What Blog Men!

Whatte Design

2010-02-16T10:36:00.000-08:00

To all those who've been asking for design specs of my bookshelf. When you build one, please mail me a picture of it loaded with books and CDs. Enjoy!

Swine Flu over the Cuckoo's Nest. Laugh now

2009-08-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

The evil air of Swine Flu has engulfed our city and has in the process clouded the minds of our politicos, who want us to stay away from Multiplex cinemas and malls for four days so that they could... surprise surprise... do nothing magical in particular. I mean I was expecting to see some bigtime guerilla fumigation exercise with an N95 masked SWAT team, okay this is not a Hollywood film, but at least some sort of a cleanup or infection trail identification exercise that would have left the city a lot less H1N1 prone on Monday.

But no such. Might as well have let us watch Kaminey and what's-that-other comedy caper with Genelia D'Souza during our less-proud moments of humour craving, qualitatively speaking.

In other news, I have discovered a talent for dropping mobile phones from heights directly proportional to the value of the handset. I think I achieved economic equilibrium with this habit with my previous phone, the Nokia E62 which cost about 12k and could take a fall from the first-floor of a low-ceiling building without as much as one whimper. Falling from the topmost berth of an AC 3-tier train coach was a piece of cake. I used that phone for 2 years and offered it to gravity at the rate of 1 drop every week and it still functions beautifully.

But my new phone, the El Fragilo Nokia E71 is a high-maintenance pampered lady in comparison. I mean I once put it along with my house-keys in the same pocket and it protested with a permanent scratch on its screen. Nokia, what made you assume everyone who used a Rs 20k business phone wore silk clothes? Second time, I dropped it while seating myself inside a car and it fell onto the car floor. Since then, it has decided to behave vindictively by switching on and off by itself twice every hour. The scoundrels at the Nokia service center cleverly detected that the phone had fell and refused to cover it under warranty. They should all be using their forensic acumen in saving us from gun-wielding 20-year-olds who suddenly crop up from Karachi in dinghies and exterminate beer bellied Indians in Colaba pubs.

And I am sure that when I left the Nokia premises, they all had a sadistic laugh and made a long distance call to Finland to some engineer with fifteen s's and twenty seven e's in his name and thanked him yet again for designing a fall-sensitive phone that could help them further the fine art of customer harassment.

2009-08-13T00:50:00.000-07:00

A hilarious email forward I received today.

The Times of India is read by people who think they run the country.

The Economic Times is read by people who think they own the country.

The Hindu is read by people who are not sure whose country it is.

The Indian Express is read by people who shouldn't run the country.

The Statesman is read by people who think they ought to run the country.

The Asian Age is read by people who think someone else should run the country..

The Hindustan Times is read by people who think Delhi is a country.

The Telegraph is read by people who think Bengal is the best country.

The Malayala Manorama is read by people who think Kerala is their country, and God's ... zimble !

The Mid-Day is read by people who can't think in this country.

The Pioneer is read by people who think the Brits ran this country better.

The Tribune is read by people who're more bothered about the country-side.

The Dainik Bhaskar is read by people in the country-side.

The Bombay Samachar is read by people who'd rather be in some other country.

The Saamna is read by semi-literates who think, tujhi aiee chi, everyone should fx%k off from country..

The Femina is read by the fat wives of the rich in this country.

The Stardust is read by people who care a shit who runs the country as long as she has big tits.

The Pune Times is read by some people who think the pub is their country.

The DNA is not read, but used to pack footwear by people going out of this country.

Seriously, how many newspapers in India really stand for something today?

The No-How of Pune

2009-01-01T19:37:00.000-08:00

Once or twice a month, I travel down to Pune to my parents', who stay in a rather sprawling government bungalow in the hilly outskirts of Pune. For government largess, the bungalow is rather lavish, set in green surroundings with a private garden. The government does take good care of its employees (if you are in the right department and posting) and I enjoy my mostly peaceful stay there, if you don't count the errands my Mom takes pleasure in delegating to me ('say Apurv, why don't you get some potatoes, onions, cabbage,coriander, 10 kg atta and 8-9 other items at noon tomorrow?' Of course, the wake up calls for errands scheduled for noon begin at 8 am).

For a city perceived as young and modern, Pune is amusingly stiff and and quirky. 'Don't take off you slippers here', 'no services available between 1 pm and 4.30 pm', 'milk not available here', 'no discount on non refrigerated cold drinks', 'coughing not allowed at wash basin' are common signboard sightings in Pune. I don't think any city in the world collectively enjoys saying 'no' as much as Pune does. Shopkeepers get visibly irritated if you ask for an item they don't stock (though they clearly should by the particular nature of the shop). Consider this signboard outside a grocery store in Khadakwasla: 'Only Coca Cola available. Please don't waste our time by asking for Pepsi.' Even the Pope wouldn't be as dedicated to Christianity as Pune businessmen are to the cause of disabling their own profit. Their pet peeve is : 'I try hard to run this shop but the bloody customers keep disturbing me.'

Most auto rickshaw wallahs will refuse going to any of the destinations you ask of them. If you investigate further, it surfaces that they don't want to go to any destination, even if you offered double the fare. They want to sit there and stare at the stray dogs perhaps, or mine snot from their noses maybe, who knows. After all, what better place to enjoy a day long siesta than in the back seat of a rickshaw in a noisy auto stand, intermittently disabling commuting ambitions of people like you and me. I can visualize the chief of the Pune auto rickshaw union sitting in his dingy office and laughing out loudly to himself saying, 'Serves you right you imbeciles, always trying to go from here to there. Now please fuck off and go sleep the day off like us staring at stray dogs and mining snot. Ha ha ha'.

Punekars have successfully taken unhelpfulness to the levels of a performing art. Consider this signboard outside a paan-shop near the Pune railway station. 'Charges for asking directions: Rs 1 for distances upto 1 km, Rs 2 for 5 kms and Rs 5 for more than 5 kms.' A clear and effective deterrent. Those who do attempt being helpful are monumentally miserable at it. 'Reach Fergusson Road at the T junction and go up it and then go down the Bhandarkar Road'. Since none of these roads have a slope, the instructions must clearly mean that I should reach Fergusson Road and levitate above it and then drill myself into the ground at Bhandarkar Road.

The municipality is an active participant in this festival of disabling and saying 'no', something they do by not building any infrastructure for a fast growing and Infosys-ized city. If you were to walk into the offices of the Pune Municipal Corporation, I am sure that you will find signboards in cubicles such as 'building new flyovers not allowed', 'please do not widen any roads' or 'do not complete any project before 5 years.'

Despite all such quirks, Pune must be one of the most picturesque cities in India. I know of few large cities where you have a burger at Burger King one minute and be out driving into the misty hills with their beautiful lakes in the next hour. For the ample surroundings and scenic hills of the Western Ghats that lie right outside Pune, I love being in that town.

Traveling between Mumbai and Pune can be immensely pleasing if you take the train route. And within the various available trains, nothing beats the Deccan Queen.

The train is perfectly timed in morning and evenings to suit business and regular travelers alike. More than anything else, I just love the Pantry Car - where Fish and Chips or Baked Beans on Toast occupy the breakfast menu along with the legendary Chicken Cutlet and Veg Sandwich of the Indian Railways at affordable prices.

The waiters are extremely friendly and resourceful and will readily serve you custom demands ('Can you instead get Fried Fish with Bakes Beans and some warm milk?'), for which they are handsomely tipped by the older commuters, often by cheques.

So while you enjoy your breakfast, the train wades its way through the scenic hills of Lonavla and Khandala, poetically green and beautiful during the rains.

