Once Upon a Time in America

It's been nearly twenty months in the US now. I have not got to the stage where there are multiple occasions when I think to myself 'Last year this time, I was...', which is an obvious sign of longevity. Besides, having just experienced my first power outage in the US, I feel like I have now seen everything. From a domestic sense that is, not from a Vegas-Miami-Night To Remember sense. Or even a Grand Canyon-Statue of Liberty-Thomas Cook Tours sense. But from a Make Lunch-Launder Clothes-Watch Football for most weekends sense. And here's what has happened....

The first (and easiest) thing one gets used to is the standardization. Standardization means that you only need to get used to an activity once, and you can be certain that that you can follow the same steps the next time you do it. It's why you can land at any airport and look for signs to the same transport options out - rental car being the most popular by miles (pun unintended) and the most standardized. That means you don't have to know how to haggle for the auto in Chennai. Or that the cab is more popular than the auto in Mumbai. Or that Bangalore may or may not have a prepaid auto option, depending on the weather and potential traffic situation in the city. Of course, the problem occurs when the standardization is not too easy to figure out, and no one understands the non-standard version. So I don't know what a Clipper No. 6 means, and my friendly neighbourhood Vietnamese haircut lady does not know what 'Medium, enough to comb' means. What the heck is comb anyway?

The second (and slightly more difficult) thing to get used to is that your relationship with the outdoors, and openness in general is restricted to parks or the beach. It's not like you can pop down to the potti kadai, get one Lay's Magic Masala packet for that Sunday afternoon craving and curl up by the window with your book.  Firstly, there's no Magic Masala, which sucks (come on Frito, missing a market here). Even if there was, you wouldn't get a small, one-serving packet. You will get a giant bag of potato, oil, salt and a sauce that goes on a 100 other foods as well. And last of all, there is no potti kadai. None. The best you can do is drive to a superstore, traverse an area half the size of Adyar and eventually give up and ask the assistant where to find some chips. By the time the whole ordeal is done, the afternoon has passed, you've lost your mood for the book and it's probably time to step out again. To run, or hike, or take DSLR photos. Because if you are outdoorsy in the US, you are either a runner or a photographer. Why else would you be outside! Which is the exact reaction I got during my first visit to a bank, where I had walked in the 100 degree Houston heat (yes, I referred to it in Fahrenheit, so sue me). It was a ten minute walk, but there was a freeway to cross. US visit tip: Don't 'cross' a freeway like it is Mount Road. Even under the freeway.

The third thing to get used to is time. Time, the same thing that gets stretched interminably in India, gets abused, not cared for, always assumed to not really mean what it actually says - that is very different. Of course we all know the Indian punctuality conundrum and how it is really difficult for us to wrap our heads around the fact that ten minutes later is actually a delay. But the more important timing changes are actually broader, and more regular. For example, lunch is at 11 AM. That's the time I'm usually brushing my teeth on weekends, but if you eat at that time 5 days a week, then you want to eat by then on weekends as well. And end up waking up on Saturday with a huge hunger pang. Then again, I'm also starting the work day at 7.45, so it's pretty fair to want to eat a big meal in about three hours. And of course, this cascades on to dinner times resulting in having 'supper' at 6.30. That is basically Aloo Bonda and chaaya time in India. So the stomach rebels for a while at this affront of having to eat a full sized meal at that time. Only for some time. After a while you stop questioning that 6.30 PM is the time to eat a full meal. Or asking '... and what else?' whenever someone offers 'salad' or 'sandwich' as a lunch option. So be it!

So here we are then. Twenty months and my biggest takeaways are potti kadais and aloo bonda, but they really are significant. I feel like I'm missing something from the whole Yoo Ess experience, but there's time yet to take some Patel pics, run the New York marathon, stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon, buy a DSLR camera...

TwitteRant

Firstly let me clarify that this has been long due. That it has not seen the light of day can be attributed to various reasons, not least of which is paradoxically one of the things this post seeks to address. And thankfully, now that I've got my customary long sentence out of the way, I can get down to business.

Unless you've been living under a rock or, in massive over-preparation for 2012, in an ABC shelter, you cannot have missed the internet phenomenon that is Twitter. I was about to prefix that with 'latest' when I caught myself, realizing that in the digital world, Twitter is about as latest as the chubby Ronaldo is to football and the Pterodactyl is to the earth. Either way, your life has been touched by #twitter at least once. I am among the last of the muggles left in Twitter-warts magic school, simply failing to understand how a medium that needs such constant attention and allows no room for flowing, liberal prose could ever be such a popular medium of expression.

It's not that I don't like the concept itself, it's just that somehow I feel, it's no different from those big ol' public chat-rooms that Yahoo had. For me, twitter is like the Chennai Central station - as soon as I enter it, I just get swamped by this incessant buzz of chatter, each with their own voices and opinions and all talking at once. Similarly, most twitter conversations which go @reply after @reply after @reply seem like the chubby, late-middle-aged bureaucrat or businessman in a Safari next to you talking loudly into his phone forcing one side of the conversation completely upon you.

And what is this about joining the conversation. Most of the times the conversations fly by so thick and fast that I barely get to comprehend what's going on, let alone get a word in. Apparently there's 'clients' and 'apps' which can read your brain, paraphrase it in 140 characters, throw in a few links and hashtags and announce it to the world within 10 seconds. I, on the other hand, lose about 2 minutes just trying to see which @ I should reply to, and then thinking about the line which will best pack a 140-character punch. By then, the topic of discussion would have moved on entirely about thrice, rendering you clever, thoughtful and brilliant insights kinda 'old school'. Damn.

