Sporadic Splurges

IT down, customers frown

2011-07-23T06:55:00.000-07:00

Over the past week I have experienced 3 separate incidents of an IT system failure causing major customer dissatisfaction.

The first one was last week at SPAR, Jayanagar. It was a Saturday afternoon and the mall was pretty crowded. Nothing unusual for a weekend.Trolley loads of stuff and slow processing meant that the queues started to build on all the counters. When I joined one of the queues, I realised that the slow processing was mainly due to bar code reader malfunction - the person at the counter had to type in the code for each and every item or search for them in the inventory. Some paid through SodexHo coupons which meant at at least two rounds of counting while doing mental arithmetic - only adding up to the overall processing time. Restless kids tugging their parents clothes and urging them to move created additional emotional strain. Strategically located candy and chocolate bars in the billing aisles came to the rescue of some.

10-15 minutes for every customer meant that people farther behind in the queue had a really long waiting time. Couple of them got really upset, lost their temper and started shouting at the young boys and girls at the counter. Not a very pretty scene.

I wondered if the retail IT systems were designed with the "weekend" scenarios in mind. And this was not an isolated case; I had seen similar issues in other malls around the city as well.

The other two incidents happened today - first one at a local branch of Canara Bank. Apparently the "system" was done - none of the bank employees were able to login to the system. This meant that even relatively simple transactions like balance check/passbook updates could not take place. One customer got really upset - the gentleman had filled in a form for DD and was standing the queue for some time only to realise later that it was not possible to get a DD issued !

I myself had to deposit a DD and thankfully, it did not require the "system" to be up - it is a self-service operation (which is the case in most banks these days - you fill in the form, pin the DD to the form, apply the bank seal and drop the couple into a box).

With a Landmark gift card to redeem, I made my way to the store located in Forum Mall. Spend some time browsing in the books section. Selected couple of items and went to the counter only to find that the card cannot be redeemed as the "network" was done. I returned as a dissatisfied customer without making the purchase.

As more and more of our lives get driven by "networks" and "systems", them being "down" severely impacts our day to day activities.

My toaster project - registering it

2011-06-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

After several years of debates,shop visits and consuming tawa toasted bread (the double roti kind), we finally bought an electric toaster yesterday. The acquisition was not in any holy pursuit of better toast experience but to merely expend a soon expiring gift voucher.

The appliance in question was a Phillips Electronic Toaster - model coolwall,HD 4823/01.

Hopefully HD, which is a popular buzzword these days,does not mean Hi-Def in this case

Now some may call the toaster as the best thing since sliced bread, rather the best thing for sliced bread; I, for one, beg to differ.

Today the first trial of the toaster was conducted that resulted in 2 mostly charred pieces of "Daily Bread" bread. This brought back tawa toasted nostalgic memories - of mostly cooked and seldom burnt bread.

The flimsy user manual was of not much help. Hilarious as it may sound, it said that the bread may be 'charged' when removed from the toaster and recommended not being left unattended. Great ! yet another gadget that you have become a servant of thought the Luddite population of my little grey cells.

As my laptop was already powered on, I thought of searching the myriad shards of page ranked information to see if there was a 'best practice' in using this 19th century invention. Unsurprisingly, the top hit was the product page on the vendor's website which I had to visit. A blurry image of the product and sparsely populated links suggested that this was'nt the 'top of the heap' kind of device.

What caught my attention on the page was the link titled 'Register your product'.

Now I have registered Windows OS, phone but registering a toaster seemed interesting.

One would argue that it is not as interesting as The Toaster Project; to each his own.

So the register link took to me to the page called - register. What I was being registered into was "Club Phillips" - sounded exotic for a toaster registry. The registration page asked for my name, email address and date of birth (as rules forbid < 14 year old humans to register). The site wanted to be sure that I did not want updates on Phillips products and congratulated me on successfully registering myself. The email confirmation took me to the actual product registration page.

I was wishfully thinking that the product registration would ask for the serial number of the product and would decipher the location based on that (this is 2011, remember - not too unreasonable to expect your toaster to tweet, or post pictures of popped-up slices on your facebook wall is it ?).

Turned out to be a damp squib - only date and country of purchase.

Done ! Toaster registered !!

This height of ennui is not going help in anyway the future of my toast experiences but still, I, for some strange reason,went ahead and did it.

My humble word to Mr. Thwaites - building the toaster is the easier bit, try getting a decent pair of toast out of it.

आतंक

2011-05-27T10:08:00.000-07:00

कातिलों के कातिल मना रहें हैं जश्न-इ-इन्साफ
क्या रंगे हाथों से करेंगे अमन का आगाज़ ?

न कोई सहर नयी , न कोई खूबसूरत शाम
न ख़त्म होगा जब तक ये सिलसिला-इ-क़त्ल-इ-आम ||

17 year time travel

2009-07-17T15:28:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I managed to meet a few of my classmates from school. Some of them I had'nt met for 17 years now. Amazing as it sounds, it was true.

Not only were we 17 years ahead in time, we were about 12,000 kms away from our alma mater.

It was quite an experience - talking about teachers, off-school activities and other friends.
All this fun with just 6 of us - can't quite imagine a complete class reunion.
As another friend suggested in our mailing list - a reunion back at school.

That would be quite an occasion.

Vidush starts playschool

2009-06-10T06:21:00.000-07:00

Today Vidush spent the first day at a play school near our house. Meera was with him the 21/2 hours that he was there. He had a great time there and refused to leave the play school when it was time to go home !

I guess the liked playing in the sand and all the other toys at the place.
Both myself and Meera were a little worried past few days about how he would react on going to a new place. Looks like we have a good start. Lets see how things change going forward - especially once Meera stops staying back at the school.

Overhauling memories

2008-12-21T01:19:00.001-08:00

Cute cars are'nt they ? They are 23 years old now.
These were gifted to me and my brother by Rail maama, a neighbour whose acquaintance we gained during one of our train journeys from Delhi to Chennai. Hence the name.

Couple of weeks back these became hand-me-downs to Vidush.

He enjoys playing with them even though keying them does not result in any movement.
Today I decided to fix that. As I took them upstairs and opened them up with a screw driver, childhood memories came rushing back. The numerous hours spent playing with these cars - setting up elaborate tracks with cardboard boxes and textbooks and watching the cars flying off or toppling over.

Rail maama was the one who introduced us to the world of eggs. For orthodox Hindu brahmins this would be blasphemous. But he himself was an iyeangar and did'nt seem to care a bit. We were too young to know. So one afternoon when we were at his place, he started beating the eggs in a glass and quickly prepared an omlette. He then toasted couple of breads and prepared a sandwich. Some ketchup was added and offered on a nice place. We started reluctantly but finished off the sandwich in no time. There was an implicit agreement of not discussing this act with our parents.

Back to the cars. After the covers came off, I noticed that springs inside were all rusty - not a surprising thing to discover after 2o odd years of unuse. The chasis was dirty as well. After cleaning the covers with detergent water and overhauling the mechanical systems with some seasame oil the cars were back in action.

Initially Vidush did'nt seem very excited to see the cars actually moving now. After a couple of runs when he noticed the wayward trails the cars were taking, he seemed to take a liking and kept throwing the cars back to me to key them back again.

Thank you Rail maama - for the cars and the eggs.

Write on

2008-11-01T02:48:00.000-07:00

It's that time of the year again. NaNoWriMo time. Frentic typing, twiddling fingers, scratching heads - all of that and much more. As the badge on the left shows, I am doing it this year as well. Spurred on by last year's 'victory' I guess.