The train would however do good by providing electrical sockets at each seat for those with weak mobile batteries and laptops. I can't understand for the life of me why a nondescript passenger train from Kalyan to Kolhapur (that takes 18 hours for a 6 hour journey) can have this facility while the Deccan Queen cannot. Maybe the officer at the Railway HQ responsible for allotment of electrical socket-enabled bogies to trains (Shukla jee with hair in his ears and red tape in his heart) performs the allotment randomly through a lucky draw of chits. Maybe there is a whole gambling ring of bookies built around predicting which trains will get electrical sockets in Shukla jee's next lucky draw. Who knows.

Whatte Bookshelf!

2008-12-15T21:55:00.000-08:00

After a lot of searching, it finally dawned that the Dream Bookshelf does not exist in a furniture shop, but has to be designed and made at home. And so it was that a friend and I embarked upon a search for crazy designs and finally mashed all our ideas together to get the above result. The carpenter took less than a week to build it.

Looks cool, whatsay? It can hold about 150 books in total, though I used the bottommost shelf for my DVDs and music. Efforts to fill the shelf with books are in full force too - vigorous biblio-retail activity, if you will. With four hours to kill Gurgaon last week, I spent them at the Landmark store and impulse-bought a few Bill Bryson titles and two more Jon Krakauer books. Added in a travelogue of Pakistan by American journalist Ethan Casey. Combined with the earlier William Dalrymples and Paul Theroux books, my collection of travel books is finally beginning to look good!

Airport lobby dynamics

2008-12-07T10:45:00.000-08:00

We are living during times when all people waiting at airport (or hotel) lobbies have only two books to read - The Secret or The White Tiger. Books that a friend calls 'essential reading for the non-serious reader'. I don't mean this in a judgmental way (it goes without saying that when one says judgmental, it always means negatively judgmental), because with all due credit, the female variety at airport lobbies has progressed from the time when for about four and a half years, they were stuck with that other lobby-book 'Tuesdays with Morrie'. In hallways spread across this vast country - women of all sub-40 ages and pedigrees could be spotted gawking into the pages of Tuesdays with Morrie. I use the word 'gawking' confidently because they were always alternating surreptitious glances at the book in their hands and their surroundings - people in particular. One could almost transcribe the happenings within their minds: "So where was I? Third paragraph on the right-side page. But wait, look at that pink-clad elephant of a woman and her non-matching shoes. Such absence of dressing sense. Reminds me of so-and-so, that obnoxious friend of so-and-so. Back to paragraph 3. The man with the pink-clad elephant too has a potbelly. No wonder both..." No wonder their part-time glances at the books looked like gawking. Only that now, the subject of this timeshare gawking is Rhonda Byrnes' The Secret.

This overhaul in reading monotony from Tuesdays with Morrie to The Secret is by all means an achievement in the chronology of insignificant reading.

Men waiting at airport lobbies on the other hand had nothing much to pass time with until America introduced laptops to the world, except gawking at the women who were gawking at the books and at other women gawking at books. The advent of mobile phones then added a third occupation for the male kind. After going through the farcical modalities of security checks at our terrorist-friendly airports, our typical suited booted corporate-type pot bellied business development manager dude now finds an empty seat in the lobby and with a quick sprint of his handbag's zipper, flashes out the Lenovo laptop. Presently, the other hand reaches for the mobile phone, the screen of which without much delay is propelled towards the ear and stuck there. While the laptop boots up, he indulges in the habit of habits, and with one sweep of the eyeball surveys all the women gawking at books before returning his gaze to the laptop screen.

From here commences the intricately tripartite occupation, multi-task of multi-tasks - of talking loudly on the mobile while gawking at the book-gawkers and then passively at the laptop screen. Any expectations that the laptop screen might have an Excel sheet or a business proposal are quickly unfounded when you hear musical beeping sounds of balls bouncing against surfaces. The subject of our regard is playing one of those games called "Stupid games for pea-brained morons waiting in lobbies or traveling in metro trains." For those without laptops, these games also come in mobile versions, the juggling of which along with loud talking on phone is made easier by hands-free kits or Bluetooth headsets.

Moronic retail in mid air

2008-12-07T10:40:00.000-08:00

One of the most amusing inventions to have found a place inside budget airlines of our times is the In-Flight Shopping Mall booklet. Every seat pocket contains apart from the safety instructions pamphlet and the in-flight magazine (these days containing articles fiercely running for that widely coveted prize called 'The Worst Travel Writing in the History of Mankind') a 16-page brochure listing down about two dozen extremely pointless items targeted towards abject morons. Passengers, all of whom obviously have an IQ of minus 150, are expected to marvel at the dull objects and be thrust towards indulging in the act of birdbrained retail 30,000 feet above sea level. As I perused through the brochure, I could not help but run through a few of them and examine their utility to mankind.

The Digital Musical Photo Frame is 'the most upto date way to store your photos. It's 7" screen allows perfect viewing while pleasant music plays in the background. Stand out from your friend's with this advance photo frame.' Must we mention that using this photo frame renders severe punctuational retardedness in you? Anyhow, the manufacturers of this musical photo frame have in a very focused manner targeted the shy and strong silent type people amongst us who while showing photographs of their childhoods or vacations to friends have nothing much really to say or narrate and consequently must break the awkward silence by playing music from the photo frame. I can imagine people sitting in the flight gasping in awe at the booklet and exclaiming, "Finally it is here! Music playing from where it always should have been - a fucking photo frame!"

Let us investigate the 'Bite Relief' gadget now, which is a palm-sized plastic object with a pointy rounded probe at one end and a button at the other and looks like one of those tops that when rolled on the floor emits light in various colors. The 'Bite Relief' gadget promises (and I quote verbatim) 'instant relief from mosquito bite. This genius gadget, relieve pain irritation when applied to effected area, simply click once and feel the pain disappear.' This contraption is unquestionably a boon for all masochists who love getting bitten by mosquitoes in order to use this gadget rather than use any one of the various kinds of repellants. If I were the owner of the company that manufactures this innovative gadget, I would serve this niche market of non-believers of 'prevention-is-better-than-ecstatical-scratching' better by also producing an electric mosquito that will first bite the skin so that the pathbreaking 'Bite Relief' can be used.

Among other whatsits that the In-Flight Shopping Mall booklet attempts selling to the nincompoops amongst us are nylon travel belts that cost Rs 960 and rucsacs that cost Rs 575. According to the creators, people who can afford travel belts worth Rs 960 will buy cheaper rucsacs. This must clearly be that emerging segment of customers who like to buy Rs 20,000 ice-cube trays that they will use in Rs 10,000 refridgerators.

New tagline for home pesticide

2008-11-05T02:53:00.001-08:00

Beast or Pest, Baygon Spray is the best.

ʇı puıɯ

2008-09-10T05:32:00.001-07:00

˙ɐƃoʎ ɥʇıʍ ƃuıƃƃolq xıɯ ɹǝʌǝu

Tumach

2008-08-28T06:57:00.001-07:00

X - Thanks for the tip.

Y - Why just the tip? The whole iceberg is yours.

*One Tight Slap*

The last words of a dying ant

2008-07-28T08:17:00.000-07:00

So long and no, thanks for all the squish.

The Happening or It Has Happened, Frendo

2008-06-24T06:48:00.001-07:00

It's finally happened. I had heard of it happening to others but always found it absurd and attributed it to a flaw in those people, their conduct or their ways of existence. I abhorred the cribbing and complaining of these people and they invoked images of sissy pop song videos in me. I was sarcastic, satirical, unrelentingly caustic and singularly captious about them.

And now I am on the proverbial other side, a subject of the affliction, stressed, compressed, distressed and helpless at that. A soft corner for this state of being has suddenly sprouted within me and from looking down from above, I have plummeted to looking at myself while being down below.

I am finally Friendless! Yes, that I am, as opposed to Friendful - which I was until not very long ago. At 27, I should have seen it coming, because I have been a bystander to seeing others see it coming since long.