"If you know so much, you must be using it, Aha!" you say. I am, but it's mostly in such a passive state that bears in hibernation will have a longer timeline than mine. Mostly I'm just scared that I will break some unwritten rule in the flurry of all the @ and #s. Is it ok to address a guy you completely don't know as 'mate'? Should I ask for people's permission before @mentioning them? And seriously, what's the deal with celebrities?!! Questions to which deriving the answers from the iterations of my moral compass result in the same lack of alacrity as mentioned above. And on twitter, alacrity is everything.

As far as I see it, it has been most successful as a news dissemination medium, which is quite different from what it allegedly started out being. By the sheer strength of crowd-sourcing, it's been able to pull together stories from all over the world in a way no news agency can, and for that it works. Imagine a current affairs wikipedia, constantly edited and getting filled with some useful information by a modification of the Infinite Monkey theorem. And the power of customization letting you choose which parts of infinity you want to read, right here right now. Well, that's all just fair. I guess some of us would still like to wait for a more informed, thoughtful opinion in the next day's papers.

What do you think? Feel free to drop me a line on twitter @Duckyied and I'll be sure to get back to you. By 2013.

Or you can just leave a comment below.

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.

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.

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.

Unfair

I think it's unfair that as we near peak oil, increased environmental awareness, and a general aversion to what are fondly called Supercars, this has to come out.

Not to mention my complete economic inability to do anything about it. Oh well, this too shall pass.

[Source: Wired]

Overrated things

1. Life
2. Hope
3. Fairness
4. Derek Jeter
5. IIT-Madras
6. The World
7. Rear Window
8. Desire
9. Capability
10. Chetan Bhagat

This is a dynamic list. All additions within realms of reasonable accuracy shall be considered.

We look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for your interest. Have a nice day.

Fooled by Randomness

While the plagiarism of the title from this could have been avoided, it's the discussion about this book that lead to this post in the first place, and so it's only fair that there's a reference to it. The book itself is a take on how chance plays a role in almost all aspects around us, or to put in Douglas Adamsian terms how chance has a big part in The Life, Universe and Everything. And that's quite true, if you think about it.

Life, by its very structure, can never be in equilibrium. By Life, I mean,the whole bloody large piece of jigsaw puzzle that the roughly 6.3 billion people in this world are attempting to solve(from here on, Life, with a capital L shall refer to this macro-state, while life shall refer to the thing that an IITian doesn't have). In purely Engineering terms, when there's equilibrium achieved, all the components are in their most 'satisfied' state and are not going to (or even want to) move to any other position. Now, in Life, if there was a force that pushed everyone towards this ideal point, and it was doing its job perfectly then at some point of time t in the Universe's existence, Life would have equilibrated. This raises the question, what next. What happens at all times t+, if at t, everyone has achieved what they wanted to achieve. This is where Chance comes in. Or to stick to engineering, Chaos. Or Randomness.

Since Life itself is made up of each of the single lives, each of these lives has the potential to disrupt entirely, the overall design that is Life. Even if each person's life is tending towards its own micro-ideality, the ideality may not be what that person set out to achieve in the first place. This might be a bit of a ramble, but imagine you could break down each of your achievements into its smallest logical unit. For every pragmatist out there who believes in 'My life is what I make of it 'or 'There's no such thing as Lady Luck, I've never been good with ladies anyway', it's fairly simple to show that there was at least one point in their path of life where whatever happened was not a planned act of the person in question. Anywhere there is a question of choice, there's a bit of chance involved, as no amount of logical rationalizing can ever pick a 'better' choice, at least between two near-similar options. And every life always has its moments of picking between choices. And every life then follows the path that such a choice leads to. And thus every life, at its smallest opening step, is adulterated by chance.

Which then leads to the question of whether, once this initial disturbance from equilibrium has been set in motion, there is only one place it can lead to, and whether if the other choice had been made at that point, there is another path which will lead somewhere else, a sort of a parallel universe. Like in the whole concept of movies like The Butterfly Effect and Sliding Doors and, closer to home, 12B. Three months with an Equity Research firm has also only strengthened my belief that overall, it's just one big gamble. There can be reams and reams of reports from the classiest analysts in the business, and pages of code written by Math Ph.Ds from the Princetons and Dartmouths of the world, but eventually, it's the call of the man on the floor on whether to put in or pull out the billions of Dollars. And that's, basically, a chance. A chance backed up by thirty pages of reports and innumerable Partial Differential Equation simulations, but a chance nevertheless. And if the decision is to pull out, and made by 5 or 6 such people together, each taking a chance on the other being right in pulling out, we end up with something like this.

Eventually, somebody has to get lucky, of course. In an overall 10:1 ratio of misses:hits, there have to be enough lucky people in the world to convince the other 9 that if you try hard enough, you can too. Something like Colbert's claim, if you may. And so the world goes around, with everyone in the 9 trying to become the 1, in spite of the obviously futile exercise that the 1 in 10 is a fixed number, and that Chance is a zero-sum game. But oh well, something has to make the world go around, and love simply doesn't work anymore. So, cool.

Update: And then, this happens.

Economics and the Great Indian Dream

It was an unbelievably muggy evening in the city, something which has become more common of late, maybe there is some truth to this whole global warming affair after all. I was walking out of this mega-retail shop, the thing which stacks everything from pins to Porches. The same kind which has already wiped out your tricycle-vegetable-vendor man who comes out calling every morning and which is threatening to wipe out that very symbol of local community living - the road corner pottikadai. Digressions apart, as I walked out of the shop towards my vehicle, an old man shuffled up to me. He had his hands full of various types of Agarbathi packets, and from his forearm hung a sack-bag, which had more of the same packets. He looked terribly worn, and his left eye was clearly not serving him any purpose anymore, a long-ignored cataract having taken its toll on the eye. He walked up to me, and held out his packet.
"Sir, please buy one packet of Agarbathi sir. I came straight from Kodambakkam in the morning, haven't even had lunch. Please buy one packet sir, there's been no sales at all yet."