A bigger challenge this year - considering that the first week I have a technical work-out at my company. The week-end after is a team outing for a couple of days and the month end there is a week long conference that I want to attend.

As a prize for last year's winners, nanowrimo organizers have negotiated a deal with CreateSpace. There is an offer to get a free proof-read copy of your novel in paperback form from CreateSpace. Valid for six months from now. Tempting as it is, it would take quite some effort to polish last year's 'work' to a publishable form. Maybe I will take a stab starting December.

For now, it is my new novel that gets priority :-)

Sleepless Class

2008-09-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

That is what the Sleeper Class (SL) on the Indian Railways has become these days. I was initially surprised and later shocked to realize that the 3 in 3 tier compartment has been taken more seriously. The side berths now have a middle berth ! Yes, one might imagine that this to be an impossible engineering task, the railways has actually managed to squeeze in a berth there.
What the railways has gained is additional 9 seats. What it has, lost big time, is usability.

The width of regular berths too have been reduced. Once has to be a trained gymnast, if not an olympic medalist, to actually get into the side middle and side upper berths.
And looks like I am not the only one complaining.

While the intentions of Mr. Lalu Prasad Yadav to make Indian Railways a profitable PSU are commendable, steps such as the above are not the right means of getting more revenues. While this technique worked for freight trains, this is a nightmare for commuters especially on long distance routes.

So Mr. Yadav, can you kindly return to the good old Sleeper Class ? And return our hard earned sleep on rail journeys.

What's your moth story ?

2008-08-03T04:38:00.000-07:00

I got to know about the The Moth society from Malcom Gladwell's blog. It is a club in New York that conducts live story telling events. Many celebrities, including Malcom himself, have told their tales here. Most of the celebrity stories are available as podcasts for a small charge. There are a few recordings that available for free. I heard a couple of them and found them quite interesting. Elevator ER was riveting while Anthony the hat was funny. Planning to hear the others over the next few weeks. Do check them out when you have time and connectivity.

Also thinking of telling my own 'moth story' - maybe not on the real stage; just on this blog.

Dry-cleaning chat

2008-07-24T05:56:00.000-07:00

My neighbourhood dry cleaner is definitely chatty. I went to him a few months back to get my jacket cleaned. The 10 odd minutes I spent at his shop, he gave an overview of his career up until his latest job as owner of the dry cleaning shop. He told me that he was into catering - worked for a five star hotel and then started his own business. He was doing well but unfortunately met with an accident which forced him to start his current venture.

Yesterday I had get one of my trousers dry cleaned. The first question he asked me was
"Is the IAEA aggrement good for India ?"

I was a bit taken aback. I replied that it was good for the country in the long term. That was my honest personal opinion.

"Everthing is good in the long term - nuclear agreement, stock markets ..." was his reponse.

Quite a profound observation, I thought.

What do you think about the nuclear agreement ?

A new beginning - in July

2008-07-09T09:32:00.001-07:00

More than six months since my last post ... long time indeed. Had been a tad busy - posts were happening on the internal blogs though.
Since January, I got myself an iPhone (2G), Vidush turned one, I got promoted and I was (finally) part of team that won a quiz competition !

Sat through a different kind of lecture yesterday at work. It was talk-cum-dance performance by Dr. Sharada Srinivasan. She talked about the musical pillars of Hampi and then did a Bharatnatyam performance inspired by the musical pillars at the Vithala temple. It was quite a fascinating experience.

It was also sad to hear that the nearby area of Kupgal that is also a neolithic site and full of sonorus stones, is been ruthlessly exploited by the local mine owners for quarrying purposes.

We had been planning a trip to Hampi for quite some time - now I really want to visit the temples there on my next vacation.

A Dead Pup

2008-01-06T21:18:00.000-08:00

I saw a dead pup, lying in the middle of the road.
Open jaws, cold paws, run over, probably mowed.

Would the father have cried, the mother bellowed ?
Are they even aware of the cruel blow that an unmindful human has endowed ?

As the world moved on, unmoved - nobody mourned
Have our souls died ? I implored.

I guess so - as dead as the pup lying in the middle of the road.

The {strange} color of music

2007-12-26T08:10:00.000-08:00

On Christmas day morning I was out driving around 6:30AM to pick my MIL from E-City. I turned on the radio and heard the usual lot of film music doing the rounds on the air waves. As I reached 91.9 MHz, I heard a bhajan. Now this was a 24 hour strictly English/western-only songs channel. Was there some mistake ? I tuned to a different channel and came back. No change - same bhajan on Lord Hanuman !
On Christmas day, I was expecting 'Jingle Bells' or some christmas carols and not bhajans on this channel. For the past 2 weeks they had been playing Christmas songs but on Christmas day they were playing devotional music of a different kind.

To explain this as the effect of Modi's victory in Gujarat would be too far fetched. So what else could be the reason for this strange color of music ?

Of mains and crosses

2007-12-26T00:44:00.000-08:00

Bangalore is city of mains and crosses - at least the older parts of the city are. I remember reading a similar description about Malleswaram in one of the hand-outs that my fac-ad gave me during our first meeting. The mains and crosses are perpendicular to each other and their intersections are called 'circles' (local slang for the intersection junction) . I was always perplxed at seeing some of the mains being smaller roads than the crosses !

Today morning I was reminded of this puzzle that is Bangalore. I had to attend a function at 8:30pm in Rajaji Nagar. I was given a postal address - complete with a door no., block, main and cross numbers. One would have thought this would be sufficient information to locate the place. Having spent twelve years in Bangalore now, I should have known better.

I was driving around, in vain , through various narrow lanes marked with yellow stone boards having the main numbers. As the numbers increased, I thought I was in the right direction and then suddenly the numbers seemed to be reset to 1 !
Asking for directions at a couple of places resulted in nebulous responses - you know should-be -somewhere-there kind of general hand-waving.
I got a straight-in-the-face response at the third place I asked.It was a STD booth and the owner had just then opened the shop. He replied in a mix of fluent Kannada and English that just asking for a main and a cross is no good here. We have been living here for the past 40-50 years and still we don't know all the mains and crosses. It is best to have an associated landmark and ask for directions. The owner looked too young too have stayed 40-50 years anywere let alone Rajaji Nagar - I guess the we included the old man, probably his father, sitting in his shop.

But as I drove on I realized that this was a fundamental truth of this city. My lesson for the day - right there. I had a landmark alright, but it was very close to being absolutely useless.
A Ganapath temple. It was as bad as looking for a Manjunath in Bangalore (or Attilla in Budapest :-) - every street had a Ganesha temple.
I felt like the leader of the forty theives in the Ali Baaba tale - hoping to find a house with a cross mark on the door and on reaching the town, finding out that every house had the same mark !

Luckily I had a phone number which was thankfully answered and I got some directions over phone. I was even more lucky to actually make it to the place. As you may have guessed I did'nt exactly follow the directions as given to me - I had got them a little wrong. But alls well that ends well.
I was pleasantly surprised to hear couple of other guests describe their 'we-were-lost' stories - especially to know that they were 'lost' in spite of having spent 30+ years in the city !

That was when the 'landmark' truth finally dawned on me.

