San Diego Zoo and the suffocation of choice a.k.a the buffet problem

Visited San Diego Zoo, considered by many to be among the best zoos in the world. There's always something conflicting about zoos: on one hand, however gilded the cage, the animals are in captivity, but on the other, we get to be so close to them and feel why its worth conserving as many of them as possible (which this zoo is also famous for).

Saw my first ever gorilla, toucan, and polar bear (partial list here). It's also one of the most accessible outdoor spaces I've ever seen, with even an escalator segment that helps you navigate some of the steeper parts of the zoo.

We must have seen about 40-50% of the zoo, given the size of the campus. That's pretty much the most you can do in 4-6 hours, especially with children in tow. Which means you have to choose. With a dazzling array of choices, this act is very difficult. You have this problem at large buffets and bookstores (ok, *I* have this anxiety at bookstores).

People have been studying the problems of abundance - when we can't have it all, it makes us uneasy, for making a choice implies saying no to something else, and thus a potential loss - what if you made the wrong choice?

Sheena Iyengar's book Buy The Art Of Choosing sums this up nicely.

Blockboard

So you sit there, literally at the eleventh hour, wondering: how do we get here once again? The blackboard of the mind, so fresh and unsullied in the morning, brimming with the promise of a plan, a straightforward journey chalked out in white, red, yellow, and green, where all you had to do was to show up, follow the dotted line, and pick up the pot at the end of the rainbow.

But here we are, sitting in front of your laptop/book/slate, watching a tangled mess that even Jackson Pollock would refuse to entertain with kindness. Visual evidence of another day spent idling, in neutral, in reverse gear. And when the engine spluttered to life, it took you elsewhere, on paths in black and grey, fun but guilty nevertheless. Or so you claim.

So here you are, with the clock's hammer poised to strike down upon your head with vengeance, when you decide to sleep over it. Tomorrow, the slate will be wiped clean, freshly gleaming, waiting for your stratagems which it shall spoil - but only by the end of the day.

Business as unusual.

How Tendulkar helped me retire, unhurt

I call my generation of Indians as the "Doordarshan generation", because of the shared monoculture embodied by the national broadcaster and the overwhelming nostalgia for the DDiot box. "Tendulkar generation" may be another good candidate: we came into sporting consciousness by surfing the after-wave of the '83 Cup victory and helped make cricket a single-minded national obsession.

In the centre was "Sachiiin, Sachin". He was the only child prodigy we could tolerate and not feel envious of. He became a solitary and tragic soap operatic figure - Fate, doubtlessly clad in rich georgettes and heavy makeup, constantly conspired to thwart his success and tried his sincerity and talent in every episode. Like our moms would with Tulsi and her ilk, we stood by him, knowing Sachineva Jayate. There were those who doubted him, and fought from the shoulders of Sourav or Rahul, but we knew we'd win in the end.

And look who is still padding up. The end has come and gone.

My relationship with sport has changed dramatically. It may be a dreaded sign of becoming a grown-up or an inevitable cooling off. The first signs came when I realised I had accumulated very few stories of watching sport from recent times. No more I-sat-up-and-watched or did-you-also-notice or I-still-can't-believe-it. The few stories that stuck featured Federer, Nadal, and Messi. Where at one point, I had shelves full of daring cricket stories, now I had the woodwork being gnawed away by the termites of apathy.

Like a Nick Hornby character, I could write an autobiographical account purely through the lens of Indian cricket and Tendulkar. The Abdul Qadir over: I was at a friend's place, watching my friend's father howling in delight over this little fella smacking the world's best leggie. Aamir Sohail's wicket to turn around the '92 WC match: at home, during exams, just after a immensely annoying but short power-cut. '93 Hero Cup Semi-Final: at cousin's place the day after father was admitted to hospital with malaria. The Pakistan Test at Chennai: on stage at a quiz final, getting score updates from the only person on stage with both a pager and a complete lack of interest in sport.

And so on and so forth through the nineties and the noughties and what-do-they-call-this-decades, proving wrong uncles who thought India couldn't chase big scores, proving friends right through big-match failures, collapsed in prayer and stuck in superstitious chairs, and choosing to stay away from debates of being "overrated". And a World Cup win, and a 4th innings chase, and some other tidbits. (But never a direct hit: he always sucked at throwing down the stumps to run someone out.)