So this is what happens as you near the age of 26 and a fraction. Half of your friends have had more than two halves the luck in finding suitable prospective spouses and off they go spinning in marital bliss. A few more finally give in to the persistent telephone calls originating from home and fill those endless forms about their 'hobbies' and 'expectations' to be harangued into the other kind of spun bliss - the arranged marriage - not before long. All promises of singleton behaviour on their part post the event fall flat on the floor. About to be married people have a tendency to tell you, "Don't worry yaar, how can you even dream of me being a tied-down guy? You won't even notice the difference." Rubbish. Immediately ridicule it as empty bravado. Do not set yourself up for emotional disappointment by believing in their lies. The fact is - those whose after-work lives dwell on grocery purchase cannot be good activity puh'dners.

The rest? You finally realise you've grown out of friendships, you fight and call it quits. Yes, it happens at 27 too, as I have Eureka!-ed upon recently. You fight and you say tata to (or are said tata to by) friends at 27 too!

So that leaves you, 27, lonely, derelict and deprived of social stimulation. I still have memories of the time when I didn't need to call beyond two phone numbers to be already munching popcorn in a theater with good company or to already be out on a spin on the highway. But today, I am contemplating watching a movie alone. ALONE! Asking for only one ticket at the Box Office; buying half a popcorn and half a Coke and having strangers on both sides of the seat. I'm not used to all that, ya know. Being chronically commitment-phobic adds to the woes, so dating can often become the Frankenstein that I must avoid, avoid at all costs (excuse for not putting effort).

To those about to second-guess me: this is not mid-twenty crisis. This is all a fault of the silly institution of marriage which plunders people of their beer partners and one which I cannot escape myself for too long (you did not read the last phrase).

Having reached this point, I have a Heart-of-Darkness type insight into the human psyche. It is this state in - or because - of which most people give into the spinning bliss of marriage.

I however, have still given myself more time to enjoy singledom. And now when I spent my last couple of years in singledom, I find that I have to do it alone. Duh. Do be do be duh.

Never mind. This is the moment I can deservingly pat myself. They taught us about saving for a rainy day. This is my rainy day. Doubly the rainy day (telling you that it's Monsoon and raining would be admitting to have cracked a PJ). And my saviours - instead of putting them in the 'hobbies and interests' column of the matrimony form, I will execute them.

An arsenal of things to do will get me by, or I will try hard to get the by past me. I am soon starting a guitar class in my office where I will teach the instrument to the four disciples already signed up. My camera lenses need to be rid of the fungus and then out I must go clicking in, around and outside the city. I will now confess the potentially embarrassing fact that of the approximately 35 books I bought in the last year, I have read only four. This domination of the retail addict over the bookworm must be ended with haste.

Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker. Every minute it rains in the hills, they get beautifuller. Each time I look around, the walls moving nearer. Must climb those hills, must leave town on weekends and explore the jungles, watch more birds and capture more nature in my D80.

Any more ideas for a single guy trying to fight loneliness in Bombay?

Sarkozy-m

2008-01-12T22:12:00.000-08:00

The President of a country should symbolize what the nation stands for and I'm glad that the French have found the right one.

Mausim

2007-09-26T23:41:00.000-07:00

You don't suspect anything when the termites begin feasting on the wood, nor does the unrelenting heat and discomforting humidity hint at the shape of things to come.

Day in day out, traveling the central line in local trains or in your air cooled car along the Mahim causeway, you absolutely do not notice the sudden appearance of egrets along the bushes near railway tracks.

At night, little winged insects hit against the living room tubelight or the TV screen, sooner or later slurped off by a delighted house lizard. But all that only adds to your pain, as you wipe the sweat sitting below ineffective fans in rooms that feel stuffier than ever.

And then one late afternoon, the wind chimes in the balcony suddenly start ringing louder than the hum of the air conditioner. The sun goes mild and the windowpanes sway, pushed by a gentle breeze carrying various smells of the city.

Before you know it, sheets of rain start hitting the building walls and clouds roar out a bass drum roll. You rush out to gather the clothes drying on the line and there you feel a few refreshing drops of the first monsoon rains spraying on your face, washing away at once all the discomfort of the days gone by.

Last year, I drove out of Mumbai towards Alibaugh in the monsoons. Even though it was early July, the sky was bent upon throwing all of itself at the earth. Rains in these parts offer a spectacularly overwhelming experience. You simply cannot get ahead of rain that pours nonstop for 24 hours, refusing to even pause for days on end.

Trickles turn into swollen rivers as bridges over them become slippery. Paddy fields on each side of the road assume a brutal green hue and rocks go damp allowing the growth of fungi and moss.

Rural folk in waterlogged villages wait for that one hour in three days when the rain takes a short break so that they can sneak a few moments back to normal life and buy supplies. Wives beckon their husbands to stay home and not venture out to the seas and husbands
ignore the advice and catch handsome booties of fish without venturing too far out.

Like an epic novel, the monsoon builds over the weeks, elaborating itself in different ways at different places. Some towns turn into the aftermath of a war, with trees, telephone poles and hoardings crashing down and getting strewn all over the place.

At other places, monsoons accentuate the inherent natural beauty of the area. Birds usually unseen perch atop trees and high tension power wires and snakes exit their water filled holes to catch frogs enjoying a splash game at puddles. The occasional squirrel saves its skin by making a well-timed dash from getting hit by a falling coconut.

Back in the city, clothes take forever to dry, hang as they do on nylon lines on balconies overlooking the seaface where lovers walk hand in hand, finding lonely spots to cosy up. Others wait up over coffee for their loved ones to arrive on delayed flights at the airport.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

2006-10-19T07:21:00.000-07:00

Good music, writing, art, ideas... stay away from them. They are brutal killers.

All subtle art is cruel. It seduces, entraps and regresses you, and all the while makes you believe that you were lucky to have the perspicacity to appreciate the finer points of the world around you.

But when you listen to that momentary sleight of notes in a stupid piece of jazz or read a clever twist of words in a book, your mind and heart pains and aches, and longs for something larger than the sum of everything you are. It kills me.

Oh, and by the way, to maintain the continuity in my previous post, I won the Oktatabyebye contest and had a vacation of a lifetime traveling from Delhi to Manali, Keylang, Leh, Pangong Lake, Nubra Valley, Kargil, Drass, Srinagar, Gulmarg and back to Delhi. I blogged about it on the Oktatabyebye website. My blogs have now been broken into destination-specific travelogues on the website. A big thanks to Webchutney and Makemytrip for giving me this larger than life experience!

ok-tata-bye-bye

2006-06-23T01:14:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is what seems to be the final round for the oktatabyebye travel contest. If you're looking at the profiles of the people on that link, you will find the amazing levels of passion for traveling and travel among them. Especially Mridula, whose travel blog is a delightful revelation. Who'd have thunk that HR professors could live such an interesting life?

oktatabyebye is a to-be online travel community, which I reckon would be a bulletin board enhancement based on travel (?)

After you travel sufficiently for leisure in your life, you begin to form opinions about travel... travel as a hobby, industry, the media associated with it, etc. With strong opinions comes a natural disgruntledness, a desire to make things work differently, a feeling of 'they could have made it work that way'.

Travel is picking up greatly in India, but strangely, people are spending a lot more on travel than they could have. Indians by nature think of leisure travel as something complicated and dangerous. In my hometown Pune, Maharashtrians are known for their affinity to what I call the Raja-Rani-Tours-and-Travels mentality. On a tour to Ladakh, the typical Maharashtrian would rather be more worried about the food he/she will be served there than whether he/she is carrying enough woollens. Which is why a Raja-Rani-Tours-and-Travels pitch like 'We serve you assal shrikhand-puri and batata-bhaji when you are with us, no matter where you are' works magnificently. The premium for these homely service is high, but the Maharashtrian would rather be safe.

This is the sole reason why my uncles and aunts have been to Dharamsala-McLedoganj twice but do not know what a Momo or a Thukpa is. And I think that's pathetic!

