for barely 20 minutes (walking back home for a maximum of 1km) and they all pile up in one shelf in my cupboard one after another. Hence, they are also annoying.

Today, when I had to buy a bunch of household essentials from the friendly neighbourhood retailer, this time I took my own bag. Or rather, a bag I'd got from the same friendly neighbourhood retailer just three days ago. When I reached the head of the counter and the cashier reached for the bag, I whipped out my white used bag from my pocket in my best Clint Eastwood impression. The man at the till looked at me quizzically, but there's of course no reason for him to reject my wish to use my own bag. And he duly filled 'er up and sent me on my way. The bag held for the 20 minute walk, got emptied in my house and went back into the shelf.

It isn't exactly an earth-saving act. It's one plastic bag less and that too for a very selfish reason of reducing the clutter in my cupboard. But if it has served the purpose it was meant to serve just as well as a new bag, and if I can use the same bag over at least 10 purchases, that's 9 less plastic bags in landfills like these:


Of course, I am now naturally inclined to get holier-then-thou and ask you to think about how much lesser bags there would be if each of us reduced 9 plastic bags from being used. Or use fancy terms like BYOB (Bring Your Own Bag) and expound upon the merits of doing that as well. Or tell you how we can even put that 1 bag out of use if we use a jute bag. However, I'll resist all those inclinations now. All that's for later. This post is only about what I did. And what I did was save one plastic bag today.

So what did you do today?

The UID Project

Dear Mr. Nilekani,

Firstly, let me congratulate you for stepping back from the corporate world and consenting to take upon yourself the onerous task of accounting for every single one of our 1.3 Billion and growing population. As a 'giving back' step to society, it is very commendable and it also helps that you've picked what is definitely an area of expertise to give back in. Hopefully you can bring all of your expertise and know-how gained in the corporate world and see this project to completion successfully.

I remember when the UID project was announced and you were given special cabinet rank to execute it. I remember your interview over phone with Shereen Bahn on CNBC, not one on my regular-channels list admittedly. After that of course the project has been going on, as always happens with projects of this size and magnitude, at its own pace and time. And cost. So why am I suddenly reminded about this now?

The reason is because today, I got Uniquely IDed. A census officer came over to our place today as part of the National 2010 census, and also to collect details for the UID. And the whole experience left me with a lot of headaches about the management of the project, which I'm sure have crossed your mind as well and you are looking to solve. Still, as a concerned citizen, just my two penny worth of thoughts in what will finally give the Social Security number equivalent to all of us in this country.

Firstly, there are three of us living in a shared apartment - an undeniable feature of almost every house in a radius of 5kms from where I live. I'm sure the same is the case with houses in Bangalore, Chennai, Mumbai and every other city in this country. Most of us are temporary residents there with permanent addresses all given differently. In such a situation, is there going to be an effort to cross-reference people scattered over the country to the actual households they belong to? By permanent address or something would be the way to go I'd think?

The second issue is with the language. The officer who came around took down our names in the regional language. I'm sure there is going to be a lot of Lost in Translation occurring when these names are transliterated back into English for the UID. And I don't want any issues when the spelling on my UID does not match the spelling on my passport because someone made a typo at the data entry point.

Also I would apparently receive my UID from the local Corporation, 6 months down the line. What if I'm not in this Corporation 6 months down the line? And have surrendered my local phone number? It is the only means of contact that the Census officer has for all three of us in this house, since he took my name as 'head of the family' - another concept which cannot apply to shared residences like ours. Anyway yes. I'm now tied down to this city's Corporation for the Identity Proof which is supposedly trans-national and should be provided to ALL citizens of this country.

Those are just some of the issues that I, solely from my point of view, thought about. Expanding my line of thought to the logistics and data collection of the exercise throws up a lot more questions. For example, will the Database be able to cross-reference me and my father as belonging to the same family, though our census happened in different cities? How would it do this, considering the permanent address cannot be a unique key on which databases can be related. The census officer mentioned that he'd come around 5 times to a house. Even allowing that all visits are on weekends, that's about 5 visits over a month. It's quite likely that families are out on month-long vacations. Especially in the summer. Do they just get missed then?

I'm sure there are some issues among these which have been dismissed as inevitable. But there are some points where one wonders, can this not be done better. For example, there's already a huge database of unique Identifications in the form of the PAN card, especially among the salaried class. That's about 250 Million people that have been covered already, and there must be a way to sync that up with the census exercise. For the migrant issue, or the language issue, there's only so much care that can be taking I guess. But the point is, the painstaking and accurate part of the work has to come at this first point of data collection. And I somehow feel there should be a better way to structure this to avoid inaccuracies or double counts.

I guess that's why you're heading the project then, and not me. Because given enough manpower, I'm sure any educated Indian can get the rest of the process after the data collection right. It's to figure out how to get that part right, while ensuring it's not a mammoth time and cost exercise, that your experience comes in I guess. Well, I sure hope you can pull it off.

Regards.