We knew that one day it would happen: Sachin would retire. This wasn't a Superman comic or a Nancy Drew book or a myth about a Chiranjeev. Things came to an end. And then there was personal business. In these enlightened times where everyone sings solemn paeans to productivity, it was hard to ignore the time being spent in watching your team lose. Or win. It was hard to tell the difference any more. So I knew I would have to move on too. Perhaps, somewhat like with friends from fifth standard, I could promise to 'keep in touch'. But the channel doesn't show Sportscenter anymore and the subcription to Sportstar lapsed two years ago.

So how would I feel? What would I miss? What would I do, post-retirement? These questions circled around me, setting up me up for a soft dismissal that I would weep over.

The Master Blaster to the rescue. I don't know how, but I've been led to a point where I just couldn't care. The fan-muscles had atrophied, but with overuse. No debate would goad me into a response; no allegation would rile me; no snigger would evoke an instinctive reaction. Yes, Tendulkar is still around, far beyond what anyone would have expected a decade ago. He's overseen my transition from naive and rabid supporter to oxymoronic objective fan looking for beauty in sport to a devil-may-care-but-I-don't bystander. This is mostly true of cricket; since my involvement with other sports was relatively skin-deep, they have escaped this fierce U-turn.

100 hundreds, or 24 years not out, or 30k+ runs - the numbers are so big that they are insignificant. Somewhat like the length of the orbit of Jupiter. It makes utterly no difference to my life - and if he hadn't been around for so long, I would not have realised that.

This makes my cricket retirement utterly bearable, and I have, like with many things in life, Sachin Tendulkar to thank for it.

---

* Some of my old Tendulkar posts
* A truly illuminating article by Jonathan Wilson on the value of sport to our lives.

The search for 'sur'

In Stephen Alter's "Fantasies of a Bollywood Love Thief", the musician-writer-director Vishal Bhardwaj speaks of the process of writing a story and compares it to finding the right "sur". It's an interesting comparison, for even the average musically-aware person will relate to the idea of "sur lagnaa" i.e. the consonance of notes and pitch, when things click and a sense of place, time, and cosmic order sets in. When it doesn't, the dissonance is laid out uncomfortably bare.

You could apply the metaphor to anything in life, not just all things creative but everything of importance. The search for "flow", for order, for a stable orbit: find the "sur" and the tunes of life seem to sound sweet.

An algorithm to plan your retirement

What you will need: a pencil, some paper, your brain (or a calculator), access to your bookshelves, your DVD collection (read: your hard drives), your music collection.

1. Make a list of all the books you own. Find out your reading speed, i.e. no. of mins per page. Roughly estimate the amount of time it will take you to read all the books you want to read. (A).
   
2. Do the same with your DVDs and movies i.e. estimate how much time it'll take you to watch/listen to these. (B)
   
3. Add about 25% to each of these counts, to account for newer books and movies of the future. (A', B')
   
4. Assuming an average life expectancy of 75 years, calculate how much time you've got left taking up valuable planetary space. (C)
   
5. Estimate the fraction of the day you can spend in a day reading+watching+listening. (D)
   
6. if (C*D <= (A'+B')), it's time to retire.

Maybe you don't read, maybe you like to travel, to act, to paint, to bungee jump. But the general principle holds. Otherwise, you'll find you have run out of time.

You really want to find that out? Hopefully, you'll have high senility by then.

Manneys of Pune - Beating the Retreat

As many Pune readers would know by now, the iconic Pune bookstore "Manneys" is closing down soon (in March 2012). "Manneys" has been an old Pune favourite, partly because of its vintage (about 50 years old) and partly for being one of those bookstores that is tagged as having "rare/arbit/you won't find it at Crossword" books i.e. a snob value that the more discerning book-reader can flaunt. According to Mr. Manik Mani, the owner, he is not shutting the place down because the Joe Foxes have run him out of business, but because it took up valuable time that he'd now rather devote to his family and other pursuits.

I personally had an ambivalent relationship with it. My commercial engagement with books revolves around discovery, (physical) accessibility, and affordability. Both the first and the last have decisively shifted online. I also made heavy use of the 2-3 libraries I subscribed to, and thanks to Landmark's sponsorship of quizzes, I usually had coupons to the store right across the road. Also Manneys was shut on Sundays, the price of being run by an individual who also prized life-outside-work.

The term "old-fashioned" to describe stores like Manneys emits a whiff of both nostalgia and a certain exasperation. The latter because customer service can be limited, extended browsing is difficult, and there were no discounts to grease the palm. However, as alluded to before, Manneys was one of the few places in the city where you could find an interesting book, on History or the Sciences or Philosophy. In fact, that should read as "stumble upon", thanks to the higgledy-piggledy disarray on the racks. But you could find an entire shelf or two of Tagore's works, or books about plays, or about linguistics. Sometimes you found them when they fell out as you put back a book on the other side.