Many people visiting oktatabyebye would have strong opinions about leisure travel based on their own travel experiences. You get a bunch of people like this together on a forum, and they have the strength to change people's perceptions about travel! So regardless of who wins tomorrow, travel in India and the backpack-culture is sure to move forward. If Webchutney pulls this off properly, that is.

In other news, I've been underground for some weeks getting PaGaLGuY.com in its new avatar. Take a look at our new design (http://www.pagalguy.com/). We've also tied up with two of the best international companies in the MBA business. The first is with TopMBA.com, the guys who get us Stanford, Tuck, Harvard, INSEAD, Chicago GSB at the annual World MBA Tours. The other is with Manhattan GMAT, who're at the top in the US in the GMAT training. Both tie-ups are for content exchange. There are exciting times ahead!

Win Free Go Air tickets

2006-06-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

PaGaLGuY.com is doing a rather unique campaign! Allowing the world to win 24 Go Air return air tickets in India just for blogging about them. The concept is simple. All you need to do is tag four of your friends while making a blog post for which the details are given below.

Best of luck in winning those free free free air tickets!!!

## Start of GoPaGaL Tag ##

If your blogger friend has tagged you, follow this link to participate: http://www.pagalguy.com/goblog/

GoAir and PaGaLGuY.com bring to you the GoPaGaL Campaign where you can win free return tickets to the destination of your choice. Winning is simple, just copy paste this tag on your blog after adding answers to the questions below and publish this as a blog post on your blog! Then head out to http://www.pagalguy.com/goblog/ , fill in the form and send us your Name and Blog post URL & Finally, tag 5 more blog users and let the world know. Promise! Its that simple and should take you no more than 5 minutes!!

— Answer the question below —

Q) On which GoAir Sector would you like to win a free air ticket?
A) Mumbai - Srinagar
( Answer the above question after you visit http://www.goair.in )

[ Link (Tag) 4 other blog users in your network so that they too get a chance to win the tickets. Without you tagging 4 other bloggers, your entry will stand disqualified.]
Tag
I would like to link the following bloggers!
(Please include the full URL to the blogger you are tagging)
e.g: http://insane.pagalguy.com, http://whatblogmen.blogspot.com etc etc

1 — Neha - http://neha16.blogspot.com/
2 — Zarine - http://toughmorns.blogspot.com/
3 — Siddharth - http://blogmia.blogspot.com/
4 — Neeta - http://could-it-be-mpd.blogspot.com/

— End of Question & Answer —

Now head over to http://www.pagalguy.com/goblog/ and submit your entry to win the tickets. New winners will be announced every fortnight!

Why? What? How?

This is an unique campaign run by ‘GoAir - The People’s Airline’ and ‘PaGaLGuY.com - India’s largest MBA forum’.

We are giving out over 26 return airtickets over a period of two months!

Join the insanity and find more ways to win tickets at http://www.pagalguy.com/gopagal/

Visit GoAir - http://www.goair.in
Visit PaGaLGuY.com - http://www.pagalguy.com

## End of GoPaGaL Tag ##

Music that put a smile on my face

2006-05-06T21:35:00.000-07:00

Long time since I blogged about music.

An overwhelming feeling of sadness came over me as I read the papers about Naushad's passing away yesterday. As obituaries upon articles mentioned his songs, I relived all the memories of childhood when I had discovered Naushad's music. I also felt a sense of pride in having being able to discover and appreciate a composer whose music was not exactly 'in' within my generation.

There is a lot to Naushad beyond Mughal-e-Azam and Mother India and I think his best can only be appreciated by listeners who take some effort to find their music rather than music finding them through radio or TV.

I don't know what it is about songs like 'Uthaye jaa unke sitam' (from Andaz) or 'Do sitaron ka zameen par hai milan' (Kohinoor) that everytime I play them in my head I smile to myself. I can say the same thing about every song in Baiju Bawra, perhaps Naushad's best.

I cannot claim to identify with the lyrics of these songs because they speak about a different era but also because I am not that deep as a person. Yet, I can attach every time of the year, every turn of the weather and every place that is close to me to some or the other song by Naushad.

It is largely thanks to Naushad that I developed a taste for Hindustani Classical Music. I was probably 8 or 9 years old when Dad's huge collection of tapes and LPs of Kumar Gandharva, Jasraj, Bismillah Khan, Kishori Amonkar, Hariprasad Chaurasia et al caught my curiosity and attention. I still have images ingrained in memory when I began to neglect school homework and started listening to that music fulltime, flooding Dad with all sorts of questions the moment he returned from office about what differentiated Raag Kedar from Raag Bihag, or how one counted the Maatras in a Taal, and the works. Dad has a way of explaining things that you 'see' it immediately.

But it was in Naushad's songs that I found validation for my understanding of all these complex concepts of music. Thanks to Naushad, by the time I was 12, I understood enough about Classical Music to be able to sit through entire 4 hours of a Hariprasad Chaurasia concert fully knowing what was going on each second and fully enjoying it.

What I learned then has stayed with me till today and helped me play more than a dozen musical instruments without any formal training. I might have explored other forms of music over time, from the glass-shattering mayhem of Pantera to the deft piano runs of Chick Corea, the gruff vocals in Dire Straits to the ghazals of Jagjit Singh, but the music from those years remains closest to my heart.

Very little from the film music nowadays feels like home. I can clearly count songs that have really touched me in the recent years. Parineeta's music, especially 'Raat Hamari Toh', or 'Bawra Mann' from Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi or 'Luka Chhipi' from Rang De Basanti are the only ones that really make a mark.

Living Portugal

2006-04-09T06:52:00.000-07:00

How much effort are you prepared to take to have a truly quality time when on a backpacking trip? When I heard of Korlai, I knew that it would be worth it to learn Portuguese and then visit the only place in India where over 900 people still have the language as their mother tongue. And I wasn't wrong!

Maybe it is that lone young people don't board the ferry that leaves the Gateway of India quay at Mumbai for Alibaugh on weekends too often, and if they do, they are instantly branded dubious wandering explorers by the locals from Maharashtra's coastal belt.

For as the boat chugged away eastwards from the Mumbai skyline, a group of fishermen folk had identified me as one, perhaps because I was the only one on board who was not surrounded by a huge group of college students or a better half.

Soon I was the centre of attention of the hoi polloi. "Why you go alone? How you will spend your honeymoon if you go alone?"

So I made an attempt to divert attention from this alleged irregularity in my existential setup was by asking them where near Alibaugh that town was where over 900 inhabitants spoke Portuguese as their mother tongue even today.

"Oh you want to go to the town of Firangis?" came the quick reply. "Go to Revdanda and ask for Korlai!"

Yes, that was the one I was looking for. The way from Alibaugh bound south for Murud town – with its majestic sea-fort of Janjira – isn't quite a path well trodden. So when I learnt that tiny fishing towns on that road were once the hotbed of Portuguese colonial activity, I knew that stuffing my backpack up was the inevitable thing to do. My intuition told me that Revdanda was the material that would make for many delightful private discoveries and have you wondering if you should disclose its existence to the world. What if millions of tourists throng this place tomorrow and kill the charm of this place?

Hitting land at the Mandwa port, I boarded one of the 8-seater shared rickshaws just where the milestone read, 'Murud – 58 kms'.

The rickshaws here are staple transport for the locals, all of whom seem to be traveling from one village to the other all the time.

Noticing my backpack and camera, a croaky voice belonging to a passenger asked in Marathi, "Going to Revdanda?"

As I replied in affirmative, another fellow commuter spoke, "Revdanda is a boring place, I don't know why youngsters go there. There is nothing to see in Revdanda."

The rickety vehicle carrying us trotted along a highway that ran just next to the sea all along. Every now and then, villages with houses covered in dense foliage appeared and disappeared, adding and subtracting people from the rickshaw. And then the blue sea crashing against the now rocky and now sparkling white sand shore returned to be the winding road's companion.