Karthik Call Waiting

The multiplex-boom in India, with their over-cushioned seats, over-priced popcorn and over-stretched parking lots have led to a genre of made-for-multiplex movies. Movies coming from a distinctly setting, with characters that most people watching the movie recognize immediately as themselves, their cubicle-mate, their next-door neighbour... it's brought Hindi cinema a lot closer to its audience, at least the urban audience. However, it fails to take into account that this audience is also heavily into American/English pop-culture and is not going to appreciate one's recycling of old stories. KCK falls into that category.

A first heads-up for those who haven't watched the movie and haven't read up a synopsis of it anywhere - it's not a sugar-laden love story. Even if that's the impression you got watching Deepika Padukone making the collective male populace go 'Uffff, teri ada' on any of the innumerable music channels. If the friend next to you turns and says 'You didn't tell me you were bringing me to a horror movie', shrug and smile. For those who have read the synopsis and have a vague clue what it is about, it's not a thriller either. It's just confused. Like the protagonist himself.

I will not do a brief synopsis of the movie or anything because it's probably present in a million places. Farhan Akthar is Karthik, doing a role which you immediately think Irrfan Khan with his sleepy Vodafone ad voice would be much better at. Deepika Padukone is hot, and trying her best to justify her presence in the movie. There's a psychiatrist who takes 'stating the obvious' to levels never seen before. And there's a Japanese-made telephone which is quite eerie and is obviously the technological predecessor of later Japanese techno-horrors as seen in The Ring.

Karthik has issues in life (he's going to a psychiatrist, duh). The issues stem from childhood scarring, are made worse by a boss who doesn't have a single polite bone on his body, and the fact that the hottest girl in the office sees right through/over/above him. The last part he can have no complaints about I think, he's lucky there even is a hot girl in his office. But personal feelings aside, that's his life. And the psychiatrist is just no bloody help. Until... drumroll. Or rather, ring tone. It's a voice claiming to be Karthik and he rights everything in Karthik's (the non-phone one) life, within 30 first-half minutes. At this point, you're already thinking 'Ohh, Fight Club. Or Beautiful Mind'.

Obviously, he can't tell people about his phone friend without them calling him Cuckoo. Especially his girlfriend, who has apparently been through too many bad relationships and a cuckoo boyfriend is really the last thing she needs. Confusing, this lassie. She mocks him for being a 'safe guy who would never misbehave with a girl', then she says 'you won't be like all them other guys right?'. Make up your mind darling, do you want safe or sorry? A straight lift of a line from the sitcom Two and a Half Men about how girls:men::dogs:cars doesn't help clarify matters any. So anyway, the lassie says he better get help or else. And eerie phone Karthik simply doesn't like that. So everything he built in the 30-minute first half, he destroys in 30 seconds of the second half.

You'd think all the thoughts in your head about 'already seen this story, already heard this line, already know the ending'would stop at those. But the music director feels the need to make his presence felt as well, and a jarring background score to all of the Karthiks' encounter. Heavily 'inspired' by Clint Mansell, you wonder if that's the best mood you want to set for a poor guy having mental issues. Though again, 'Uff teri ada' is completely worth it all. As a visual experience.

Karthik calling Karthik takes two good 90-minute films and mixes them into a hodgepodge 120-minute one. It could either have been the story of a shy, introverted guy slowly overcoming his fears and all that with an imaginary friend type person. Imaginary friends are ok, they're mostly cute, they're always by the protagonist and they usually disappear when the job's done. Or it could have been the story of a tortured, scarred kid whose scars eventually affect him enough when he grows up to start taking apart his life. The one good thing probably was the conscious effort to leave no loose ends, as the 'summary' scene shows how Karthik actually knew everything that he wasn't supposed to know. Fair play there, well worked, at least they didn't make it descend into the realms of the supernatural. If only that effort had been put into a more organized screenplay.

Keeping with the movie's own theme, subconsciously you want to like KCK, appreciate it, applaud it. But consciously, it just comes across as one of those things for which you say 'Well tried. Maybe next time.'

Parallel Universe

Credits: Prabhav 'N2' Kashyap, who has clearly put a lot of thought into this, and even more clearly, feels quite strongly about it.

After 5 years at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, and two years before it preparing for the JEE, one has to enter the realm of what if and explore how the world would have turned out differently if certain key decisions had been taken differently at key junctures in one's life. The exploration of this parallel universe is necessitated even more by the realization that the 7 years past have done nothing to improve the quality of the 70 years which will follow, nor of the 7 itself which have passed by. Imagine all the Jews turning to Moses and going 'Dude, what promised land?'. Then multiply it a thousand times, throw in the feeling of United doing this to me, add the feeling of the 100s of Millions in our poor country who went and followed hockey just because Priyanka Chopra told them to, and you're still not close to what I'm feeling right now.