I hurriedly shook my head in the negative and got on to my scooter. I couldn't even being myself to look at that face again - the sallow skin with the beard gone white, the out-of-use eye, the frail body and the bag full of agarbathis dangling from the emaciated forearm. As I drove away I thought about my instinctive 'no' to the old man. There was no valid reason for me to do so, and I'm sure I could have spared ten rupees for one packet. It would've probably got his first meal of the day- at 6 in the evening. And yet I had not given him 1/20th of what I had spent in the shop just a minute ago. I nearly ploughed into the back of a truck on my way back, thinking about the whole thing.

This is not an isolated case. The boy-younger-than-me who'll be cleaning up tables at the local eatery, the platform vendor of handkerchiefs whose last sale was probably weeks ago, the man with polio whose affected leg dangles uselessly about 6 inches of the ground as he hobbles around at signals, with his outstretched arm... all images which are seared in a mind which also reads everyday about 9.5% growth and the rising middle class and the emerging superpower and all else. Where did it all go wrong?

In my simplified version of things, there are two levels that every man aims for - subsistence and luxury, in that order. In the new 'young and dynamic' India, while the transition from subsistence to luxury happens rapidly, efforts to raise people to basic levels of subsistence seems to have got left behind. And it's not as if every person who had his subsistence assured is scaling the first barrier either. There's still a substantial majority for whom it's a struggle to stay above the poverty line, but they just manage to. Those who don't, well, The Forgotten. It's not the rich-poor divide that I'm referring to. It's more like the 'can act rich'-'can just survive'-'why should I live?' divide that seems to be the divide in the India of today.

People earn more, but do more people earn more? Sure, there's a lot of things which have come up targeting this new high-income families- facilities that rival any world-class establishment, quality of services (note, this is usually mainly entertainment, or shopping) that we wouldn't have dreamed of even five years ago, so many other things. And with these places getting as many patrons as they do, it's easy for us to live under the self-deluded impression of us being a nearly-developed nation. But, as said before, the quality of your local bus service has not reached world standards. Southern Railway is still not Eurorail. And I'm not even thinking about comparing roads, lighting and other infrastructure.

I'm probably meandering but there just seem to be so many knock-on effects of the increased spending and luxury-craving lifestyle that a very few concentrated pockets of our country is witnessing today. Since when did we start buying Popcorn by the bucket?! Or dropping a 4-year old to her school which is barely 2 kilometers in a 3.5-liter, turbocharged SUV? And then bringing the monster back home with only the driver in it, till it's time to go pick up the kid, who'll probably fit in-between two people on a Scooty Pep, again. Or blindly flush around 120 bucks an hour (or whatever the bowling rates in your city is) to go and knock some big sticks with one big ball regularly on weekends? I know the great Indian dream is to eventually reach the great American dream, but that is simply not sustainable in our country. In fact, word is coming out that it's not sustainable even in America, but they of course just need to go into an oil-rich country and bomb the s*** out of them and they're good for a few more years for oil.

I agree people earn the money and they spend it as they please. I don't even think it's fair of me to say that people should maybe show a bit more prudence before they splash their wads around the next time, but I'll say it nevertheless. Demand-driven inflation will first hit the 'just surviving' section first, and soon we'll see some of them drop off below the line. Maybe your leaving the car and taking the two-wheeler or, if it's by any chance possible, public transport to work for one day will not bring the inflation from 4% to 2%. But it might bring it to 3.9999999999995%. And I think we can take that, for starters.

As Mahatma Gandhi said- Live simply, that others might simply live.

Rebirth

The Wood Apple, otherwise known as Vilambazham in Tamil is a fruit that is round to oval, 2 to 5 in (5-12.5 cm) wide, with a hard, woody, grayish-white, scurfy rind about 1/4 in (6 mm) thick.

To put things into perspective, this thing disguised as a fruit is as hard as a hockey ball. But wait, no one knows how hard the ball of our national game is. Proud to be Indian. Anyway, it's as hard as... um... a hockey ball people, come on! Point I'm trying to make is, it can hurt quite a bit, if it hits you at a decent speed. Now, assume this thing fell from a tree from a stationary position. (yes, it got detached from it's branch, or whatever)

Height of tree(h) = 12 feet
Initial velocity (u) = 0 feet/second
Acceleration due to gravity(g) = 32 feet/sec^2

Hence, by the fomula v^2 = u^2 + 2gh, we get, final velocity of the falling fruit as approximately 28 feet/sec. At that speed, a hockey ball hitting your head, can leave a good sized lump. And wipe away a few memory cells here and there. You know, you'll know your name starts with A and ends with D but the letters in between would've been erased. A wood apple hitting you right at the top of your head, at that same speed, in a cycle parking lot, with no one else around, could make you unconscious. In which state you would stay for a while cos no one's around. And therefore eventually, you MIGHT have put your mortality to test.

The Wood Apple missed me by 2 inches. I brought it along with me. Newton's apple taught him gravity. The Wood Apple taught me the gravity of life.

Feeling line, I know :)

Deep Breaths

I'm a calm man. I'm a man who suppresses emotions and does not splay them all over the canvas of my life for all to see vividly. I'm a man who walks alone. People have a hard time reading me, knowing me. I don't blame them, I don't know me. What I want, what I care for, what I love, what I would give my life for. The works. As a result, people never know what I'm feeling, at a given point. It doesn't show on my face, my words, my action. And I end up thinking to myself, how callous can people get, can't they see I'm frustrated? But the fact is, they can't. And I have no one else to blame but me.