The rickshaw pulled off below an old ivy-covered thick-stone archway that is the entrance to the erstwhile Portuguese fort of Revdanda, formerly known as Chaul. The road runs through the town for a couple of kilometers until it passes under a similar high archway and opens up to a bridge over the Kundalika river mouth. The entire stretch of the road between the fort walls is covered in a thick canopy of dense tropical vegetation, which makes the hot and humid weather bearable.

The black-stoned fort walls are really thick, perhaps to nullify impact from huge cannonballs shot from warships. The Revdanda fort was built in the mid 1500s to augment the Portuguese military control of the coast.

The fort's walls and citadel are mostly in ruins, but at some places there are plaques on walls and on top of doorways with the seal of the Portuguese empire in a surprisingly perfect condition.

As you inspect the fort, you run the risk of becoming the subject of amusement in the tea stalls clasped to the fort walls.

"That's all of the fort that you can see. The rest is not accessible, too many dense bushes," called out a creepy onlooker in a very I-keep-seeing-many-of-your-kinds manner from a Chinese food stall thoughtfully named 'Maratha Hu-Lin'.

He pointed me to a street that went in the direction of the sea, proposing that I might like to check out the old chapel where St Francis Xavier lay buried. St Francis Xavier in India? Yeah right, I thought.

There, just next to a well stood a roofless ruin of a structure that had the looks of a could-have-been chapel.

A fairly new marble plaque at the ivy-infested entrance read 'St Francis Zavier Chapel'. Maybe 'Zavier' was not the same as 'Xavier', perhaps the people of Revdanda had a casual sense of spellings or maybe they had achieved more phonetic progress than the Americans, I examined all the possibilities.

I recalled a tourism department handout which claimed that St Francis Xavier had delivered both his first sermon on Indian soil and the last discourse of his life at Revdanda. Surely if that were true, the monument would not be an abandoned ragtag now.

A large tablet with inscriptions in Portuguese lay on the ground inside, while two huge cannonballs from yore lay along one wall. If somebody were to decipher and translate the text on the tablet, perhaps the truth about the chapel would be known.

"There was a man who knew all about the history of Revdanda. He had found secret passages inside the fort walls. He died in 1978. His ghost comes here during stormy nights. But you might want to check out the Birla Temple across the river," said the man from the Chinese stall as I returned back to the fort archway.

I took the cue from the fishermen in the ferry and asked him for Korlai, which turned out to be the next village down the highway. Passing over the river bridge, I could see the Korlai fort far away in the distance, standing majestically on top of a hill jutting out at the mouth of the Kundalika. Small needle like things protruded out of the fort's vantage points. Cannons, I reckoned. Sparkling white sand beached bound the blue water and land together all along the coastline.

The Korlai village is divided equally into the Catholic, Hindu and Muslim communities. This part of the Maharashtra coast looks like a very unlikely place for being a hotspot on the world etymology map. But Korlai village, with its population of 3,003 (as written on the state transport bus stand sign), speaks 'Korlai Creole', the purest living form of Portuguese in the Indian subcontinent. About a thousand Catholics in the village have the language as their mother tongue, though the other communities too speak it because all the children study in the same Mount Carmel School. The language is a mixture of Portuguese and Konkani Marathi, the former being the dominating component.

Around 1515 AD, the Portuguese families that immigrated here mixed with the locals and settled down here. Of all that they passed down the generations, only the language survives.

"These people can't read or write Portuguese. A Portuguese national today might be able to make out what they are saying, but they wouldn't be able to understand modern Portuguese," Father Diago of the 350 year old Mount Carmel Church told me, as I climbed up to his flat
teeming with the odor of freshly cooked chicken.

"There is no recorded history of this place. A historian from Revdanda had done huge research on this place but I don't think he's alive now," he remarked as I made a connection with the ghost that haunts the man at the Chinese food stall.

The school attached to the church had just ended, and a mass of children streamed out of the doors as if a dam had burst open.

Identifying a few idle ones, I asked them to teach me some of their Portuguese. Knowing some modern Portuguese myself, I could make out the difference between the pure form and the Creole. 'Eu' (I, in Portuguese) had become 'Yo', 'Voce' (you) was 'Vaache', 'queira' (to want) was 'halla'.

The path winds through the village to a narrow strip of land that connects the Korlai hilltop fort, once known as 'The Rock of Chaul'. Climbing up mildly along the sea facing side of the hill to the lighthouse, the path provides a beautiful view of the huge U-shaped beach of Korlai, marine blue water breaking against white sands till more then two miles until a hill extends itself out to close the bay.

Few cross the lighthouse complex to climb up the 150 steps to the Korlai fort, but the tiring ascent is well worth it. The ramparts run along the ridge of the hill which is surrounded by sea on three sides. The fort is a long sequence of seven doorways, one after another, and
is hardly ten meters in width. The topmost part of the fort has the citadel with a dilapidated church and a temple facing a water tank.
Cannons lie facing the sea in all directions. The lowermost gate that opens up into the mouth of the Kundalika river has a seal of the Portuguese empire with the inscription 'No entry without a fight' on it. The fort has its share of snakes but one can hardly see them outside their hidden shelters except when its monsoon.

I took one last glimpse at the Korlai beach from top of the fort and returned to the highway. A rickshaw going further south along the coastal road was waiting to fill one vacancy so I stacked myself in.

Ten minutes later, the road descended down a hill in a hairpin bend and suddenly a beautiful blue beach kissed by the setting sun unveiled itself. Kashid Beach is the most famous beach in these parts and the location for several advertisement and film shoots. Few venture out here, which explained why I had the entire two mile stretch of the beach bliss all to myself.

One doesn't get much to eat here, except bhurji-pav and tadka-Maggi, but some commendable soul has put up hammocks along the entire length of the beach.

Checking into one of the hotels here, I settled into a hammock with a book, watching the sun sink.

(Published in April edition of Darpan, the Indian Airlines in-flight magazine)

Not even the ABC of India

2006-03-18T02:27:00.000-08:00

Check out this highly superficial news clip on ABC News about the Rise of India. It is hilariously inaccurate, especially in the part where the reporter asks a woman in a jhuggi how long she's been living there. She replies "Do saal" and he translates "Twenty five years!"

http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=1674437

Craziest workplace s-logged!

2006-03-16T07:09:00.000-08:00

The insanity continues at http://pagalguy.com/slog/

All about the craziest workplace this side of the M-17 Nebula! :)

Of firing the hiring as we know it

2006-03-15T00:52:00.000-08:00

My greatest headache of this day and possibly of all time is turning out to be hiring a Full-time Journalist for Inzane Labs' PaGaLGuY.com. No, we have no HR Manager on the rolls because we haven't been able to find the right person, The One, yet.

That leaves me alone and totally clueless in a game I have zilch idea about. Which is a great thing, because I can reinvent the wheel based on Common Sense. What works most in my favour is that I am NOT an MBA, so my mind hasn't been jargonized and filled with that horrible word called 'processes' yet.

On the flipside, what makes it super tough is that I am not settling for anybody less than The One, or someone who shows me the scope to grow into The One.

Where do I start from? How do I reach out and get in the resumes? How do I judge if they're fit to survive in an obsessively entrepreneurial environment that we have fostered in the company?

I began with making a detailed job posting, looking inwards of the MBA Forums of PaGaLGuY.com for the dream journo. I also spammed the other avenues (Yahoogroups, Orkut et al). I knew that many of the applicants we liked from this lot might not be from Mumbai. I can do the telephonic interview and make other checks through contacts. But even then I would be clueless. How do I take a call on someone without having met them? I would next be going to Journo Schools, but there's time before their placement season starts.

That is when we realized, that if we were looking for The One, we should be willing to put in the effort and the money during the hiring process itself. So we decided to do what probably no other company on Earth has ever done: Give every prospective the complete return flight-ticket expenses to stay in Mumbai for a week and work with us. If we like you and you like us, cool. If not, cool.

Otherwise, what is the point of being meticulous?