94 Down - Angry with everybody (for e.g.) for a puzzle ? (9)

2007-12-23T21:50:00.000-08:00

Crossword. Yes that was the answer to the clue (created by yours truly :) in title of the post. December 21st was the 94th anniversary of the crossword puzzle. To quote Wikipedia -

On December 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne, a Liverpool journalist, published a "word-cross" puzzle in the New York World that embodied most of the features of the genre as we know it. This puzzle is frequently cited as the first crossword puzzle, and Wynne as the inventor.

I had been seeing crossword puzzles from the time I had been reading newspapers. But mostly ignoring them as some black and white squares with cryptic clues that only English pundits would have any chance of filling up.
My interest in them was kindled in the third year at IISc - our combinatorics course professor, cevm, was infatuated with them. He gave us a crossword at the end of the course whose puzzles were combinatorial problems and solutions were numbers ! We could solve them but right answers did not contribute to the final grade. I had bought the first of 'Art of Computer Programming' books few months back and was pleasantly surprised to find a problem in the book that required generating a crossword puzzle given a description of the grids. The program had to be written in MIX - I wrote one in Perl that generated a Postscript file instead of just a matrix of 0's and 1's. I even sent the program to Knuth's email id - I was so thrilled at having solved at least 1 problem from the great book. I was even more thrilled to get a response back !! It was not from the Don himself but one of his students who replied saying that the next edition of the book would have the problem modified requiring postscript output. That was something.
I still did not get to solving crosswords. It was only a couple of years later when I got a job and was living couple of friends that I got my first taste of actually solving these puzzles. Sonal was my crossword guru - he taught me some of the hidden pointers in the clues that helped get to the right word. We worked on the crosswords from The Hindu. Many a 'aha' moments were experienced while wasting hours bent over the folded newspaper with blunt pencils. The crossword bug had bitten me and I am affected till date.

I have never been able to completely solved a newspaper crossword yet. I did manage to win a prize for completing a crossword puzzle at workplace - I had to use the Internet to solve some of the clues.
I also try to exercise 'my little gray cells' on the Sunday crossword - they are much more cryptic but cracking even one of the clues feels great.

Amateur cruciverbalist - I can gladly call myself that.

1 in 15333 - The lightning talk I did not deliver

2007-12-08T06:20:00.000-08:00

On December 7, I had my first taste of Lightning talks at foss.in. They are a wonderful thing. Unfortunately I did not sign up. Unfortunate because I did not decide to sign up when opportunity knocked and was repenting for not having done so all the way back to my home that evening. I could not make it today - there was another round of lightning talks. The now legendary Danese Cooper was facilitating these talks. She was actually noting down the inital list of speakers from the white board before the event when I went to take a closer look. She even asked me if I was planning to do one. I said I was not sure but would surely attend the session - after grabbing a cup of coffee.
Anyways here is the talk I would have delivered had I signed up that day.

This November about one hundred thousand people signed up for a race. 15,333 people emerged as winners at the end. I was one of them. I was a winner ! I did not know how many people actually won when I finished the race. I came to know about the 15,333 number only a couple of days back. So what kind of race was this, you may be wondering ? It was a writing race. A race against time. A race where one had to write 50,000 words in the 30 days of November. If you do the math, it works out to 1667 words per day. The race was called NaNoWriMo - the National Novel Writing Month.
1667 words per day - that's easy, some of you would say. That's what I also thought initially -
not just from the daily word count perspective but overall I thought I could spit out 50,000 words. No sweat.

I actually signed up a day late, November 2nd, after reading an internal blog where I first came across NaNoWriMo. I did not write anything that day. And on November 3rd I wrote 452 words. I was'nt make much progress as you can make out. By 10th I had serious thoughts of throwing in the towel. But thanks to a combination of pep talks from the NaNoWriMo community, constant encouragement from my buddy and dogged determination on my part in refusing to quit this crazy race, I kept chugging along. A weekend of absolutely no writing was followed by a 5K words Monday and by the 25th I was close to 35K. There was no looking back after that. I finally completed 50K at around 2:00pm on November 30th - ten hours before the deadline ! And probably I was the only one who used vi on Win XP to write the novel !

As I look back it was as I had lived my whole life in that one month. A six month old son at home, Diwali, Barcamp and quality audit at the work place nothwithstanding I actually completed my novel ! Noone has read the novel. Even I have'nt read it. But it does'nt matter.

I encourage all of you to participate in NaNoWriMo 2008 - at least those of you who are 'One Day Novelists', who want to write a novel one day. NaNoWrimo would mark the end of the 'One Day Novelist'.

I may not have spoken exactly these words and managed to complete my talk in the alloted 3 minutes. Nonetheless this is how the talk would have sounded like.

A matter of life and death

2007-12-05T22:04:00.003-08:00

As you can make out from the nanowrimo badge in the frame, I managed to complete 50K words and was declared a winner ! Yohoo !
I did it with about ten hours to spare - churned out the last four thousand words in about two and half hours. When I started off I was worried about reaching 50K and hence sent my MC on a long tour aroundIndia. Finally when I hit 50K I was no where near completing the story ! So right now the novel is incomplete - hoping I can spend some time over the December 'break' and clean (and complete) the novel. The whole experience was amazing. During the first couple of weeks there were these two voices inside of me - one telling me that all this was a complete waste of time and just stop it. The other voice kept egging me on - now that you have signed up you better complete it. Somewhere after I crossed 25K these voices kind of merged and I could hear - you should have stopped much earlier; now that you have reached this far better give your best shot and go all the way !
There was a point when I thought I would cry when I was done - one of those tiring days I guess. I thought two consecutive 3K word days were awesome and then I did an exhilirating 5K word day - on a working day ! That was it - I had to complete this thing I started.
And I did it ! Yohoo !!

Anyways, on Friday I wanted to have a small TGIO celebration at home. Raghu's first wedding anniversary also coincided on the same day. So on the way back from work to home, I dropped in at a Nilgiris store. There is a new chain of stores around the city - got to know that the management has changed and they are driving the expansion.
The black forest looked inviting - there were only three of them which I picked up immediately. As I looked around the display window, I came across a card stating "Life By Choclate". My mind immediately made a connection to "Death By Choclate" - a richly sweet cake with couple of scoops ice cream that is available at Corner House. Was this choice of name deliberately aimed the Corner House offering ?

Some people live by choclate and some are willing to die for it.

Being a more positive name, I picked one of the LBC's and one double choclate moouse. I strongly recommend the double choclate moouse - do try it out. I really liked it

Malaika and Roberta

2007-11-16T05:23:00.000-08:00

My high school yahoo group has become active now. A few members were fished out of Orkut and added to the list. There was a mention of a song called 'Malaika' in one of the emails. Boney M seemed to have done a cover version of this number. The song itself was in Swahili and I could find both these versions on YouTube.
Sometime back, after seeing the song's reference in the book 'Snow', I searched for the song called 'Roberta' and found that song as well on YouTube.

Actually I had first searched on Google and the first hit took me to Peppino Di Capri's home page. There I came to know that he had actually performed as the opening act during Beatle's first live show in Rome ! How great is that !!
Anyways Roberta, an Italian number, and a few other songs were available on his web site but unfortunately my browser refused to play any of the songs - even from home.
I had given up on finding that song, when I happened to search on the tube and found it there.

Anyways, both these songs, though being in different languages, seemed to be having a similar kind of spirit - nice, soft numbers. In fact the place where Angleique, the signer, goes Malaiiiiiiiiiikaaaaaaa and point where Peppino goes Robertaaaaa seem pretty much same !
Which I found pretty interesting.