Given this emotional ambivalence and the fact that I've long since deserted the store, I can't be too sentimental at Manneys' departure. However, it had an undeniable 'heritage' value, for as expressed in this post about the changing landscape of Pune's landmarks (where, ironically, I evoke it), Manneys and its ilk were outposts in the otherwise bland 'sameification' of mall culture that has cloaked cities like Pune. I was planning to write up a post about book stores in Pune, and Manneys would have been among the first to be included. There will undoubtedly be a gaping hole in that list.

So I went to Manneys last Saturday for the last time (at least for now) and scooped up a bunch of books. I also noticed the immense goodwill that the store has obviously generated among its many customers, most of whom told Mr. Manik how much they would miss the store. I could not resist joining them to wish him a happy post-Manneys life.

Manneys has a discount sale until the 4th of February, Saturday (unless this has been extended). They still have lots of great books. In Dhammo-style, here are some of the ones I picked up:

1. The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish : Neil Gaiman
2. Two "William" books : Richmal Crompton
3. The Mystery of the Stuttering Parrot : Robert Arthur (Three Investigators series)
4. Pale Fire : Vladimir Nabokov
5. Southern Mail/Night Flight : Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
6. Dog Detective Ranjha : Partap Sharma (who recently passed away)
7. The Story of Philosophy : Will Durant

George's post on a "defining bookstore of his life".

Some press articles about the store and its closure:

1. The Economic Times
2. DNA: local reaction
3. Indian Express on when William Golding visited it

Dead Right, Pune

This was saved in my drafts for over two months. I desisted from publishing it because I didn't know if this was a harsh over-reaction to everyday life in Pune. But today, after hearing this incident, I felt compelled to put it out. Yes, this was a unique case, one 'madman' causing damage at such a scale. But what we face each day is, IMO, just the same only at a smaller scale. Caused by us 'sane' people.

---

What would you say if I told you I was facing death threats? ("Lucky you" isn't the right answer.) That some persons outside, entirely unknown to me, represent a grave mortal danger to my well-being? Each day? And these numbered not in the ones or the tens, but in the hundreds?

I am not joking.

That's just how it is to go out on the streets these days. I don't think it's an exaggeration. I don't see a difference between sending these people into the city with a bunch of loaded guns with their safety catches off. Though, people with gun licenses are infinitely more responsible than with driving licences.

There are people who are blissfully unaware of most rules of traffic (don't insult the jungle by making a comparison - at least the jungle's rules are followed). There are people who will miss a turn, then reverse half a kilometer to avoid taking the next gap in the divider ahead. There are people who think flashing their lights at vehicles and passers-by automatically empties the road. There are people who will force you into a mistake by honking repeatedly. There are small people in big, ugly vehicles who think driving in a big box enables them to muscle another person off the planet. There are people who will ruin your day for you, for free.

These are people who can maim you. Or kill you. Or someone close to you.

There's nothing very funny about "that's the way we drive". You might not like it if I, like some Middle Eastern despot, shot off rounds randomly at you and said "that's the way we shoot here".

It's sickening to see anyone on foot, especially the elderly, having to scamper for their lives, each time they step out. Insensitively, I guess the problem is that somehow not enough people die in front of us. That the answer lies in mashing up Stalin's quote: one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. We need a million personal tragedies.

You may think it's more terrifying to live in Karachi, or Kandahar, or Karbala, where bombs go off each day, where people don't know if they'll make it through the next 24 hours. You might not think of it in these terms, but people who venture out each day don't know which idiot might run into them. A conscious culture of casual and opportunistic lawlessness prevails, where each one nudges the other to skip that signal, break that no-entry, burst through the wrong lane, and see these as the de facto rules. I bet more people die of road accidents in a year than in terrorist attacks. (Anyway, eventually, we don't do much about either.)

You might not have noticed, but it can be terrifying to go out there.

To tell you the truth, when I see people breaking the rules and putting others in danger, I wish something nasty happens to them during that very act. And only to them. I see them as a menace to society (even if society is busy being a menace to itself) and the only way to make the roads safer is to get them out off the way.

This is dangerous thinking. But sometimes, it's me or them.

I'm convinced that the only way to look at this is in black and white. To hammer in the bare-faced social and personal costs of bad driving. Realise this: we are an army of assassins-at-large.

And we'll get you eventually.