Imagine when the company grows 1,000 strong and EACH and EVERY employee is chosen this way and is none but The One. That's the way this company will work.

Who is The One for a PaGaLGuY.com Journalist? Somebody who has the balls to question everything about how journalism has been working until now; we don't want to be a Media company where the Editorial and Marketing departments co-exist in a bitter and estranged vibe, cursing each other all the time in a conflict between marketing and news content battling for space.

There is a way to have each of the Editorial content, the Marketing content AND the user/reader interest to co-exist peacefully, each in full-throttle, with Zero Conflict between them. It is just that nobody has ever put adequate thought to it.

Our being a Web medium helps, because we can put Advertisers and Readers in direct contact using web-forums/bulletin boards. Go do your dirty fighting there. That way Editorial content remains truly sacrosanct and out of advertisers' influence, something you can't do in the print/electronic media. Things then go to the next level.

Does this sound too idealistic? Maybe. Does it make business sense? You decide. Is it better to die trying? Any day.

Can you see this Big Picture? Would you like to be a Journalist who is also a great Entreprenuer and can take this insane organization further? Can you take Content as we know it to the Next Level?

If this makes sense to you, do take a look at the Job Posting and apply! If we see a spark, we'll give you a buzz. You decide your salary! :)

Mutual No Tag Agreement

2006-02-20T03:26:00.000-08:00

Before doing this tag, I am declaring a Mutual No Tag Agreement (MNTA) with Neeta, Subbu, Puneet, Zarine, Neha and everybody else who have tagged me in the past. You, yes you, if you have ever tagged me, please consider yourself a signatory. Henceforth after this tag, we don't tag each other. Let's make this world a better place to live in.

Puneet, Subbu and Neeta have tagged me to write about 8 qualities in my Soulmate.

1. She should be happy, confident and at peace with herself. She should be an ever-optimist.

2. I am a little weird in the sense that I don't think like most people do. I am both an introvert and an extrovert built in one person. She should be comfortable with this and believe in me and what I am trying to be. I guess this takes care of everything else.

3. She should love endless witty conversations and a have pleasant sense of humour with her one-liner sense in place.

4. We should be able to say a lot to each other even when nothing is said.

5. Love for books, tasteful art and things, ability to spend hours in a bookshop, being as comfortable in an antique shop as in a mall.

6. Love for walking just for the sake of walking, without a predecided destination.

7. Respect. For her family, friends, all people around her and me. She should be able to fit in inside my social circle and gel with my friends.

I guess if these seven qualities are there, everything else can be taken care of :)

And I tag nobody. May this menace end forever!

My IIMs, Your IIMs, Their IIMs

2006-02-13T23:45:00.000-08:00

This has been a week of interesting insights. A story long in the pipeline was published, after being called 'untouchable' and refused by several newspapers and magazines on the grounds of being 'too sensitive'. Posted on Pagalguy.com forums, it elicited several rather passionate reactions. Do take a look at them. I hear the story has reached the internal bulletin boards of all the IIMs and other major B-schools with discussion threads.

Negative, one-sided, malicious, not-presenting-the-complete-picture, unfair to the IIMs... I liked the adjectives. A couple of IIM students frantically called me to register their protest, saying the story would put off future students and prospective employers. "Teri hamse kyaa dushmani hai?"

First, I don't think a newspaper story can harm the IIMs' popularity and reputation. That's catastrophizing the issue. Second, I neither take myself nor my stories so seriously to believe that they will harm that big an institution. I am no expert on the IIMs. Third, I don't want the IIMs' reputation to be harmed, I am no IIM basher.

Fourth, for 40 years everybody, media included, has sung continuous paens about the IIMs. I guess nobody asked for the 'other side' then.

For me the most interesting part was that all negative facts about the IIMs were given to me by serving and former IIM Professors and Deans themselves with full consent to be officially quoted, except for one professor. One friend pointed out to me that they may have personal agendas for doing so. But in the end, the facts they gave me were each time backed up by actual evidence I independently fished out.

Given all the problems the IIMs ail with, would a truly passionate individual be able to survive in such an environment? Does the IIM culture respect passion, incredible pre-MBA backgrounds, leadership?

From what my IIM friends tell me, no matter what your age, experience or background, a 22-year-old fresher kid who happens to be your senior will rag you high-school style on your first day on campus. Birthday celebrations are about making the subject roll in mud and cake, get kicked and beaten by many, doing inventive 'fun' things with a batchmate of the opposite sex and more. They call it their culture. To the Common Sense it looks like humiliation. Maybe my senses are warped.

Any IIM student will tell you how group assignments are done. All the work is put on one guy while the others freak out or play games on the network. That's world class excellence.

And then is the placements thingy and the dirty childish games some IIMs play among themselves. IIM students reading this post would know what I'm talking about. Jobs become your complete life worth. Maturity goes out the window.

The IIMs should by all means go global. But will they survive global competition if their faculty are paid the same pathetic salaries? I hear that Wharton, Tuck, Stanford and Darden are setting up campuses in India in the next 10 years. Will the stagnant culture in IIMs stand that kind of world-class competition? I pray for IIM Shillong.

On the Pagalguy.com forums, I continuously see debates challenging the projected glory of the IIMs and people changing their perceptions 180 degree. One user calls the IIMs 'talent pickup joints'. Sooner or later, more people will write about it, more perceptions will change. You cannot fool all the people all the time.

I love the IIMs, they're my country's pride. But when I see the rot-like situation inside, I feel like doing more 'one-sided stories'.

Concert photos I dreamt of taking but never could being the Ignoramus that I WAS.

2006-02-09T23:42:00.000-08:00

Yet, at parties and other social occasions with ample show-off opportunities I shall continue claiming that film cameras are the best.

Dominic Miller (Sting's guitar player) and his band playing at the Kala Ghoda Festival, Mumbai is best caught on Allwin's Digital Cam which I have been procrastinating on returning since months.

The Festival is a godsend for jazz-lovers. The level of tastefulness of all the music I have heard this week (Sanjay Divecha, Amit Heri, Charlie Mariano, Eric Lohrer, Dhruv Ghanekar) should be hard to match anywhere in India. I'm smitten!

Cartoon as Vindication

2006-02-08T04:35:00.000-08:00

Funded travelling

2006-02-06T05:57:00.000-08:00

I have not spent from my pockets on a trip in a long time. Usually, I find some pretext to turn a holiday into an assignment and get funding from a publication. Though under such a plan, one has to be careful while spending and collect hundreds of bills for every small item bought. Often, there are no ATMs at your destination so you have to carry all your money distributed in different pockets of your clothing and your luggage. As the money gets spent, it is replaced by bills for Bisleri, camera batteries, cabs and food. When you return, it becomes a big nightmare to collect all those bills at one place and make an expenditure account to be sent to the publication. The toughest part is recalling which Bisleri bill was incurred on which date, small details that the accounting guys are very particular about. I procrastinate royally on this activity.

Getting paid to travel is a wholly satisfying experience, because the story you write is very personal. I especially like Editors who are flexible and don't mind some wit and politically incorrect humour thrown into stories. Fortunately, most that I have written for are like that. I think you cannot know about a culture without their humour. What do they laugh at? How do they play with words? That tells you a lot about the place.

Two next travel assignments coming my way are on small long-forgotten Portuguese fishing villages south of Alibaugh near Mumbai. I hope to get lost on my way several times. I am looking forward to exploring some history there and sporting my newly learnt Spanish, which I believe is quite close to Portuguese.

In other news, PaGaLGuY.com now has a fully functional office in Fort, Mumbai with fulltime a Marketing Manager at cracking big deals. If our visiting cards are anything to go by, this is going to be a crazy workplace that will change many ideas about business online and offline.

Down with Sundays!