Life during the holidays has been a blank sheet. Nothing's happened. And so I've been able to do what one is supposed to do with one's holidays. Enjoy them. Of course, I miss not having cofee at 2 A.M... and not sleeping that night because of that very coffee, but Hey, you win some, you lose some. Loll in front of the Laptop all day without feeling any guilt about the next day's classes. (Mis)use the internet to the fullest, chatting on (so far, a maximum of) 6 windows at a time. Watch T.V, even if it shows the same Maradona solo goal against England 23 times a day. You know, generally indulge in the indulgent, consumerist lifestyle that we have got used to indulging in. The things you own, end up owning you, Fight Club style

And today, I got frustrated. I got frustrated, and I got angry, and I smiled. I smiled and made a joke and since that was normal behaviour, no one asked me if anything was up. And that made me sad. Really sad. Angry too, but that I already was. So it was mostly sadness. That welled up inside me and washed over me like a wall of water 6 feet tall, leaving me behind, cold and drenched. But it was my fault. If I was angry, I should've shown it. At the world. The world is not waiting to do you any favours. You gotta ask for it if you want any.

What in the name of God am I typing? Wait, some other time, if I feel like it... I'll elaborate on this.

My blog is alive though. Great news for my millions of non-existent fans, that.

PH 670- Einsteinium

The seconds crawl along inexorably. You wouldn't have thought one second is such a huge interval of time. It is funny when you try to quantify time... by time. You're staring fixedly at your watch, and you're thinking, It's taking hours for that seconds-hand to move. And then you smile, realising the impossiblity of the thought that just crossed your mind. Of course, that doesn't stop you from boring through the watch with your eyes, willing those second, minute and hour hands to move at ultra-sonic speed. But after a while, you stop bothering about the minute-hand, being resigned to its inexplicable immobility, its stubborn defiance to move over from the current minute to the next. It gives the minutest(pun unintended) flicker of motion when the seconds-hand trundles around the dial to complete one full circle, in about as much time as it would take you to go to the moon and back... twice. And this tortorous crawl around the circle continues, the minute-hand obliging with a barely perciptible motion after approximately an eon. These eons drag by, painfully, brutally, until 50 eons complete their life-time... and the class ends. Nirvana.

There's no one around, you are just walking across the ground, and the ball is in your way. The goal is inviting, mocking even, as it gapes open, challenging you to put that sphere of 8-inch diameter inside it. You kick it, making perfect contact between ball and foot (you just KNOW when a perfect strike happens). And the ball speeds towards the huge, open area between the goal-posts... and hits the post! As always... ALWAYS. The ball rolls over to someone else, who promptly puts it it, just to show how it's done. Nothing's been said, but the challenge has been thrown. You can't wait to put on the shoes, the socks, the dirty T-shirt. Six others have got wind of the proposed battle and have, with miliary precision, been didvided into two sides and are standing in perfect formation. As you run out of the room, you steal a quick glance at the clock, and for some reason, the time registers in your mind... barely, but it registers. Out on the field, the first kick is taken, and it's Game On. At the end of it all, when you trudge back to the room, wiping your sweat off, you glance at the clock again. Three hours??? THREE hours??? Three hours which had flown past at Mach 4. You shake your head as you remove the socks...

Relativity Explained.

For the Love of God

I don't know why I have this addiction to titling blog posts after song titles. Maybe because it saves me the effort of thinking up a title and because I can build up something that will justify the title anyway. Because unlike most bloggers, I don't blog with a point in mind... mostly. Sometimes I do, but for that, something must have left a REALLY deep impression on me, which doesn't happen often. Otherwise I just take things as they come, going with the flow, hoping things will work out for the best. I mean, the method works for me in real life, surely it would work for the blog!

I had the humbling realisation today that I do nothing in life. I've been having quite a few humbling realisations about my life over the past week... or two. Like the one I had two weeks ago. That I couldn't talk seriously. I was in a Debate, an inter-hostel one and we were given this high-intellect, serious-thinking topic to talk about. All the while I'm thinking, How many jokes can we get in here. The round was based on The Big Fight, where there are three people shouting themselves hoarse and going nowhere in the end. So I decided to reduce the participation to two, and kept my mouth shut. Unfortunately, we were seated such that I was in the middle. So there were these two guys having an extremely heated discussion about something I had no opinion about, and there was me, in the middle, waiting for the appropriate moment to deliver my wisecrack. As Chandler would have said, I felt like- Rock. Hard place. Me. Needless to say, I placed 5th... out of 6 (there was another round of 3 people). And realised that I could provide only comic relief... not the main show.

And now I've realised, I do nothing in life. Like if I have 6 hours of free time in the evening, and my laptop is not with me, there's nothing I can do. There is no football till later in the night, so that's out. I am in the middle of "The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari" but I am not feeling too philosophical right now, so I'm afraid I'll miss the full import of what the book hopes to deliver to me and hence hurt Robin Sharma's sentiments in the process. (ok ,THAT'S one thing I can do... write long sentences). There is April's Reader's Digest... not in the mood. There is MA 204- Statistics... DUH!!!!!!!! And then, there were none.

I mean, if I could play the Guitar or something, I would take my six-string, go up to the terrace and strum away, all the while looking up and thinking what Chris Martin was thinking when he wrote Yellow- Look at the stars, Look how they shine for you... Or if I had Music on my computer at home, I would turn up Pink Floyd and just feel Comfortably Numb. Or if I had any bit of interest in electronics and gadgets and stuff, I'd take apart something in the house and put it back together again (My cousin did it... a LOT!). Or atleast read about some such thing on howstuffworks. Or go clean the car and the Kinetic. The Kinetic has a front-tyre puncture! Ok, good time to remember that, 10:37 P.M. Ok, so that's something to do for tomorrow, but today's gone. Or rearrange the bookshelf (yeeeah, with about 234 books... like THAT will take a lot of time).