See if you can listen to these songs on the tube. Let me know what you think.

The first 10K !

2007-11-14T05:12:00.000-08:00

Finally, I managed to reach the first personal milestone - my nanostats bar graph touched the 10K line! Yohooo !!

This is turning out to be a bigger challenge than I initially thought. There have been momemnts of self-doubt. Even times when I thought of throwing in the towel.
But I have somehow managed to reach 10K !!

So another Yohooo !!
As 15th November is nearing, I should have been closer to 25K than 10K. Need a good couple of real good days of write-a-thons to make up now.

Its all uphill from here :-)

Me too !

2007-11-02T02:16:00.000-07:00

Read about NaNoWriMo in an internal blog post and signed up on an impulse. So what's the deal ? You attempt to write 50,000 words or more in the 30 days of November - that's all. As the web site conveys, the preference given to 'quantity over quality' is a refreshing change from some of the other endeavours that one pursues and the expectations out of them.

Starting a day late, I now need to type like crazy. The preparations of the upcoming quality audits, festivals (Diwali, arguably the biggest festival of India) and 6 month old kid at home do not help the cause.

Let me make it clear - I am not complaining about the last 2 points. Diwali brings a few holidays along with it which should mean more time to type :) And Vidush's smile can launch a more than a thousand novels !

Anyways, now that I have joined the madness I better figure out a method to it !!
Or should I even bother about the method ?

Simon & Garfunkel Test

2007-09-07T21:31:00.000-07:00

I had realized it the first time I tried it. The feeling was reinforced when I did it the second time last week. I am talking about listening to Simon & Garfunkel (S&G) while driving on city roads. It just doesn't work.

The best place and time to listen to the soothing melodies of S&G are sitting on a sofa on a Sunday afternoon'. Not amidst the hustle and bustle of the city traffic where people talking without speaking, people hearing without listening, go about in their mindless chaotic paths. There are frequent meeting of bodies, of vehicles that is, and more than a new niceties are exchanged. Do they ever feel that all my words come back to me, in shades of mediocrity. Probably not.

The noise of the engine within the car also does'nt help - even with the windows rolled up.
I hereby propose a new test for automobiles - to see how 'silent' their interiors can be.

Roll up the windows
Start the car up and move up to 60 kmph speed
Start playing Scarborough Fair and note down the complete lyrics
If you get all of the song, the automobile passes the test.

Crazy, you might say. Crazy it is driving through all this madness. So I thought S&G might help but I was proved wrong twice.

Honk !! Honk !! Honk !!

Disturb the sounds of silence

Possibly one of the biggest ironies of life.

Mr. 'Gracious' Smith

2007-09-06T03:04:00.001-07:00

I got this parcel today from the office courier person. The picture on the left shows who sent it . I was on cloud nine. It had finally arrived !!

So what was in the parcel, you may be a wondering. A book !
The front cover is shown on the picture on the right.
Well it was not just "a book" - it was actually a gift from Mr. Smith himself. Yahoooooooooooo !!

Does it get any better, you may be wondering , again.

Yes it does !! The book is actually signed by Mr. Smith himself. Don't belive me ? Here's a picture of the first page of the book with the signature on it.

Cool icing on a delicious cake ? You can say that again. So how did I get this wonderful gift, you may be wondering, again. Let me explain.

Tue 08/21/2007 7:31 PM: I send a "thank you" email to Mr. Alexander Mccall Smith. I had visited his website sometime back. Today I chanced to the visit the site again and found that the url has changed along with the site layout. Watched his interview video and saw some of his pictures. Also noticed an email id bearing his name. I had been wanting to getting in touch with some of the authors, whose books I have read and liked and this seemed to be a nice opportunity. So I send this message basically thanking him for all the wonderful books he has written and conveying my liking for his works.

Tue 08/21/2007 7:32 PM: I get a reply ! Wow, that was fast, I thought. Turned out to be an automated reply that said that Mr. Smith will try to reply "as soon as possible". Hmmm...

Tue 08/21/2007 11:42 PM: I get another reply !! Of course, I saw it the next day. But I was really elated to see a reply from Mr. Smith himself. My joy doubled on reading the complete mail. Mr. Smith actually asked me to send my mail address so that he can send a signed copy of his latest book !! How great is that ?

So immediately I send a reply thanking him along with my adress. After that I got one email from his secretary mentioning that the dispatch process has been initated. And today I finally held the book in my hands. It is difficult to express, in words, how I feel exactly but I will try one last time

YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO !!

Let it 'Snow'

2007-09-03T05:34:00.000-07:00

'Snow' is an amazing novel. Orhan Pamuk has managed to create an intriguing milieu of art, philosophy, religion, politics and human emotions (love,fear,jealousy, guilt to name a few).
I bought this book on an impulse from Strand while on book buying spree. I started reading and was immediately hooked on to it. Ended up reading the complete book making full use of the extended vacation I had taken to be with Meera and Vidush.

The thing I liked the most in the book was Ka's struggle to uncover the pattern of his poetry. He spent more than four years in exile and could not write even a single poem. Back in Kars he suddenly finds himself in the grip of strange force and ends up writing 19 poems in about 4 days time ! And then he goes back to Frankfurt and spends another four years in trying the decipher the pattern of those poems. His final solution of arranging his poems along the axes of a snowflake was so beautiful (a nice picture at the end of Chapter 39 depicts this quite vividly) . The underlying symmetry of a snowflake that he was always fascinated by also helps him understand himself and his poems. Philosophis of life like the one below also emerge.

Every life is like a snowflake

While I was enjoying the book, I kept wondering if reading the work in Turkish would have had any different effect. Would there be some kind of loss during the translation process - would the ideas and thoughts that the author was trying to covey represented as accurately in the English version. Of course, someone who has read the book in both Turkish and English only can shed more light on this.

I will end with another littel gem from the book

Life is a meaningless string of random incidents.

The slower 'un

2007-09-03T04:21:00.000-07:00

Some childhood memories are simply unforgettable. Sports were a reasonably big part of my childhood. Cricket and football (soccer for some) were the primary obsessions. Occassional dabbles in table tennis (ping pong for some) on the the narrow benches in school with hands or notebooks doubling up as 'bats' and bricks, pencil boxes etc forming the 'net', were a seasonal rage. Volleyball, and badminton also made guest appearences. But being in India, cricket got the most 'air time'.

Luckily we had some open areas back then where we could free our arms. These were the public parks in the locality that were always busy with at least 5-6 games going on in parallel. Sundays were devoted for little more competitive versions of the game. Enterprising players from neighbouring localities challenged each other with matches. There was a 'prize' which was negotiated before hand - either a lumpsum in cash or the cricket ball with which the match was played. Each player contributes a fixed amount towards the 'prize' and the winning team gets to take the spoils. The matches themselves were usually 10-15 overs (per team) long with 5-7 members per team.

A delivery from one such match always brings a smile to my face. Some other details have mostly been completely forgotten. Like who batted first, how many runs were scored, who finally won- my 'little grey cells' fail me there. But this one ball is etched firmly in my memories.

Being the eldest member of the team (about 13 years old then), I always got elected as the captain. Raghu, Deepak, Shammi, Vicky and Pammi were the other team members (I am not sure if I got the team lineup entirely right). Danny and Co. were our opponents. Danny was batting rather well that day and seemed to be running away with the match. I started a new over. Gentle medium would be best description of my style of bowling.