2006-01-29T23:23:00.000-08:00

"Santa Cruz->Churchgate->Fort->Churchgate->Santa Cruz->Grocery store->Home"

That is largely my life, interspersed at times with assignments that take me out of Mumbai. Those assignments, though, are outliers at best. Most stories get done inside Mumbai. Now it is not as if I don't like this way of life, it was my own choice after all to move to Mumbai and jump into the spiral.

I think what spoils it for me are Sundays, those evil speedbreakers. When your hobby becomes your profession, Sundays are boring. They suck the life out of a comfortable rhythm of work. It is like being placed on gate duty during the most happening event of your school or college. When I walk out of my house on Sundays, all I find myself doing is staring blankly at faces on the streets, who in turn stare back at me in what seems to be a completely pointless exercise. To escape that agonizing experience, I sleep the whole Sunday off often to find a day of my life wasted. It is a wholly unsatisfying thing.

What I would love to do instead, is work continuously for 3-4 months without a single holiday, and then take off for an entire fortnight. There is so much to do in Mumbai. So many stories lurking behind the old structures in Bandra and Fort, so much of history to explore and be fascinated by. You need a long break to dig substantially into it.

I have spent more hours consuming the contents of the Times Food Guide, than I have spent eating out in Mumbai. I have mentally made long lists of eateries I'd like to experiment with. I hear there is a restaurent in Thane that serves food from Uruguay! It has been long since I ate at 'Momo's Point' at Kamla Nagar in Delhi, which is having me crave mad for Tibetan Food. It would be great to have twenty days off just to explore food joints in Mumbai and around, one after another. So on Day 1, it would be Lebanese for lunch, Uruguay-ese for dinner, on Day 2 it would be Konkani for lunch and Thai for dinner... and so on till Day 20.

Then I want to learn and play squash good enough to represent my company at one of those Press tournaments. 20 days of practise is enough to get me there. I cannot speak enough about the trekking and hiking options around Mumbai. It is also time for my yearly pilgrimage to the Himalayas, worshipping those mountains by walking on them till my legs can't take me another meter and camping in the snow and eating Maggi cooked on firewood.

I would give away all my Sundays and public holidays in return for just those 20 days when I can bury my mobile phone somewhere deep inside my wardrobe, put on my sneakers and pack a light rucsack and become laapata for some while.

But only for those wrecked things called Sundays!

I want I want

2006-01-19T05:31:00.001-08:00

Irresistible!

Make no bones about it

2006-01-11T05:57:00.000-08:00

Will Swami Ramdev now stop teaching all aasanas that require one to turn their bodies to the left?

A knot not shot

2006-01-06T23:29:00.000-08:00

Reporting Amitabh Bachchan's illness had already made me a persona non-grata among my non-journalist friends, who held me as culpable as the more aggressive electronic media for generating what they called ‘constant gibberish’ in the name of news.

Yet, when I read about the stories from Bhopal and Philadelphia, where anxious fans had erected Big B Temples to pray for his wellness, or Assam where two poor buffaloes were sacrificed by equally concerned souls, I knew that my urban elite friends did not represent the real Indian news consumer.

Taking solace in this, I embarked yet again on another project, that of covering Aamir Khan's wedding bash at Panchgani, Western Ghats, one in which I risked losing approximately seven friends per news report I wrote on the subject.

Reaching Panchgani late morning on December 28, 2005, I gathered the facts: Aamir Khan, Bollywood's most selective actor, would wed his girlfriend of two (or so) years in Bandra, Mumbai the same evening and then arrive with a contingent of Bollywood's who's who to Panchgani the next morning to spend four days eating, drinking, singing, dancing, playing cricket, listening to nearly every genre of music in the world and keeping prying scribes, who had nothing better to do than to scoop microscopic details about the event, off.

Of course, he was right, because we really had nothing better to do. Celebrity lives, especially during weddings, are under public scrutiny all over the world and Indians are no different.

Reaching Il Palazzo Hotel, where Aamir would host his party the next day, I tried to enter through the main gate. At once, four hefty moustached men, who until then seemed to be snoring away in their chairs, suddenly became active and brandished their lathis towards a large board that read, "Trespassers will be prosecuted." The lathis subsequently changed their aim and pointed toward the gate, where I was standing. The Hotel officers were equally uncooperative when contacted on phone.

Walking away from the hotel toward the bazaar, I asked a random bystander what he knew about the celeb wedding that was taking place in his town. The three-minute non-stop information outflow that I received for an answer exceeded all my expectations. These chaps probably knew more about the wedding than Aamir himself!

Next, he offered to take me to a secret place from where I could get a bird's eye view of the party venue. Climbing for an hour through silver oak forests, we reached the top of a hill from where the property of Il Palazzo was visible in spurts and bits through a canopy of trees.

A TV journalist had already reached the 'secret point' before me and was excitedly shooting away blurry zoom shots of a swimming pool inside the hotel where in his words, "Aamir Khan would probably throw a pool party." That shot, an hour later, would run as 'exclusive breaking news' on that news channel. No kidding.

But just like the sight of even an ankle through a burqa excites men in some countries, unearthing this swimming pool before anyone else did translate into beating the competition for the paparazzi on the Aamir Khan wedding beat.

For the rest of the day till the next evening, nothing happened. Editors were screaming into mobile phones for 'the dope' but no information was coming. And then the unthinkable (read expected) happened. After all the guests had arrived on December 29 and Aamir's party was in progress with Satara's Divisional Commissioner as chief guest, one particular TV crew decided that enough was enough.

"Attack!" they hollered in their minds and a cameraman barged into the hotel to get some exclusive shots. He managed to penetrate the hotel premises three meters more than the best media attempt yet, when the able and strong-armed security guards of actor Ronit Roy's side business, Ace Security, spotted the uninvited guest and pounced on him. A bullfight ensued, joined by other media personnel resulting in two broken cameras and an injured cameraman. The mood was very tense. Shaadi aur barbaadi, I said to myself.

The next two days were no better. The evening's scuffle had left a bitter taste in everyone's minds. The occasional photographer triumphed, succeeding in catching an arm, a leg or a scalp of a supposed wedding guest.

I myself saw the futility of it all and instead used the time to do a travel story on Panchgani and even delivered a talk on Media as a Career to a bored class of adolescent students at a 150-year-old boarding school there.

At the end of it all, it seemed that Aamir Khan was bent upon proving a point, that of "defeating" the media by not providing them a single news moment. I still believe, had he stepped out for even five minutes to give the journalists what they wanted: a sound-byte and a photo-op, he'd have been left alone by the Press and everybody would have had a happy vacation in Panchgani.

Readership or Impact?

2005-12-27T07:39:00.000-08:00

A typical situation: An all-India entrance examination is conducted sloppily, loading the results in favour of some. The rest write to the institute about the faulty invigilation and mismanagement of time by the exam centre but receive no response. Frustrated, they decide to approach the Media.

The Times of India is the obvious first choice. The logic being: since it is read the most, it will cause maximum embarrassment and hence result in corrective action.

My experience tells me something else.

There are two kinds of newspapers:

1- those that are read the most by people-at-large (Times of India, Hindustan Times)
2- those that are read the most by bureaucrats but hardly by anybody else (Free Press Journal, Indian Express, The Statesman, Asian Age)

In my opinion, it is a better idea to approach the second variety for help. If one can impact the right IAS officer in-charge of education, there is a higher chance of corrective action happening.

I recall the IIPM story here. Soon after Rashmi Bansal and Gaurav Sabnis were hounded by IIPM, there were hectic attempts across the spectrum to push the story into the 'MSM' (Main Stream Media). A week of PR by the people involved got the story published in a few top dailies, even if as only opinion columns.

That IIPM is still enjoying the ride on inaccurate claims in full-page ads is there for all to see. As a bigger indicator of the failure of the bloggers' campaign, absolutely NONE of the senior IAS officers in the Union Education Ministry know about the IIPM matter even today. Moreover, none in the Union IT Ministry have a whiff of who/what bloggers are. That is how weak the blogger campaign was.