The Rahul Dravid of the year

December 31st is the Rahul Dravid of the year - everyone is waiting eagerly for the next guy to come in, about whom everyone is exceptionally hopeful about, irrespective of how great Dec 31st was. (Eventually they'll blame that guy for practically everything in their life that year, instead of realising that the days are different, but they remained the same).

December 31st is always overshadowed by the promise of the next wicket.

(Previous December 31st commiserations. Have a super 2012, but have an even better Dec 31, 2011!)

Yeh hai dungistan ka wow

The only thing keeping pace with inflation is the sales in pet dogs. Each morning (and doubly so on weekends), the streets are filled with pooches attending to nature's urgent calls, while their masters (or more commonly their slaves) remain on call waiting. Observe these masters and you will realise that to them, the pet dog is a true member of the family. As the humorist Pu La wrote, they talk to them in intimate tones and adamantly claim the pets can understand them.

But I have never seen pet owners lead their kids or any other equally prized members of their family out to relieve them in the middle of the roads. The morning constitutional belongs not just to them, but to us as well, but we are forced to slalom past remains of their privileged motions. The yellow road is not one that leads to Oz, but to public nuisance.

Of course, one can claim that pets are merely following citizens in a country long used to treating outdoors as the natural repository of the insides. When can we expect that owners don't take our streets for granted and teach both pets and children the value of the commons? Perhaps it is time to raise an equal and opposing stink of some kind.

The last word belongs to that great philosopher of our age, Jerry Seinfeld, a citizen of a city where they make you clean up after your pet:

On my block, a lot of people walk their dogs, and I always see them walking along with their little poop bags, which to me is just the lowest function of human life. If aliens are watching this through telescopes, they're gonna think the dogs are the leaders. If you see two life forms, one of them's making a poop, the other one's carrying it for him, who would you assume was in charge?

Be there, be square

Each Saturday, when I receive my copy of the Indian Express, I turn, not to the sports pages or the Page 3 party news (this being the IE, there is none of course), but to read Mihir Sharma rip into the Indian TV news media. I derive a nasty form of pleasure from it, and I'm sure I'm not alone in it. In recent times, spurred by what we saw, heard, and winced during and after L'events D'Anna, his tone has become as militant and mocking as that of some Kejriwal-Bedi offspring. And this is one campaign I wholly support.

Take for instance Sharma's take on the ever increasing panel sizes of 'experts' on Times Now. There were days when the 9'O Clock show looked more like a set from Hollywood Squares: there were many boxes on screen and each box had someone answering questions, sometimes simultaneously. But unlike that TV show, the responses were not funny and the viewers never got any answers at the end.

Indeed, I call upon Mihir Sharma to go on an undeclared, unwarranted, infinite fast against such news programmes. For that is what the Nation Demands.

Incidentally, I have been on a zero-TV diet for the last 2 weeks. And realised it's very easy to achieve an immediate improvement in one's life.

String theory

IBN Live quotes Extreme Tech, a technology website, as saying:

The innovative doodle that Google put up for the country and jazz guitarist, songwriter and inventor Les Paul resulted in $268 million in lost productivity.

The calculations are basically a house of cards made of slabs of back-of-the-envelope calculations built on a foundation of assumptions. Still, even if I ignore the number or method, the exercise annoys me. Consider the positives:

• Several million+ people, who may not have heard of the pioneer Les Paul, now know who he was.
• Instead of muddling 5 minutes on Facebook or Powerpoint or thinking about what they'd do after work, they spent time with a new toy, and some of their neurons (especially on the right hand side of the brain) welcomed the change.
• They marveled at the current state of web technology and some of them resolved that day to learn to build such cool things.
• By listening to what others had done with the audio-doodle, they figured out that great music can be made even from humble instruments. Some dusted off their old guitars and others made appointments with musically-inclined friends and teachers.

I wouldn't know how to calculate it, but I guess that whatever the loss to numerical productivity and annoyance to neighbours, the contribution to human knowledge and creativity was firmly in the black.

And if you want to pluck a few strings again, here you go.

Alain de Botton and "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work"

That I am a little reluctant to describe Alain de Botton as a modern philosopher probably reflects more on my self-image and the image I want to portray to the world. In this post, I will be describing a book of his that I quite enjoyed and since, in the minds of my friends, modern-age philosophy is often bolted to the shelf of professionally vague self-help bestsellers, I worry about what they may think.

But Alain de Botton himself (or rather his website) comes to the rescue, describing him as "a writer of essayistic books that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life.'". That's a reasonable description. de Botton is not a prescriptive writer, but one who seems to possess both the leisure as well as a unintrusive acumen to write about us humans and the worlds we inhabit. Without telling us what to do next.