The first two balls were pitched on short of a length, around off stump and moved away - he simply opened the face of his bat and ran the ball down between the wicket keeper and short third man for couple of runs. This off stump line did not seem to be working. But I could not afford to stray on the leg side either.

I walked upto to my bowling mark for the third ball of the over. Just as I turned around to bowl the next ball, a thought struck me. I paused for a second, rubbed my hands against my trousers, gripped the ball again and ran into bowl. The line was again good length, on off stump, only this time I deliberately bowled it a little slower than the previous 2 deliveries. Danny played his pre-meditated open-the-face-of-the-bat shot again. This time though the ball came after he had lifted his bat and ever so slowly,as though in a slow motion replay, it clipped the top of off stump.

Got him !

I can still recall the Danny's expression - he stared open-mouthed first at the stumps, then at his bat and finally at me. He just could'nt believed that he had been bowled ! I, of course, was smiling ear to ear and my team mates were jubilant.

As I said before, I have no recollection of the final outcome of that match, but this particular dismissal stands out in my mind.

Spinners have a rich set of variations in their armoury - googly, 'doosra' or the wrong 'un, flipper, slider etc. For the fast (or gentle medium) bowlers, there is nothing like a good slower 'un.

Come September

2007-09-03T01:21:00.000-07:00

First time I came across this phrase was when the movie 'Raja' was released and the songs of that movie were doing their rounds on the countdown charts.

The 'Nazarein milin dil dhadka' song in this movie was supposed to have been inspired (read lifted) from the title song of the movie 'Come September'. Wikipedia has some interesting material on Bobby Darin (including an unconfirmed entry stating that the name Darin was picked from a faulty restaurant sign reading [Man]Darin Duck) , the composer of the original as well an actor in the movie. 'Raja' was also the debut movie for Sanjay Kapoor who, thankfully, did not get to display his 'raw talent' for long.

September, of course, kicks off a whole slew of Indian festivals. Janamashtami, Ganesha, Dussehera and , arguably the biggest of them all , Deepavali. Sometimes Onam falls in September as well but because all these festivals are actually based on the lunar calendar, their exact occurence on the Gregorian calendars changes from year to year.

जो बोया सो डुबाया

2007-09-02T22:45:00.000-07:00

एक कहावत ही लगती है "जो बोया सो पाया"
क्योंकि हमने तो है जो बोया सो डुबाया ||

दो वक़्त की रोटी, तन पर कपड़ा और सर पर एक साया
पकवानों और महलों पर ना कभी ये जीं ललचाया ||

कर्जे कि ज़मीन को अपने पसीने से सींचा और जान लगाकर हल है चलाया
कभी नकली बीजों ने, कभी असली बारिश ने तो कभी सेठों और दलालों ने है कहर ढाया ||

अपने बाप और भाइयों को बारी बारी है गँवाया
अपनी इज़्ज़त कि अर्थी को भी इन्हीं कन्धों पे है उठाया ||

ऐसी ज़िन्दगी ने ही मौत कि सूली पर है चढाया
मौत ने भी सिर्फ कुछ आंकड़ों को ही बढाया ||

दर-ए-जन्नत से आवाज़ आई - "बन्दे, तूने जो बोया सो पाया"
मालिक लेकिन हमने तो जो बोया सो डुबाया ||

और एक सवाल दिल में उभर कर है आया
इस जन्नत को ज़मीन पर लाने का है कोई उपाया ?

MetaPost Four lanes of misery

2007-09-02T22:39:00.000-07:00

Where did this come from ? Not much to guess here. A frustrated driver feeling miserable - watching people shamelessly filling up the wrong sides of roads.

"India lives in its villages" said Gandhi.

I think in the 21st century "India will on its roads". People would have migrated from villages settle along the road sides while the rest of us will be stuck in traffic on the roads !
I am sometimes amazed that many of us still manage to be sane after all the crazy driving on the roads !!

Talking Lens

2007-08-31T05:22:00.000-07:00

Mr. Ranganathan, Meera's maternal grandfather is a Tamil pundit. He has taught Tamil and few other subjects at school for over thirty years. He also took a large number of tuition classes after school hours, not only to support his meagre income but also to help needy students. He has an avid interest in politics and likes to read a lot. But unfortunately he has lost his eyesight - most of it actually. He can barely recognize people. Reading is close to impossible.

One reason of course is age - he is in his nineties. Apart from that he has another complication. He damaged one of his eyes at a very young age and has been forced to use the power of one eye for most of his working life. That has put lot of strain on the eye and eventually led to the current situation.

Last year when I met him, I realized that I wanted to help him read. One of the ideas that came to my mind that time was to build a "talking lens" - something that he can use to point to a newspaper or book and it will read out the text. This, of course, would be useful for other visually impaired people as well.

Alternatives exist of course -
a. Buy him audio books (expensive ?)
b. Teach him Braille (too old and is there much reading material available widely ?)

Both these don't really solve the newspaper problem. He does watch TV but is not very satified with the quality of the content presented there. His wife could read to him for some time. But she herself is having heart problems and whatever time she gets from doing household chores, she probably wants to take some rest.
All of Mr. Ranganathan's children and grandchildren have their own lives to look after - so they don't have much time to spend with him.

The ascii diagram below depicts the system I have in mind -


 +----------------------+            +----------------------+
 |"Lens" - OCR component|...........>|"Talker" - text2speech|
 +----------------------+            +----------------------+
                                                |
                                                |
                                                |
                                                |
                                                V
                                         +------------+
                                         |Audio Output|
                                         +------------+

While the components like OCR and text2speech are available, the challenge is to build a compact and portable device, just like a normal lens, which does all these
things in an integrated manner. Probably someone has built such a thing - I just have to search better. Support for Indian languages, for both OCR and the text2speech may be another challenge.

Nonetheless, another interesting thing to pursue with some spare time at hand. I wish I could build one of these and give it to Mr. Ranganathan one of these days.

Metapost Munnar Trip

2007-08-30T22:18:00.000-07:00

The html file was dated November 28 2000

The header in the file had the following note -

Oct 21-23 2000, the CT team went to Munnar. This is an account of some of
the events on that trip. This was sent out in 2 parts through e-mail to the
ctgrp mailing alias and was liked by many.

The Munnar Trip

2007-08-30T22:14:00.000-07:00

Bus comes at 4pm. Madamouiselles,Monsuiers and materials all aboard by 4.15pm.
Well, almost everyone except the 2 Dinesh's were in. While Dinesh
Goyal was at his elusive best, Dinesh Kumar was busy with the sysadmin world.
While Soms was successful in pulling the later from his worldly matters,
the former, like those onsite, has to remain content in reading this account.
The bus started Munnar-wards at 4:30pm. Once the Bangalore traffic was left
behind, the Cheif Entertainment Officer (CEO) of CT was summoned to get his
act together. Nishanth, as ready as ever, obliged us with some of his now
well known and much liked mimickery performances. Filmstars and CT team members
were mimicked to a good deal of perfection. There were the occasional shouts
of "That's not me" or "When did I do that ?" but overall everyone enjoyed.