Speaking of, and as an aside, anyone notice the distinct correlation between good hockey teams and good football teams in this world cup? They guys who get regularly thrashed are us, Pakistan, South Africa, Canada and New Zealand. Everyone else in this World Cup have had a football team which has reached at least a quarterfinals of the corresponding World Cup in some edition. Maybe not Australia, but those buggers play anything anyway. I mean, our poor boys simply do not have the concept of an off-the-ball run. Or a 'tactical change'. The whole team is built around one trick, and it's called Sandeep Singh. But, we beat Pakistan, and in this country that's all that counts. This is way more blog space to devote to hockey than is required anyway.

On the other hand, imagine if us IITians had foregone that route and gone and done something like Economics at a reputed humanities college. Stephen's was the example used by the proposer of the theory, and Stephens it shall be, that we go with. That would have immediately saved the pre-college 2 years of JEE preparation, and one would have been more in tune with such important things in life as the best movie of the year or the coziest Coffee Day to go to with a girlfriend. In fact, one would have had a girlfriend to make all this happen. Even if not, there is no way three years in Stephen's can pass by barren unless you're a douche of the nth order with as much natural charm as a flea in the back pocket of Quasimodo. And even if you were that character, by the sheer law of averages, you have at least visually encountered more members of the female species than your current life path which takes you from a guy-infested school to guy-infested JEE class to IIT (which needs no adjectives) to similarly-guy-infested engineering jobs where you meet people who already know all your classmates from each of the above three institutions. Cos we're like that, us engineering types.

Just to show this is not a sexually-driven rant, I shall further back up my theory with other empirical and statistical evidence. Such an economics course would have ended in 3 years, making one pass out at a good enough time in history where Lehmann has still not gone "What the" and the rest of the world has still not gone "What the f*******k". Two more years of cash-earning, work-experience-adding, still-maintaining-contacts-from-Stephen's life right there. And the rest of the chaps in your life will not be all talking the same language of client calls, chargeable hours, cost efficiencies and "onsite" visits. Then of course, the whole world would have gone belly up, but at least you had two years to work towards it. And got some along the way.

By this point in one's career, one's educational pedigree has mostly been ignored anyway, so it doesn't matter where you passed out from as a fresh, eager, young graduate, full of hope and excitement about the world ahead and waiting to make one's own mark in it. 2 years down, there remains nothing but a shell of all this, so how does it matter what existed within that shell two years before. We're at one place now, we would've been at the same place two years earlier, and probably with the whole world in general a bit more cheerful too. Spreading the joy and the likes.

MLIA. A lot more sensible acronym than over-hyped crap like MNIK, with a 45 year-old trying to play the sequel to Taare Zameen Par. MLIA, which I didn't know either, apparently stands for My Life Is Average. How true. Sudden strong moment of empathy with Kevin Spacey from American Beauty. It was like Achilles said, or rather asked. About history remembering him after the Trojan War. But I think it's more like how good friend Gilmour said - Would you exchange, a walk on part in the war, for the lead role in a cage.

For what we do in life, echoes in eternity.

F.Art

Have I already put this one up before? Just thought the blog could do with a revival. So. Revive, oh blog!

Kevin was distraught. The culmination of all his years as a student of Fine Arts was this one piece. It combined the latest in contemporary art with the incredible world of science. It was a clash of colour and monochrome, of order and entropy, of geometry and art, of science and religion. It was a representation of the miniature world of incomprehensible particles found within an atom. And yet his professor had been completely dismissive about it. He called it ‘The Blow-Up’. His professor had called it a blow-off.

And so it happened that he was standing on the sidewalk next to his professor’s office, with his heart, soul, morale – everything except his canvas – torn to shreds. It was Saturday evening, and quite a few people had already spent the better part of the day in the bar. One such straggler walked up to Kevin. He was pretty unstable, and had yet another unfinished beer in his hand. He peered curiously, screwing his eyes up and bending forward – first at the painting, then at Kevin, and back at the painting. Kevin opened his mouth to tell him to buzz off, but the drunk beat him to it. Not to say anything though. In one convulsive twitch of his body and one retching motion, the man vomited his lunch right on to the center of The Blow-Up. After a couple of more moments doubled up, he wiped his mouth, straightened, smiled at Kevin and walked away.

Kevin stared at his canvass in horror. His mind went numb as he evaluated the artistic homicide that had just taken place. All of his quarks, mesons and neutrinos were now mixed with half-digested spaghetti and unidentifiable gravy. His thoughts were simply unable to process anything. It was a miracle that he thought he heard something at all, through the otherwise-deafening silence that filled his head. There was that voice again, going, “… that shows innovation”.

He spun around. It was his professor, on his way home. As Kevin stared back in reply, his professor continued, “Now it looks more natural, the colour scheme. Nature doesn’t operate in Technicolor you know. And the uneven texture – lovely touch.” He patted Kevin lightly on the back, “I always knew you had it in you. You just had to get it out, somehow.”

Well, I didn’t get it out, but someone else sure did, thought Kevin. “Thank You Sir”, he mumbled, still dazed by the conflicting emotions swirling through his mind, to the disappearing back of his professor.

As they say, Beauty lies in the eyes of the Beer Holder. Or rather, stomachs.

Kevin renamed his painting “The Throw-Up”.