I heard of de Botton via Dhammo (thus giving me a chance to pay the favour back). I first read "The Architecture of Happiness", a quaint book about different spaces of the constructed variety, lowly office buildings and grand cathedrals alike. But this post is about "The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work".

Perhaps I am taking the easy way out, but I don't have as much to say as much as I have to quote from the book. We spend a significant portion of our adult lives at "work", says de Botton, but we don't discuss it very much. This is perhaps not so true any more - blogs and tweets are devoted to dissecting our work-lives in detail or making throwaway comments during the day; but it is true that we do not compare our experience across professions: art curators do not break commiserative bread with brain surgeons, cricket umpires do not swap notes with database administrators.

Apart from being a lurking presence during the day and a quiescent ghost in the hours between work, what is so special about work? Our ancestors (including our parents) probably never made so much of it, the way we charge so much of our potential happiness to it.

"...the most remarkable feature of the modern working world may in the end be internal, consisting in an aspect of our mentalities: in the widely held belief that our work should make us happy."

In the book, de Botton follows people to work, talks to a wide variety of people going about their daily business, observes, and makes conjectures, even about himself. It is fascinating, an unexpected kind of voyeurism, watching rocket scientists prepare for a routine launch, shaking your head at a power engineer whose weekend hobby is to trace the paths of power lines, ride up and down elevators with business consultants. Satisfyingly (and sadistically), their lives are as interesting (or boring) as ours.

Perhaps the most interesting and poignant encounter is with a career counselor. He deals with mid-career clients who can no longer keep up the facade of knowing what they want to do and students about to plunge into the depths that plague all of us, while dealing with his own professional anxieties. Like a dentist with a vague sense of dread about the pain in his molars.

de Botton notices that the counselor has a notice pinned to a door containing:

"a quote from Motivation and Personality, by the psychologist Abraham Maslow [...]: 'It isn’t normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.'"

He observes the counselor helping a woman deal with the attempt to discover what she really "wants to do" (familiar question at any age?), by attempting cathartic writing sessions not just about what these people like, but also what they envy. What else can you do in that short span of time, in the rapidly falling sunlight of life?

A de B takes an aptitude test; when its results come back:

"I recognized my desire to submit to the report’s conclusions in the hope of quelling my doubts about my future. At the same time, the report failed to inspire any real degree of confidence and indeed, the more I dwelt on it, the more it seemed to signal some of the limits of career counseling as a while.

It struck me a strange and regrettable that in our society something as prospectively life-altering as the determination of a person’s vocation had for the most part been abandoned to marginalized therapists practicing their trade from garden extensions. What should have been one of the most admired professions on earth was struggling to attain the status open to a travel agent.

...

But perhaps this neglect was only an appropriate reflection of how little therapists can in the end make sense of human nature."

He ends the book by noting that “If we could witness the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to immediate paralysis." However,

"Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us a sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble."

Would you like kanda-pohe or murrukku-chiidai with your filter coffee?

Today is as good a day as any to record a personal anecdote that was recounted in a Twitter conversation by Shamanth yesterday.

In mid-2006, we were organising a quiz along with a well-known Pune school, so Salil and I hopped over to meet the teachers involved. Eventually, I met the teacher who would be doubling up as compere for the event, who had been handed a lengthy bio (thanks, world wide web) and wanted to know how my name was pronounced etc. (i.e. she wanted to separate the meagre facts from unqualified fiction). From my full name, it's easy to guess the region I hail from, and so the conversation proceeded thus (excerpts from my sieve-like memory):

T: So are you a Tamilian?
Me: Yes, I am.
T: Oh, I am too. So you are studying now?
Me: Yes. So you've been in Pune a while?
T: Yes, my husband has been working here for sometime.
Me: I see

Then the fun part:

T: I have two daughters. [beat] One of them is married.

(ok, it might not have been so abrupt to begin and end, and the good lady may not have insinuated anything, but real 'reality' just ruins a good story, doesn't it?)

Feelin' Frisky

Almost every large hotel or shopping complex in Pune has installed metal detectors at its entrance and has security personnel carry out body and baggage checks (usually very perfunctory and ineffective). This is yet another aspect to our outdoor lives that we have slowly come to accept. Despite the 'nobility' of the aim, this only causes minor annoyances to the 99.999% of the populace that seeks to demolish nothing but a three-course meal.

Last week, I was at the Landmark store in Pune. Visitors to the store will know the first display after the security checks and bag deposit is that of the latest music & movie releases. I was standing there, when a couple and their son, who must have been about five, walked in. I looked up because the son began to cry.