Yours truly (YT) was'nt fully part of all this merriment and preferred
to reflect on Life in general. So when Smita suggested Antakshari, YT opined
that some food be diverted to his stomach so as to deprive his thoughts.
Everyone then feasted on cold samosas. After the snack break, Antakshari
commenced and progressed with the usual enthusiasm and arguments associated
with the game. Soon songs beginning with Na and Ha became scarce (imagine
even Nanna Munna Rahi hoon was sung !!) with even 'The Database' (Yamini)
returning null results for queries on songs beginning with these letters.
So we decided to call it a day for Antakshari and relax our stressd out
vocal chords and gray cells. Dinner stop was made at a hotel which called itself
"Sri Sarvana Bhavana" in Dharmapuri. Well the food was quite unlike what some
of us have had in its namesakes in Chennai. Anyway, this was'nt the time to
worry about such small matters. Munnar was still quite some way to go ;
Dharmapuri Sarvana Bhavans's can be dealt with later. Off we all went...

A word or two about the bus and its supposed driver. A fluoroscent
yellow Sharma travels 18-seater - a bus that David Dhawan would surely
consider using if he makes a "Driver No. 1" or something. And the driver
seemed to belong to the
its-travelling-that-is-important-not-reaching-somewhere school of thought.
Between Salem and Coimbatore he stopped the bus every few metres to ask
by-standers and tea-shop owners if road on which we were moving would have
Coimbatore at the end of it. After gathering votes, enough to win the Salem
legislative assembly seat, the driver decided to reduce some of his inherent
bias for the brake pedal and shift that to the gas pedal. The team meanwhile
was napping away to glory. Soundest Sleeper award was shared by Smita and
Yamini (later they earned the 'Sleeping Beauties' title too). Mamatha was'nt
getting any sleep and she decided to count sleeping heads instead of sheeps,
for a change. Oh, and all this with the 'wonderful' music system that the bus
boasted off at its loudest (the bus also had a 14 inch TV and fans for every
seat. The fan was allegedly a Flex feature the license for which had expired
which explained why they were'nt functional). Well, if you could call
5 buttons, 3 knobs, 1 slot and some speakers playing back some
approximation to the original signals as a music system. It also made YT
wonder if he had done the right thing in buying those cassettes with his
'khoon-pasine-ki-kamai'.

The road did end in Coimbatore. RangaPS rued the fact that he was'nt
awake when the bus passed his alma mater. Soms was pestering RangaPS for a
coffee shop. "What, good coffee shop open at 2:30am in the morning ? Are you
crazy ?" replied our Tamil Pulavar (TP). The team had some light snacks with
the its-never-too-early-for-breakfast spirit once we passed the Kerala-TN
border. Morning came and with it some really stunning greenery greeter our
sleepy eyes. A welcome change from the hazy green trees visible among
concrete structures in 'Nammu Bangluru'. Stop for morning duties and some
'chaya' was made in ?? . Mali decided that tea is for the lesser mortals and
he wanted something stronger to restore his shaken spirits - so he went off to
a bar-cum-restaurant. Whether he simply visited the restroom or had a quick
sip or two of the 'colored water' available there, still remains unknown.
Our driver, meanwhile fresh from the victory of the Salem seat, repeated his
performance in Kerala too. The team started second round of Antakshari. Couple
of songs beginning with Na and Ha were the surprise of the show. Around
11-30am we reached our destination - Sterling Resorts which was about 22 km
from the main Munnar town. To be fair, the driver did a wonderful job -
driving 19hrs is no joke and all of us were safe with all bones intact.

The manager of the resort turned out to be an interesting character.
"Ladies and Gentelmen", he addressed us. "You could'nt have at come at a more
appropriate time of the year. Not a drop of rain to be expected. No need for
any winter clothing; you can move around in normal clothes" proclaimed our
copybook salesman. "What about view from our rooms ?" asked someone.
"Every window has a valley under it" was the prompt answer. We could'nt
reconcile all this with the manager himself sporting a half sleeve woollen
jacket and people moving around with umbrellas in hand. Anyway we all
freshened up and got ready for what was to be a culinary shock. It came in the
form of tomato soup for lunch. That day it was proved beyong a trace of doubt
that even simple things like tomato soups can be made to taste like the worst
of swills. Some of the guys who finished their bowl of soup (mind you,
purely out of sheer hunger) would be recommended for the Red and White
Bravery awards. Rasam was the saving grace and the we all satisfied our
hunger.

Much as would have liked to stretch our legs and take a nap after
lunch, we also knew that time was not something we had in our hands. So it was
decided to go for some sight-seeing and shopping. Making a sensible decision
of giving rest to our weary driver, we hired a couple of jeeps for the trip.
The jeep drivers turned out to be some sort of local Schumachers. They covered
the 22km stretch to Munnar town in less than half an hour !! The pros used the
steering as some sort of joystick for video games. 'The Database' also had a
large stock of Surd jokes, some of which she dished out during the trip. First
stop was at the ?? Dam. The team went for a whirlwind tour of the dam waters
on the speed boats available for rent there. Next stop was at what was called
the 'Echo Point'. Now one of the jeeps had reached there earlier and people in
that group claimed that you can shout at any volume and you'll get an echo.
That sounds odd, does'nt it ? ( The other odd thing was that this echo point
was at an altitude of a hill top but more at the base of a hill). So some of
us spoke at normal volumes and true enough some sound came back after a delay.
Sometime later a beaming Mali came out of the bushes and the secret of this
amazing phenonmenon was revealed to the world at large. The team had some
spicy pineapple and group snaps were taken.

Back to main Munnar town for shopping, we decided to have some tea and
tiffin. Another of those Saravana Bhavana's was located and some of us ordered
food. YT and Nasir (the Nature Lover) were'nt feeling upto having anything but
still decided to split a plate of idlis. So we summoned the waiter and asked
a plate of idli by 2. The waiter looked offended and refused to lay down the
plaintain leaves and later clean them up just for the sake of 1 idly each. He
said that they run out of idlis. We decided to have a good laugh.
Anything in general and nothing in particular was the kind of answer one got
when asked about what exactly the shoppers wanted to buy. Anway it was around
7-30pm when the shoppers were sure that the shopkeepers of Munnar had nothing
more to hide from them and they had seen-it-all if not bought-it-all. And as
always the true fun in shopping is not buying yourself but making others buy.

Back for dinner, the historic tomato soup was looming large in our
minds as we trudged warily for the buffet. The sweet corn soup turned out to be
much much better. Again satisfaction of hunger was the primary motivation for
completing the dinner. BONFIRE !!! we shouted after food. "Planned for
tomorrow" said the hotel people. There seemed to be some communication gap
among the hotel junta , but we stood firm and demaned a bonfire right then.
The manager was forced to entertain our demand and a fire was soon ready on
the lawns.

Dance is an evolved art form. However, this would'nt have been the
first thing that would have come to the mind of even a casual observer of the
bonfire bash. With the musical beats and our steps going off in tangential
directions, it would have quite a site. But the main thing was the spirit
behind the effort - nothing can be taken away for that. Of course, there were
notable exceptions - Nishanth, Smita, Ravi Kiran. Nasir was grace personified.
Rest can be put in the also-danced category. Once the fire went out (both the
literal and the metaphorical) the team settled down to play Dumb Charades.
Movies were the obvious choice for the domain. Ben Hur to Jurrasic Park,
Aradhana to Aakrosh; old and new alike were given to enact.
Among the lighter moments was Mali showing a battle scene , swinging an
imaginary sword (movie : Kurukshetra) which some people saw as someone playing
table tennis !! Towards the end it became a game of guessing the name of the
hero and heroine and finally the movie name.
Dinesh Kumar wanted to become healthier, wealthier and wiser and decided to
go to bed real early. Or maybe he had an appointment with his wife in that
wonderful world of dreams and he did'nt want to be late for that. Who knows ?
The rest, meanwhilte decided to call it a (long) day and retired for the
night. Not before planning to go for trekking early next morning which did
sound preposterous to many.