Ok, I have Broadband at home and a 100-MBPS LAN in the hostel. Someone tell me what to do with so much free internet! I feel extremely guilty about wasting all these god-given resources n what I usually do... Bumperball!!! HEY, I've never played Bumperball at home! Ok then... catch ya later, people...

Sad.

It's a very sad thing. (Yes, this is going to be one of my socially responsible posts, with deeply meaningful messages for the youth of this country, so those of you who just want to read nonsense, go here...) Coming back to the point, there is a very disturbing trend, call it a fad if you will, spreading alarmingly among the pre-college teens of our country, and it stokes up a mixture of astonishment and consternation that something could be so addicting.

No, it's not drugs. Or cigarettes or booze. Those will come only in college. No, it's this simple "social network service", launched on January 22, 2004, developed by a Google employee as an independent project. This Google employee is a Turkish software engineer. And he has a strange name. No, not Keyser Soze of The Usual Suspects fame. But someone who's had just as much an impact on so many people's lives staying just as anonymous. Yes, his name is Orkut Büyükkökten.

(Disclaimer: ESPNStar wishes to advice that the athletes in the following program have had professional training and none of the actions seen should be imitated at home)

(Actual Disclaimer: This post is not a call-to-arms against Orkut. I myself have spent many a lazy night going through scrapbooks, reading in delight the "Hey, I see that the third letter in our second names is the same... wanna be friends?" or the "Hola, buenos dias! Como esta este manana..." or the Scrap conversations like, "You online?". "Yes". "Cool". "Yes". "What doing?". "Nothing". "Wanna be friends?". End of conversation.)

So anyway, this Keyser, I mean, Orkut, has invaded the lives of people at levels that you would not have thought possible. School kids, in the age group 15 and above, are on Orkut, writing detailed "About Me" or whatever that column is called and scrapping each other like crazy. In all honesty, I will accept that I did not know About Me till I was 19. (SURELY you didn't expect that I'd admit I STILL don't!) So how in the world can those 15 year-olds know??? And this scrap-crap. It's some kind of a race, as kids see it. Hey, I got to 300 scraps before YOU did. Wow, what an achievement, and at such a tender age too! The kids are just growing smarter by the day...

It's been barely two years since the inception of Orkut. And I suddenly feel like I'm from a different generation when compared to the Orkut-savvy school-goers of today. I mean, 2004, I hadn't passed out of school either. And yet, I did not even know the concept of Orkut, or that you could do a "How was Physics?" or "When is Maths?" scrap in the middle of the friggin Board Exams! COME ON, people, you're gonna meet your classmates for the next exam anyway, or at the end of it all for the Big Lunch or Dinner or whatever. Surely your curiosity is not SO insatiable that you really HAVE to know how the Physics paper was for the person that you met barely an hour ago in the exam hall...

A valid question in this context would be How do parents let their kids stay Online so long anyway??? Agreed that it does not take Rocket Physics to put a "Maths was easy" scrap, but ten to twenty scraps a day would surely require the investment of a considerable amount of time... that too online. Don't parents notice at all? Or is it the classic both-parents-working-leaving-no-time-for-child case? In that case, well, someone needs to talk to THEM!

I'm not against the whole concept of the "taking a break between studies" thing. I know that Boards is a pretty big thing, in fact, the FIRST big thing in a person's life, if I may. I know that it needs people to be calm, relaxed, not go overboard about the seriousness of the whole thing. I know staring at 150 pages of NCERT's rambling about Azo-Dyes and Chemistry in Everyday Life can be terribly monotonous. I know all this because I watched Titanic in Tamil, the day before the first exam, Physics. I daresay I did satisfactorily in the Boards nevertheless.

What I DO feel srongly about, is the WAY these "breaks" are being spent. I don't remember what I did (yeah the Titanic, of course) during the multitude of breaks that I gave myself between studies. I have a very short attention time, barely an hour. After that, my eyes will unfocus and I'll just blankly stare at the book. And so I would... yes, I would go out with my tennis-ball and bowl it at my house's gate. Or I would switch on the TV and watch the Swat Kats take on the Metalli Kats. Or I would pull out an old Tinkle Digest from my bookshelf and curl up with a Lay's Magic Masala. But the point is, these are all necessarily just half-an-hour activities. The bowling will tire you out, Swat Kats will get over in 30 minutes and if you read a Tinkle for more than 20 minutes, BOY, you must be slow. So once the break is done, you're back with your Chemistry. Orkut, on the other hand, does NOT tire you out, does NOT get over in 30 minutes and does NOT have a "Tinkle tells you Why" section...

I know it's their lives and they can do anything they want with it. I know that they are all informed, educated, nearly-adults who know what they are doing and going to do. I know they will all (HOPEFULLY) clear the Boards with flying colours.

But it's just a sad thing to see a 10th Class kid, scrapping a 12th Class kid, "Hey, My Math just got over. Was easy. When is yours?", instead of going up to his Mom, all smiles, and saying "Mom, I did my Math very well" and the Mom beaming with pride, with a hint of a tear at the edge of her eye, that her child is so clever...

Coming Back to Life

It's been a while. A week to be exact. Which is not much time, considering this is not my profession and so I needn't be doing it as religiously as I would, say, be studying. Yes, that was a joke, you can all smile knowingly. But it is such a compulsion to pour out the smallest, dullest, most insignificant happenings in your even more insignificant life into this webpage that you wonder if people don't have any concept of privacy anymore. The sad part is that it is so widely done as well, and getting ever so popular. The world is shrinking. But not so much that it shrinks into MY own, separate world. No Thanks. You can all shrink till just outside my world.