The father asked him what he wanted and the child pointed outside. It seemed as if he wanted to go elsewhere and not spend a morning in a big bookstore. The father didn't protest and took him towards the exit. Where he spoke to the guard there who smiled and bent down.

The guard then proceeded to give the kid a once-over with his metal detector, immediately at which the boy stopped sobbing as if obeying the PMC water supply regulations for the day.

One could wonder if the guard had been amiss earlier not treating a kid without the complete suspicion that should be his professional stock-in-trade, or to begin with, whether the trio had not been frisked properly because they were white foreigners (for that they were). Or just realise that there well could be two sides to each bomb detector experience.

Memento, but not so mori

It's fading again. Refresh.

I'm not from Bombay. I belong to a place to its south-east, a place known (and sometimes ridiculed) for its smallness (of its size, of its ambition), its insipid rains, its lack of drive (and drive-ability), its surfeit of action-less opinions, and its cynicism. In short, its un-Bombay-ness. But it suits my temperament.

I've lived in Bombay for a total of 9 years. I don't understand the people there very well, the things they do to live in a place like that. But neither did I understand why my step quickened as soon as I set foot on its roads, why I never worried about how I would get to place B from A at any time of the day, or how friends there seemed a lot more willing to take on everyday grit. I don't know anything about the city's phantoms that get invoked each time something goes wrong, but how about something called 'the idea of Bombay'? That exists for sure. Anything that's been around for that long develops an all-permeating idea that its citizens buy into.

That idea is worth protecting, just as other good ideas are.

Set a reminder? An entry in your diary? A big X on your tear-off calendar?

There's a lot of anger. Distress. Finger-wagging. I'd like to blame people too. But I'd like to start with myself.

I do not participate in society's affairs beyond the usual limits. But is that such a bad thing? I'd like to lead my life the way I want to. All I ask for is the security and freedom to do so. I pay my taxes by means of earning an honest income. I have voted in every election since I turned 18. I am aware of traffic rules. I even sign online petitions when the urge takes me. Sure, I don't stand for elections or participate in rallies. I don't know what it would take for me to become more 'activist' - perhaps I never will. But I'm making a reasonable contribution to the land I happened to be born in.

But I do forget easily. Leave aside doing something about them, I don't even know what the progress has been in previous cases of distress to affect India. It fades away from memory. Who do you blame? Life is perennially news-worthy, so the news-men have to write about those things. My own life demands my attention like an impatient child. So who is awarded the contract to keep track? We think those faceless bureaucrats and in-your-face politicos ought to. But I can't tell if they are doing a good job or not - perhaps they foiled 99 major attacks, perhaps they were incompetent enough to let through the only attack ever attempted. I simply don't have all the information.

A tattoo! That's the answer. (Stop it now - don't be flippant).

So I ask myself: how will you not forget? How can you blame the others if you don't even remember to finger-point? It's quite possible people 'out there' are keeping an eye out, on my behalf. As a member of the un-involved masses, I'm going to try and change my own state of ignorance.

People have been saying: "we will not forget", "We will be there every week". I hope they do. But I find it hard to believe they will, and cross a certain critical threshold. Unless their lives change fundamentally in order to accomodate this zeal. It's hard to be that possessive about anger. So all I, inert participant with the limited means at my disposal, will try to do is this: each month's 26th, I will write a short post on this blog, summarising all that I will have read and tracked about in that month about what is happening re: the November attacks. I'll also try to note what the others, who have promised to remember, have done. I have no idea where I'll begin, for I have no capacity for primary research here. Perhaps on most occasions, I will only announce, yet again, my failure to do even this simple task. But I will try. If this menial task is beyond me, why speak of loftier goals?

The day in 1949 the Constitution of India was passed? Nope.

For me, 'terrorism' could be anything that scares me out of conducting my life in a reasonably independent manner. In essence, rioters, dangerous traffic conditions, gun-toting extremists, do all this. Of course, one is unlike another, and for most people, an external threat is more dangerous, with a bigger outcry. If the people of Bombay could show us how to tackle big demons, perhaps we little cousins might summon up the initiative to take on our lesser evils.

Back to the idea of Bombay. Cities change over a period of time, but Bombay's ideas have been steadfast. Others in the country seem to be (regrettably) leaving behind their own ideas and copying some of Bombay's. But all the more reason to nurture the original, for who knows what will take its place if that idea goes missing.