When YT opened his eyes next morning and looked at his watch it showed
5:30. But when he looked out of his window it was too bright and sunny for
that time of the day. On closer observation, he found that his watch had
stopped. It was 6.30 already. YT then woke up Dinesh and Soms who woke up
cursing RangaPS who had'nt allowed him to switch on the room heater saying
"If you have come so far, enjoy the weather man". It was clear that everyone
won't be up and trekking soon and so a quick game of bat-ball was commenced.
The Guide who was to accompany us took some time in coming during which we
finished breakfast and did some cycling on the sloping roads within the resort.

There are two kinds of people - those who trek 6Km and come back and
others who trek 3Km and come back. That's what one would have said when (s)he
would have been at the scene where the Guide arrived. The main trekking
attraction was upto Devikulam lake and according to him the distance to the
lake was 6Km ( he also added that one would'nt feel that distance). When some
people protested, he suggested another spot which was about 3Km but not as
interesting as the former place. Here's where our world got divided into two.
The 6Km group prevailed and the team set out for Devikulam lake following the
Guide. It was a long trek along a narrow trail, going through dense bushes,
winding up through steep slopes. After about an hour's walking we reached a
tiny waterfall. The water was quite shallow before falling off. We decided
to cool off a bit. Slowly, we started behaving like a herd of elephants -
splashing water on one another. Soon everyone was made to offer themselves
for a splash session. Even the Guide was not spared. The Guide turned out to
be a real sport - immersing himeself in the water on his own. The Lake was
only a little distance away, but only some of us went to see what turned out
to be a breathtaking sight. Mother Nature does'nt make them any more
beautiful. Stuff that picture postcards are made of. The water of the lake was
sweet (for those who dared to taste it). Soaked to the bones, we all started
our trek back.

It is at these times that one realizes the joy of being comfortably
dry. And the Hot'n'Sour soup given during the lunch did'nt taste half as bad.
After lunch, it was time to check out of the resort. Feedback ledger was
brought to us. Nasir and Co. wrote out couple of pages of complaints, the
praise being given to the Manager for his attitude. We were back into the
hands of our Driver who by now had a good 2 days rest. We were hoping for a
better deal from him on the way back. Well, the Driver did show some of his
old touch by losing his way and then executing what looked like his favourite
manouerve in driving school - the U-Turn. But overall he did'nt mess up much
and we all reached back where we stared by about 8.00 am. Oh! and those who
were wondering about the 'confession' session that took place the night before
in the bus on the way back, YT has decided to steer clear of the sensitive
matters disclosed there and instead refers the interested and curious readers
to the respective autobiographies (if and when they are written).

So yet another journey came to an end.

But Life still goes on.

Four lanes of misery

2007-08-30T08:01:00.000-07:00

Yet another day. The same story repeats on these city roads. I am one such road. Countless vehicles seem to be using to reach somewhere. But many a times they are just stuck in the same place. There is a semblance of progress once in a while but it takes quite sometime before everyone has moved forward a bit. The situation is much like the nation's itself is what I gather from conversations of some occupants of a vehicle plying on me.

There are vehicles of all shapes and sizes. The ones on two wheels seem to be moving like ants around the giant old trees that were once along my sides. Vehicles on the left lanes seem to be moving the fast inspite of being the wrong lanes to overtake. Again a reflection of the state of the nation itself is what I gather from few other travellers using me.

All these vehicles make an awful lot of noise as well. Most of the noise is supposed to be coming from their 'horns'. Kind of funny since some of the cattle that occasionally manage to come over me also have these things called 'horns' but they never made any noise apart from their usual bovine chatter.

The whole procession looks like a giant millipede heaving itself across a vast expansive desert. Just because the tail section can see the head moving forward, it becomes impatient and starts using its 'horns', conveniently forgetting that there is still a middle section that has to move as well before it gets a chance ! How silly.

"Oh Traveller" I bemoaned, " I seem to be leading you all somewhere but I never seem to reach anywhere. I feel miserable".

"Oh Road ! is that you ?" replied the travellers in chorus.
"We never knew you had feelings and not just potholes" wondered the travellers.

The travellers continued in chorus -

"The misery is equally ours - all the four lanes of it."
"We all seem to be taking the road to somwhere but actually go nowhere !"

ज़हन-ए-ज़ोर

2007-08-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

खूब कही आपने मिर्ज़ा आपका है वाकई "अंदाज़े-बयाँ-और"
अब समझने में लगेंगे हमें उम्र बारह, उस पर ज़हन-ए-ज़ोर

MetaPost Vertical Wit

2007-08-28T06:57:00.000-07:00

The date on the text file containing this ascii art was June 20 2001.

The context ? I was struggling to bring a travel story (a nomadic nugget :) to close and had this idea of having an ascii art comic strip which I decided to lay out vertically and call 'Vertical Wit' (instead of Horizontal Humour ? :) This was the first and last strip that was done - vertical for sure but not much wit. Of course the characters were 'copy-pasted' from the web - only the text was typed by me.

Probably when I get some more time, I should revive this.
Which reminds me - saw this library called libasciiart or something of that sort on a linux box. Probably a program that generates these strips from some sort of description ... or maybe it just pulls out random text from the web and uses them ...

Hmmm ... sounds interesting ...

Vertical Wit

2007-08-28T01:36:00.000-07:00



VV I T
E
R
T
I
C
A
L


     Do all stories need to have an
     end ? Can't they just trail off
   |________________________________|
       O
        O
         O_      `,
              ' ')#
              |/  ?
              | o )\
              /__/\ \____     _____
              /   \_/    \   |\____\
             / < _____ _> \  | |   |
      ------/___/  ,___/___\-| |   |
             /  |\/ |         \|_"_|
         \  /_______|            (_____
          '


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Maybe I'll organize a suggest an
    ending contest. Or maybe ...
   |________________________________|
       O
        O
         O_      `,
              ' ')#
              |/  ?
              | o )\
              /__/\ \____     _____
              /   \_/    \   |\____\
             / < _____ _> \  | |   |
      ------/___/  ,___/___\-| |   |
             /  |\/ |         \|_"_|
         \  /_______|            (_____
          '


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


                 `,    ... And they all lived
              ' ')#      happily ever after.
              |/  ?   |________________________|
              | o )\            /
              /__/\ \____     _____
              /   \_/    \   |\____\
             / < _____ _> \  | |   |
      ------/___/  ,___/___\-| |   |
             /  |\/ |         \|_"_|
         \  /=======|            (_____
          '

MetaPost Ode

2007-08-27T22:48:00.000-07:00

The date on the html file is Oct 13 2001. I think I wrote it around that time.
Of course, I was onsite then.

So one feature that can help is if one can back post blogs on past dates. Not sure if is supported by this or any other blogging software.

Ode to the Onsite Employee

2007-08-27T22:46:00.000-07:00

Everyone comes here
For 3 or 6 months or an year

You may have a different visa
Bottom line is cent is dearer than a paisa
But change of scene is surely a treat
So we brave the cold, beat the heat.

Overcome the jet lag and start running the race
That is already moving at a very maddening pace.
Bugs to be resolved, milestones to be met
Complete features whose requirements have'nt been set.