I don't know why I put that Floyd Song as the title. I don't know much these days. It's all abstract, a vague collection of thoughts and ideas and desires. The sinking realization that my life is headed nowhere suddenly rammed home with startling clarity in class today. Well, not nowhere, I THINK I can vaguely see paths laid out in front of me, leading to places. So I guess I must say I don't know where I WANT my life to go, instead of saying it's going nowhere. Yes, take the blame. It's easier that way.

I went through my Yahoo Mail Inbox today. The oldest mail I had was dated 25 July, 2004. It was one of those jokes which come through forwards. It was a good one, I wouldn't have kept it otherwise. I smiled when I read mails from my friends all excited about the first few weeks in college, whichever one they were in. And I was being pretty excited too, my Sent Items said so. "Oh wow, this campus is really cool.", "The Chemistry professor is unbelievable.", "The Computer Facility has Net connection at the speed of light!" Innocent, awe-struck wonderings of a boy lost in an unfamiliar place. And around November of first year in college, I saw the first signs of the crack showing. "I'm a man broken by the system he tried so hard to get into.". Now of course, I'm beyond all of that. Take life as it comes. Go with the flow. Things will happen when they have to. Call me a believer in destiny.... or someone resigned to fate.

Room-cleaning. With a vengeance. Trying to get back some of the lost me. I'm usually very ordered, I like to see things neatly stacked up and symmetric. Symmetry is pleasing to the eye. My room was a mess. The table was littered, the cupboard had clothes in a heap and there's a lizard in one corner of the room which lives in this room more than I do. Therefore the room-cleaning. Swept it. Once, twice, thrice. The dust simply wouldn't stop coming. So I gave up. Rearranged the table. Ordered the clothes in the cupboard. Why am I saying all this? See what I meant, in my opening paragraph?

What do I do when the quizzes are over. Where do the 24 hours go on normal days? Frightening thought. That absolute murder of time could come so naturally and without our realising it. What DID I do yesterday??? Um, I don't know! So there's a resolution made, to do something... anything! As ever. To be broken at the first possible chance. Oh well, at least I realised that I don't realise I'm wasting time. It's a start.

It's been a while. For many things. It's been a while since... I drove my car. Since I watched Live Cricket. Since I read a novel, lying on the bed, munching on horribly unhealthy snacks. Since I went to the beach alone and sat at the water's edge and listened to the waves. Since I watched the Saturday Night movie on Star Movies. Since I've been to a friend's house. Since I've had a pure, cold shower (Chennai's becoming COLD!). Since I sent someone a greeting card. Since I've listened to a very old song on the radio. Since I played Minesweeper. Since I wrote a short story, just for the heck of it. Since I sat in front of my book collection, took them all out and arranged them again in exactly the same order...

Since I've been myself...

Hello! I'm still single too!

OK, it just HAD to happen. I mean, if something becomes part of your life, no wait, becomes FULLY your life for five days, you just have to crap about it on this otherwise useless piece of webspace. Jeez man, visit any IITians blogsite and it's all Saarang, Saarang, Saarang! I've always been the rebel (I AM, really. See, I got 486 in my boards and got into this institution and am generally following the 'optimum path'... how rebellious is THAT!) and decided I'll NOT write about Saarang. And so now I'm writing about NOT writing about Saarang. And hence I'm writing about Saarang anyway. Man! Nothing ever goes the way I want it to!

Everyone knows Saarang by Day. But hey, I'm the man who slept at 5:30 on two nights and didn't sleep at all one night! I caught the sunrise of 29th January, 2006, folks, and it's NOT because I woke up early! So anyway, not sleeping and not eating and drinking loads of soft drinks and then not sleeping again can put your system slightly out of sync. As in you'll feel like vomiting all the time, but there's nothing in your stomach, so you can't vomit. And your stomach has this constant pain, but you don't know why, because as has already been established, there's nothing in your stomach. Wait... Except for the gas from all the soft drinks. Oh! So THAT'S it??? OK, NOW I know...

Not sleeping is this wonderful thing. You can feel very drunk when you don't sleep, and I got 5 people concluding independently that I was drunk on one of the days when I was actually just lacking some 30 hours of sleep. But yeah, that's the closest I can ever get to being high, being the 'rebel' I am. Another thing about sleeplessness is that you fall asleep in a micro-second when you hit the bed next time. It's a bleeding painful thing, to be in bed and not get sleep. That's when you start reviewing your life or current situation or the day ahead and you feel very down. On the other hand, lose some sleep and you can feel high for that time and also sleep off instantly without getting into angsty reviews of your hopeless life.

ALSO, you can walk around zombie-like all day with your head down and your mind switched off. THAT is a very helpful thing, especially at Saarang. It helps you to forget about the title of this post and walk above all the mindless flirtations of all the lowly mortals who strive incessantly to grab the attention of the fairer sex. In other words, it lets you forget that you are this give-up guy who can't get a girl all his life. So might as well do the "these grapes are sour" thing instead of accepting the inevitable.

Last, but not the very least, We, The Newsletter Team of Saarang 2006, are very happy that The Hindu noticed our very dedicated work towards improving the general excitement level at Saarang and decided to honour us by putting us on Page 2 of their daily publication (THAT or because they WERE the Newsletter Sponsors and we religiously mentioned that in every issue!). We also realise why they have people who do day-shifts and people who do night-shifts. We'd also like to tell them that there are a few things the Newsletter Team created in their long nights of mostly sitting around before eventualy beginning work at around 4...
The Newsletter Anthem :"Eef you come today..." (Rajkumar and Band)
The Newsletter Addition to Lingo: Khunntrrie Maxxx
The Newsletter Revelation :There actually IS a band called Repertoire Dogs!
The Quote that didn't come up : During WM, one of the participants goes, "this is my own composition by me..."

Goodbye Saarang... Hello boring old life.

The Way I Am...

There are people who have fixed goals and dreams in their lives. They know what they want and they have their lives and careers planned right from their graduation till they are thrown their retirement party at the end of it all… And then there’s me.