Finally, I'm not from Bombay. But there must be some traces of it in me. I was born in Bombay. On the 26th of November. The latest entrant to a list of dates that will live in infamy. But forever? Hopefully, some day we won't need to rememeber.

Billshot Bungle

The only way Niranjan and I have been able to survive the urban morass of corporate jargon that pullulates life in the urban jungle is through ever-vigilant ridicule (it gets worse if we slip into the gutter ourselves). Bullshit Bingo no longer assuages the cringing soul, so we came up with an evolutionary brainwave. It's called Billshot Bungle.

The idea was simple: we came up with several malaprop versions of various terms of ja-aargh-on. You could spring it on people whose native tongue has morphed into managerese. Perhaps, like Tyler Durden in action at restaurants and films, this is probably a similar but low-grade form of guerilla warfare. If this causes some unused neuron in the recipient's head to pop in unease and shock, perhaps our job is done :-)

The idea is that the replacement 'Billshot' ought to be vaguely appropriate to the term and context that it replaces. We could do more, for instance, coming up with showstopping retorts such as: Are we on the same page. -> No, we're not even in the same chapter. But that's for later.

Here's our list.

Bullshit	Billshot
Keep you in the loop	Keep you in the noose
Touch base	Touch bottom
Learning curve	Burning curve/Learning kerb
On the same page	In the same cage
Going forward	Throwing/Blowing forward
Granularity	Granulocity
Stakeholders	Stickholders
Leverage these assets	Levitate these assets
Take it offline	Take it offshore
At the end of the day	At the end of the play
Heads up	Heads on
When the rubber meets the road	When the robber hits the road
Sync up	Sink in/Stink up
Set the right expectations	Set the bright extensions
Low hanging fruit	Low hanging foot / low lying fruit
Keep the lights on	Keep the tights on
Deep dive	Deep fry
Ballpark estimate	Ballpoint estimate
Bandwidth	Bondwith

Left pointing the other way

While using a mouse, I occasionally switch from a right-handed mode to a left-handed mode. Earlier versions of Windows used to call the relevant option under Control Panel -> Mouse as switch to left-handed mouse, but now they call it (confusingly, IMO) as switch primary and secondary button.

Which brings me to my point: software UI design, for all its comforts, still remains sinistral-unfriendly. On a typical GUI containing windows, there's no way to move the scroll-bar to the left (by default, the mouse pointer tends to rest on the LHS of the screen, but largely this could be a psychological perception of having to move to the right end of the screen). The minimise-maximise-close buttons will be on the top-right. Even the mouse arrow pointer continues to nod towards the north-west (IIRC, in earlier Windows versions, it would go north-east with a switch in mouse-handedness).

Here's an interesting little discussion between a left-handed user and a (left-handed) UI designer on the topic (look for the comment by "Sebastian").

And while on the subject, once again, all the main contenders for a US Presidential election are left-handed. The last time this happened was in 1992 when George Bush (the elder), Bill Clinton (the victor) and Ross Perot (the moneyed pretender) were on the ballot.

The dividing line

On the same day that Vcat sent out a link about Americans trying to see the positive sides to indigestible gas prices, Ajay blogged about how life around him seems to be changing: neighbourhoods show a tendency to shrink (to walkable sizes) as are per capita home sizes.

As yet, we don't quite seem to be hearing such stories here. Based on anecdotal evidence around me, if at all, the problem seems to be worsening: lots of cars, cars, cars (diesel is still subsidised, but is no longer exclusively a poor man's fuel), relative affordability of 4-wheelers, lots of executive-level people use their cars (along) instead of taking company buses out to the IT parks, roads aren't wide enough or smooth enough to allow cyclists a real chance in the traffic ecosystem. I can't see any larger signs that our culture-specific habits are changing in any way in response to the environment or the prices.

Incidentally, several Pune roads now have dedicated cycle tracks marked out on the fringes. In some cases, these are demarcated using an outer fencing, rather than just a paint marking or those tiled paths that are becoming so common. This is a welcome arrangement, but there are a few gaping holes, sometimes literally. For instance, in Model Colony, some of the tracks are punctuated by intersecting lanes that allow vehicles to abruptly enter the road - the cyclist has to, every 5 minutes, watch out for these. In other places, there are no cycling lanes at all, so using cycle tracks is safe only in very limited areas. Add to this, the manic jungle-like look in the eyes of most motorists, and you're scared to pull the old velocipede out during the day.