Breakfast is nothing or maybe some cereals
Dinner with movies or TV serials
If you are lucky, you go to a team lunch
Else you just follow the bunch.

Groceries from Pick'n'Save and IGS
Eating outside ? Sometimes yes.
But mostly it is cooking at home
Cuisines from Rawalpindi to Rome.

Weekends may be a differnt story
If you are in office, it is not quite hunky-dory.
Shop at Kenosha till the car dickies bend
Or sit at home and sigh as it comes to an end.

Not driving is considered a handicap
If you do, you run into mishaps.
Jumping signals, hits or speed tickets
Landing ourselves on sticky wickets.

Calling home once a week
Choosing our words as we speak.
Telling them things, how it is
And then it is home that we start to miss.

Staying in Residence Inn, Meadows or Extended Stay
Longing for another sunny day.
Passions keep us going - Rasam, Mountain Dew
Money, Tennis, books to name a few.

And then it is time to go back
After 3 or 6 months or an year
Taking memories, photos and cordless phones
Back to our home, sweet homes
Only to return the next year.

MetaPost Meeting

2007-08-27T22:36:00.000-07:00

The rhyme on meeting was bourne out of countless hours spent in them.
The opening lines have an obvious inspiration from Shakespeare's lines -

" ... a rose by any other name would smell as sweet ..."

The spirit of the rhyme is probably inspired by the following quotation that I came across sometime back -

Chyrsanthemum by any other name would be easier to spell.

Meta MetaPost

2007-08-27T22:33:00.001-07:00

MetaPost - Post that talk about other posts. Like metadata, metaclass etc.

So this is a meta metapost - post on metaposts.

I have decided to use metaposts to explain the background for some of the posts. This one is to explain the concept itself.

MetaPost - Tolerance

2007-08-27T22:24:00.000-07:00

The rant on tolerance was triggered by an column that I read in The Hindu on Aug 12 2007. I decided to respond with a contribution to the same section in the newspaper. So spent some in diligently writing down my thoughts. Then composed an email and sent it out to the email id provided. A response came back the same evening regretting the fact that they could not use it.

I was trying to figure out the reasons for the rejection. Further questioning on the email id seems futile as noone has responded so far.

Probably they did not find the quality upto the mark. Or it was too critical of the original column. Another likely reason was thrown up when I saw the last Sunday's edition - another reader had contributed a column responding to the same article. That probably settles the issue.
Anyway my first contribution to a newspaper column ends in a little bit of a disappointment.

But it does end up on this blog - so hopefully someone other than me will also get to read it :-)

A meeting by any other name

2007-08-27T08:59:00.000-07:00

A meeting by any other name would still be as boring
Careful ! lest they catch you snoring.

Stand-ups are worth a sit-out
Execution controls are like boxing bouts

Skip levels are at best skipped
One-on-ones are tough to be slipped

All hands do not expect presence of your mind
All these meetings - just part of the daily grind ?

Dilberts, Wallys, Tinas or Asoks,
On all of us are Mr. Adam's jokes

A meeting by any other name would still be boring
Be careful ! Lest they catch you reading this outpouring !

Jai Blogger

2007-08-27T08:36:00.000-07:00

I breathe my first in the blogosphere. A sample of the promised "rants and chants" is already posted. While all this can be classified as a splurge, it might seem strange to label it as sporadic. Well it is the intial flurry and most of the stuff that you see is simply a result of a batch upload - things I had written down earlier.

I was looking around for a good multilingual blog and settled down on this as I already had a Google account (one less username/password to remember you see)। The transliteration was pretty neat and helped me get the Hindi verses online pretty quickly. There does seem to be an issue with the rendering of unicode fonts on some browsers - so you may not be able to see it correctly

The existential question remains still remains. Both for this blog and life.
Yet to find a reasonably satifying answer (both life and this blog)

So why Jai blogger, as some of you may wonder. No, it is not named after a popular Java package also found in the classpath of some of our programs.
Something along the lines of Hail Blogger is what Jai Blogger translates to in English.
Being fond of acronymns (especially TLAs - Three letter acronymns) and their endless possibilities, JAI also stands for Just Another Indian (Blogger) !

तो बोलो "जय ब्लॉगर"
"ब्लोग्गिंग जिंदाबाद"

Tolerance - a dwindling virtue

2007-08-27T08:31:00.000-07:00

Mahatma Gandhi was voted as India's greatest icon in a recent survey. While this result of statistical sampling is
mildly reassuring, a more pertinent question to ask could have been on the lines of how many of us understand Gandhiji's principles
let alone follow them. While it is too subjective a question to ask in a survey, it nonetheless warrants some serious thought.
Tolerance, one of the main principles that Gandhiji promoted, is vanishing as fast as the ozone layer. This has resulted
in "warming up" of people's attitudes. In schools we are taught that all religions preach tolerance towards others. Yet certain
sections of the society have conveniently used their interpretation of religion to justify indiscriminate acts of violence.

"Unity in Diversity" has simply become a catch-phrase which does its rounds in our midst during independence and republic day
celebrations. The unfortunate reality is that every aspect of this diversity, be it language, religious beliefs or caste to name
a few, are being used to divide us and satisfy the power hunger of some. With globalisation, we are also seeing a new element of diversity being defined on the basis
of financial status that seems to be adding to the existing challenge of maintaining unity. We seem to be defining ever reducing boundaries
of identity and similarity. First it was division into states based on linguistic differences and now we are seeing demands of
sub-division within these states for various other reasons. This is leading us to a point where the sum of parts is not even
making up the whole.
An example, somewhat trivial, of the dwindling tolerance amongst us can be found in a recent article in a national daily.
The author of this column was peeved at "stray comments" from a visiting friend about a radio station playing songs
in a local language and an innocuous question from a migrant labourer wondering why nobody spoke in the national language.
Both these instances were quoted as amounting to disrespect to the language of the particular state and we were requested
to "blend in" when living in other states. Surely there have been more serious instances of disrespect being shown to
a particular language. The radio station is probably playing songs in the local language, not only to attract local
audiences, but also because if they aired programme or songs in other languages, some lingual chauvinists would
prevent broadcasting of that channel itself ! And the poor migrant labourer probably not a polyglot, as some of the more
educated and travelled amongst us are, is having a difficult time in daily transactions in the native language.
Again, more serious attempts to homogenise regions of the country can be easily recalled from our recent history.
If we cannot tolerate differences between people of various states within the same country, how can we expect a fair
treatment when we travel to foreign lands in search of greener pastures ?
Tolerance is possibly the only virtue that can help all of us to not only accept the myriad diversities that exist in this glorious
country but also find effective and inclusive means of making India, as a whole, a great nation. We should promote this
virtue, even if it is in the form of "Gandhi-giri", at all levels. Our great scientists should probably invent "tolerance drops" to be
administered as part of our child immunisation programme to impart this important virtue in all our future generations !

इश्क और मुश्क छुपाये नहीं छुपते

2007-08-27T03:50:00.000-07:00

ना कभी इश्क किया हमने , ना मुश्क लगाया अपने आप पर
अब सिर्फ ये किस्सा छुपाना बाक़ी है ||

मकसद ए जिन्दगी

2007-08-27T03:39:00.000-07:00

मक़सद-ए-जिन्दगी ढूँढने में कहीँ ये उम्र ना बीत जाये
ना कोई मक़सद मिले या मंज़िल तो कम-स-कम ये उम्र ही बीत जाये ||