The First thing I wanted to be was a Spy. This was the period I was drowned in Jeffrey Archers and Robert Ludlums and learnt that KGB was Komitet Gazudastrevenoy Bezopasnosti. But anyway, the spy guy seemed to have the best life possible- cool gadgets, very helpful contacts, one of who invariably turned out to be a very good-looking lass and free trips to every country in the world! That dream’s not dead and buried yet. I DO know 5 languages, with fluencies ranging from perfect to Yeah-I-can-Survive-in-Spain. And I know three moves in Taekwondo. And I can tell a Browning Automatic from a Luger…

Then I wanted to be a Fighter Pilot… but that dream never took off!!! That’s because by the time I realized I wanted to be that, I already had a minor power in my right eye and thought it has not worsened, they say that you need 20/20 in both eyes to be a pilot… I think I have 15 or something in my right. But still, it would’ve been fun to take a MIG-21 up there and do a cobra-maneuver in it, wouldn’t it?

I think next up was Auto-Journalist. It would be the dream-job, really. I mean what other job lets you take Porches and BMWs at record breaking speeds around racetracks AND pays you for doing it??! I tell you, these auto-journos are the luckiest people on the face of this earth. PLUS the free trip all over the world to International Auto Expos to ogle at models… of cars, of course.

There have been cranky times when I’ve wanted to be nothing. You know, like, carry a backpack, hitchhike all over the world and do odd jobs here and there to refill the wallet. And as I already said, I AM a man who walks alone! Don’t know how wise a career option THAT is though…

And THEN I wanted to be a Football Player. Clearly, I have the pace and I’m not an old dog yet so I CAN learn new tricks. Besides the only time when I get unrivalled joy, other than when I am driving my car, is when I have the football at my feet and am juggling with it. Sure, it is the most physically demanding of all my dreams, but at least it won’t get me killed like Spying might… I think! Of course, all this was before I broke my foot. Now, I can’t even run.

You think there must be a latest fad, right? OF COURSE, there is. Now, I just want to be a Stand-Up Comedian. I know I’m funny when I want to be, and it shouldn’t take too much for me to morph my situational humour to the stand-up kind. Or I could just use some of the signs put up by our dear Traffic Police. I mean, there is this one which says “Accident Prone Zone. DEAD slow”. What’re they trying to say??? That if the accident doesn’t get you, going slow will? That either way… you’re dead???

So you see, I’m a very multi-faceted individual (Ha! That’s for you all who thought I’ll say CONFUSED individual!). And as befalls a man of so many talents as me, I seem to be faced with a problem of plenty. Well, I guess I just have to learn to live with it because… it’s just The Way I Am…

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

The thing about dreams is that they are such double-edged swords. I am of course talking about ACTUAL dreams, the things that come in the night when you are in your REM sleep... not the "I dream of owning a HUGE house some day" kind. Those I would call aspirations or hopes or wishes or fantasies or any other n number of words that Roget's Thesaurus can throw up for dreams.

But anyway, getting back to why Dreams are such double-edged swords... As long as you are IN them, or HAVING them you are all happy and contented. (Again, if you are in dreams that do NOT make you hapy and all, I would classify them nightmares, so I ain't talking about THEM either.) You are playing out what you always wanted to be, topper guy, knight-in-shining armour, football player, secret agent... whatever. And all the details appear so very vividly that it's like you're watching this extremely well made movie with you in the lead role and you feel extremely satisfied inside. (Again, I don't know how this is possible. I mean, you are ASLEEP, so how can you FEEL anything??? And yet, when I wake up, I distinctly remember running through a gamut of emotions during the dream...)

And then of course, you're up and awake and everything vanishes in the small instant of opening your eyes. And then the depressing reality dawns upon you that it was a dream after all... AGAIN! I mean, you've had so many by now that you would hope that at least ONE of them would turn out to be true, turn out with the perfect storyline as the dream promised but NO! It always ends in a vague babble of words and thoughts and that shrill ring of the alarm in your ear. For a moment you are feeling very low, as if you had been promised heaven and then had it taken away just as you were entering it. But then you shake your head, realise that such excitement and perfection as was portrayed in the dream would never be possible in real life and swing your legs out of bed to throw yourself into another day in the drab, everyday world...

If you're wondering what prompted this post, yes, I had a wonderful dream yesterday night... Perfect setting, story, ending etc... and then I woke up!

Sacrilege!

The title has absolutely no bearing with what is going to follow in this article. It was just the first thought that popped into my head when I saw that my last post was more than a month back. And to make matters worse, in the whole intervening period, I’ve had FREE Internet!!! Of course, THAT itself could be the reason for the lack of activity on the Blog. I mean, handing over free Net to a teenager is like letting a kid loose in Disneyland...

Actually, I’ve been planning to write this from Independence Day... I’m a fortnight late! Anyway, I got all patriotic and everything and my heart welled with pride on Independence Day to see what great progress our country has made. 58 years of Independence, a 100-crore population, 33 lakh square kms of land area with more than half dedicated to agriculture, ten perennial rivers, one and a half lakh industries...(sounds familiar??? No prizes for guessing the movie;))

And yet...

It’s the small things, which affect our daily life, which play a role in our everyday actions that still remain pathetic. Of course, I could worry about our 8.8% unemployment rate or our imports exceeding the exports by a few thousand billion dollars. But to say the truth, none of those directly affects my life in any way and there’s nothing much I can do about any of them. What DOES make me feel sorry for the state of our country is...

Note: These incidents are not necessarily in chronological order.