Baner Road, perennially under siege, seems to be nearing the end of this current stage of repair. It now is concretised and wider. But there is no divider. Crossing the road, whether on foot or on pedal, is like wading through croc-infested water while the critters set out "Welcome!" mats alongside their gleaming canines. How can you build such a big road, invite everyone to race at what seems to be a minimum of 50 kph, and forget the bloody divider?

Remembering Minal Panchal

I never met Minal Panchal. Regretfully, I only heard about her when this happened. It doesn't matter. Minal, whom I've never known, except via the outpourings of people who are also strangers to me, continues to affect me in ways that many near ones never will.

She was a year younger, and that hurt. That she was on a popular social networking site, sketched out in almost three-dimensions, made her more than a bystander in an avoidable tragedy. From what people said I can imagine someone, infinitely more enthusiastic about life than I will ever be, looking forward to classes, to learning, to adventures of the future, of life-changing events. Cut short abruptly. No fault of hers. Wrong place, wrong time. You can rail about unfairness, but it won't help. You can say 'that sucks' - nope, makes no difference. We've got to trudge on. We'll falter too.

In the 10%x zoom of time, we are fairly insignificant beings, most of us, just happened to be put together for a briefest of jiffies. Whether ember or diamond, star or firefly, we have a chance to shine, even if at sub-lux levels. Some of us extinguish early, sometimes due to no fault of our own. Don't wait too long to sparkle.

* Sepia Mutiny remembered Minal in the aftermath last year.
* As did Minal's former classmate.
* Prof. Loganathan too.
* This year, Minal's family hopes for a fitting tribute by way of a museum for children.

The great Failure post

Previously on failing

I remember the day this post was composed (I'm merely writing it down today). I even remember the time, give or take a few minutes. I had just finished taking one of the hardest exams I had ever had the fortune to attempt. The trouble was that there still was an hour and thirty minutes to sit out. I knew I had done all I could and no amount of staring at the paper or cajoling my brain was going to help. It wasn't a question of giving up the battle. It had been a slaughter and the duty of the slain body is to lie still and let the other warriors save their heads. It was the 28th of November, 2005, and it was about 10:30 in the morning.

I did not want to leave. The simple reason was that the instructor and both TAs, having finished clarifying questions (people had questions!), had nothing to do. I did not want them to see my paper and trace it back immediately to me. It would take them one swift pass over the largely drought-hit answersheet, even before I could step out of the classroom. I resolved to stay put, to do whatever it took to pass the next excruciatingly lengthy passage of time.

Some time later, I had my own version of Edvard Munch's The Scream on my notebook. Appropriate. Stratagems evolved during concerts endured as a child bubbled up onto the surface. I counted desks, heads, books, perhaps even pixels. I drew some more. Finally, I went back to the question paper. I stared at some Gaussians. Metaphors plunged down either side of the normal curve. I realised once again that I was pretty bad at taking failure.

My classmates will tell you that I've never liked to discuss question papers at the end of an exam, sometimes vehemently so. Why spoil the rest of the day when the inevitable silly mistake bursts into view? I am not very good at participating in things that could be fun but I think I'd suck at. It crushes me to suck. That Monday, I realised I need to learn how to suck. I can't go on failing at failure.

Some two years later, I still haven't been able to fail properly. This prevents me from doing things. Being awkward, being laughed at (gently), being found out, kissing the dust. I hide away. I admire those who plunge forth and trip, but seem to get better at staying up. Most of all, I envy those who just have it; sometimes they have it all. There were times when I'd rail at the unfairness of the world that chose to hand it out to a few while we, sweat cascading out of every pore, hands on knees while we draw in long breaths, toes stuck in the mud, watch as they canter away pleasantly. It doesn't help that I find it hard to confront my failures. I look away. I cross the street and hurry into the smog. There are people and places and times that remind of battles lost, making it harder to die another day. I'm not good at amnesia either.

Still, here we are, in the bulge of the bell curve, among those claustrophobic crowds. But remember: we make the successful ones look good. If we weren't around, you couldn't make head or tail of the victory graph. Perhaps, on top of the bump, in the middle of the tracing, we can see farther than you. It's improbable that we'd get there before you, but it's not impossible, right?

There were so many ways to look at my distraught answersheet. I'm not going to say that I chose only the noble and brave option of the gallant acceptance of defeat, the resolve to fight till another sunset, to salve the scratches. The pendulum shifts from mood to mood; towels have been flung and retrieved. But one thing is clear: the game is as yet afoot. The fat lady is still a petite lass who hasn't discovered the pleasures of icecream with walnuts topped off with sinful chocolate and has just begun practising her solfege. It's only fair that we re-calculate the scores at the end of full-time.