The other day, a friend of mine had this electrical problem in his room. The capacitor in the fan had burnt off and now the fan was rotating in the opposite direction when switched on! The burnt capacitor was also giving off alarming smells at levels of calling in the fire brigade. That apart, the monitor was flickering dangerously and basically the wiring system in the room was gone, finished, kaput… So he calls in the electrician, who promises to come at 2 o’clock. 2 o’clock comes and goes, so do 3, 4 and 5 o’clock. He finally arrives punctually at 5:30 and promptly gets himself shocked by touching some unearthed wire. Nothing happens of course, but only then does he realize he has some SERIOUS work on his hands. So, three hours of delay and a “shocking” experience later, my friend has a working electric supply.

This could be a city-specific problem, but it’s a problem nevertheless. For the Autos in Chennai, the concept of meters simply doesn’t exist. It is just an appendage, and they get fancier too, like electronic ones. But step up to an auto and he says “80 rupees”. That’s all, no arguments. Of course, you can reel off all the info about mileages and petrol rates that you have judiciously calculated for your own vehicle, and you’ll be met with a frown or a very disdainful reply. After all, don’t they know best??? Oh, and from the same place that you paid 80 bucks to get to, the return could cost you 90! Why? “Sir, one of the roads is a one way, I have to detour.” Yeah right, like I don’t know that the detour is barely a km extra and surely not worth 10 bucks...

This is a good one. The above-mentioned “own vehicle” is a Kinetic Honda. I had lost the key for this vehicle and as my luck would have it, no duplicate was available. So I had to give it to the service center to change the lock set. He promised to have it ready in two days. The promised day, I got a bit delayed and had to feverishly use some three modes of transport, including a borrowed cycle, to get to the garage in time. There was my vehicle, with a gleaming new lock as promised and its set of keys. I happily take the keys, impressed with the service center, and out of sheer habit, try to lock the vehicle. Wait a minute, the key isn’t turning! Push it in and turn, the mechanic says. OH yeah, like I don’t know THAT. He valiantly steps up to help and makes all sorts of faces in an effort to lock it. It doesn’t happen. With a sheepish grin, he asks me to wait and I spend the next hour sweating in an automobile garage waiting for a vehicle that was promised to be delivered to me when I came...

It was raining in Chennai! Sheets of white water were pouring down on the road and grass and mud and whatever else make up the contours of Chennai. And needless to say, the roads soon became a soggy mess, there was enough water in the middle of the playground to conduct the Olympic swimming trials, and a sewage pipe had burst somewhere and so the stagnant water was not exactly from the heavens any more. All these could be common civic problems that can never be solved to perfection. But here’s the killer. After a walk through this mess, I had mud and water splattered all over me and so I go into the bathroom for a wash. I open the pipe, and I get... Air!!! Hello, wasn’t someone talking about rainwater harvesting??? There has just been a mini deluge and the water pipe still thinks it’s an air pump. I mean, this is where you reach heights of irony...

I could go on- the yellow water called Rasam in the mess (seriously, if they use normal Chennai water, it’ll have enough salt in it to give it SOME taste... but they very hygienically use mineral water!), the loss of a cycle that I had barely had for 8 hours, apparently unfair cricket-team selections, roads dug up at arbitrary places for NO apparent reason, so on and so forth. It’s just that these small things put me off at times, get the adrenalin rushing. I’m a peace-loving man, believing that anything can be solved with a smile and a kind word. But sometimes it is so hopeless, just so irritating and you get all worked up and you just wish that you could... you could...

Anniyan Avadharithuvittaan.

Impulse

Impulse is actually quite a significant, if unnoticed, term in the realms of dynamics. Mostly used in Rocketry and other such things way beyond the comprehension of the average man, it is defined as the product of Average Force and the Time… or is it the quotient??? GAWD, I am forgetting everything I learnt… KNEW college was a bad idea!

But then, this is MY page and so I WILL NOT talk about such unholy things such as Physics and Mechanics and other such stuff that, the society has decided, are very important for an Engineer to know. So what IS the impulse that I have given as a heading so grandly at the top of the page… yeah, I meant that totally indefinable characteristic of humans which makes them do weird stuff at weird times, some things which their logical mind would have dismissed as outright crazy.

From my observations of the above defined indefinable property, the conclusions are that an impulsive action is one which you do by listening to your heart and not your mind. Yeah, THAT makes a lot of sense, I know. But that’s all it is… really.

In a normal scheme of things, the heart DOES have the first say in everything we do. But, it’s the mind, the logical, scheming, rationalizing, devilish part of us, which has the second, third and so on till the FINAL say. So the body does what the brain commands it to and we all remain holier-than-thou, doing the thing that…well, SHOULD be done, as defined by practice or law or society or whatever.

The impulsive act, however, does not allow time for the mind to think. The heart says, and wham, it’s done! Everyone would have done it at some point in their life. Just doing something for the heck of it…. Like, I wanna do it and so WILL do it. The other day, it was raining like there was no tomorrow and I had just finished watching FRIENDS. So, jobless as I am, I sat by the window and watched the rain pelting down on the asphalt. And then suddenly, I just got up, walked out of my house, walked through the rain till the gate of my apartments and walked back in. More than enough! I was drenched to the skin, my hair was a wet mess and my clothes were stuck to me like I was born with them or something, like Karna. Did all that matter? NO! I had just done what I had wanted to do, and I felt very pleased with myself.

There are many other things which I have done on an impulse, totally shutting out the voices in my head screaming “What are you doing?” and “DON’T!!!!!!!!!” So far I’ve not had to regret any of them. Of course, none of them have been earth-shaking events which decided the future of this planet. But still, so far, my mind has not had the opportunity to tell me “Ha, I told you!” And even if there came such an occasion, where an impulsive action could have been avoided in favour of the logical, rational one, well, I don’t think I would care. For I would be secure in the thought that for that one moment at least, I had set aside all the complicated thought processes rushing through my head, and simply followed my heart…