The catch here is, it was always going to be futile trying to push a story into commercially successfuls newspaper that place advertisements on a sacred high pedestal.

Though JAM magazine did commendable work in the investigative piece on IIPM, it can hardly expect a difference, just like MAD magazine cannot expect to influence world opinion on Iran's nukes.

I think, had a lesser known paper like Free Press Journal or Indian Express in New Delhi been provided with this story first, they would have badgered IIPM more successfully than others because of two reasons:
1- since they don't get any ads anyway, there is no risk in taking on IIPM
2- they are religiously read and taken seriously by IAS officers

The media that is read most is not necessarily a vehicle of change.

Matheran Diary

2005-12-19T05:04:00.000-08:00

My curiosity about Matheran, a resort 80 km east of Mumbai increased several times when I came to know it was India's only automobile-free hill station. Cars can come at most 3 kms of the town and are prohibited thereafter. A toy mountain train runs from Neral right into main Matheran town but has been out of business since July 2005's rain devastation. Taxis charge Rs 50 per seat to ferry the 6 kms steep climb from Neral to the last automobile point, whereafter one treks amidst a beautiful wooded path to the main market, the town center of Matheran.
About 800 ponies and 90 hand-pulled rickshaws operate atop the hill station. Matheran mein aa ke ghode pe nahi baitha to kya kiya. The place is overflowing with people, mostly from Mumbai and Pune on weekends. From the bustling market, hills paths lead to Echo Point, Charlotte Lake, Lord Point and a dozen other Points, or hill edges jutting out to face a sheer drop into deep valleys. Miniscule streets in this tiny town are named 'Ambedkar Marg', 'MG Road', 'Patel Marg' and other heavy tags. The weather is cool all year round and the entire hill is green and thickly wooded.

Suicide is the Point

A single traveller is officially banned in Matheran hotels. You don't get a room unless you are at least a group of two. Why? The official version goes that Matheran is a popular suicide destination, and depressed people
frustrated with urbanese come to Matheran to jump to death from one of its several Points. So a solitary tourist is automatically adjudged a Suicidee and refused accomodation. Khali peeli police ka chakkar nahi magta hai.

I check with the local police station and the figures are appalling. There is one suicide reported per fortnight in Matheran!

My own hotel owner describes the last case involving a rich Mumbaikar, who arrived one day in a Skoda (special emphasis on the automobile brand) and hired a hotel room near one of the cliff edges. In the morning, nobody answered his door when a bellboy knocked. Panicked, the hotel and the police launched a search operation and the rich Mumbaikar's body was found at the bottom of a Point.

Car o Bar

The last hill-station to experiment with vehicular ban was Mussourie.The ban was lifted around 2000 and the thing has become a mess now. The entire place bears the look of an endless parking lot and the market on The Mall is a replica of Karol Bagh during Diwali.

The vehicular ban at Matheran has preserved the town and its air really well. But after the train service stopped, the ban has turned into a bane. The train was a cheap method to transport essential goods like foodgrains, milk, vegetables and LPG cylinders to the top. Post-train, ferrying costs have gone up by 30 percent, largely because of the manual labour costs incurred in carrying cargo from the last vehicle point to the town centre.

A gas cylinder is 10 rupees dearer at Matheran and a shaving razor is 2 rupees more inflated. A band-aid, however, costs the same.

Jignesh goes to Matheran

Every other tourist in Matheran is a Gujju. He comes loaded with entire family, lock stock and barrel, and immediately books three rooms in the Shiv Ganesh Gujarati Lodge, or some such. While walking from Taxi stand to Hotel, the younger members of the troupe are instructed to keep a watch for restaurants offering the ubiquitous Gujarati Thali. Nothing else would do.

The Gujarati tourists are an animated lot. Time after time, Jignesh, the nephew of the family head (who is also called Jignesh) makes a fuss and is disciplined by Shantiben, his mother.

These specimens also have an unending appetite to talk about money. At the slightest provocation, two Gujaratis (both being most probably called Jignesh) enjoying the nature at Matheran will erupt into a heated discussion on Business. Abuses would fly abound for some common acquintance (also called Jignesh) who is reputed unprofessional and does not deliver the maal on time. The deep discussion will carry on over lunch, dinner and late into night even as other family members give up on them. Only a cricket match viewing Live on TV can end their raconteurships.

Echo Point

When you shout out loud from this place, the voice is supposed to echo back from the rocky cliffs on the opposite side of the valley. In reality, it is quite a dampener. The echo is overrated - all that comes back is but a whimper of your howls.

A more effective way to make Echo Point work for redeeming the 2 kms trek is to locate a soul atop the hills on the opposite side of the valley. Most likely, that sould will be equally disappointed with the echos, or the lack of it. You then make a pact. Whatever you shout, that person shouts back and an echo is created. You then shout out loud and hear the same thing being shouted back from across the valley. Voila, you have an echo!

But then, that's cheating no?

Write the writing off!

2005-12-07T08:34:00.000-08:00

We print journalists have a strange habit of enumerating 'a flair for writing' as the prerequisite skill for journalism. 'If you have a flair for writing, journalism is the career for you' is a much milked line in our respective publications' weekly education supplements. I don't know why we do this.

The truth is, that unless you are the table journalist type, you realise two years into the profession that writing skills are only the third or fourth most essential in journalism. At best, it is only an added asset.

Out there on the field, especially on the cherished crime/court beats or panchayat beat, writing skills amount to zilch. What matters is street-smartness, awareness, alertness, persistence and ruthlessness. You can be a reporter, a good one at that, without writing skills. But you cannot be a reporter for nuts if you cannot extract a story out using this whole cocktail of people skills. If your story is good, the newsdesk will take care of mediocre writing.

The overrating of the flair for writing is why we have so many journalism dropouts. Kids with perfect backgrounds join the profession assuming that they would get to write beautiful pathbreaking pieces and become famous overnight. I see so many leaving within months because they could not take the shock of dealing with a foul-mouthed policemen, politicians and goons. The basis of journalism is not good writing, it is News. Good writing can only build on top of interesting facts.

If you don't have enough facts worthy of News, what really is the use of beautiful writing skills? If you want to earn money out of good writing skills, why not instead become an author of books?

Stubborn Man on a Stubborn Balloon

2005-11-28T00:07:00.000-08:00

There are so many interesting anecdotes about Vijaypat Singhania's record breaking hot air ballooning feat that media space has fallen short to report all of them.

Singhania did not refrain from adding his personal touch to parts of the flight. For instance during the descent, Singhania's flight technician Colin Prescot had announced in Mumbai that weather conditions and misbehaving burners would make landing an ardous task spread over several hours. Minutes after the prediction, Singhania took matters in his own hands and landed anyway. Brute force works best in times of crises. That he landed in the same area in Sinnar near Nasik where he had performed practice flights earlier must have helped.

Soon after he hit the ground, Singhania cut the balloon off from the capsule. The balloon after detachment dragged away some of the burners with it, charring the grass for some distance. Funnily enough, the balloon then took off on its own again, and was still floating in the sky when Singhania boarded a chopper back to Mumbai. The balloon continued floating all over the place till late evening, giving some really nasty moments to the Singhania's ground team. Imagine their plight, as they had to keep chasing the balloon around in their SUVs all day in order to catch it the moment it touched down again!

It would be wholly amusing to find out where the balloon finally ended its love affair with the air... if it fell on top of some unsuspecting villager having a bidi or on farmland, damaging lakhs worth of produce. In the olden days, hot air ballooners carried a bottle of champagne along with them in the flight. Because you cannot predict where your balloon will land, the champagne came handy as a gift for cooling down tempers of the people whose property you landed on. Over time, property owners realized that a balloon carrying people in a basket dropping all of a sudden from the sky is not really God's curse. So the champagne was instead shared by the ballooners in a party after returning to the launch site. The ritual champagne party was thrown by the Singhanias after the flight too.

Anyhow, reporting the hot air balloon record was a wholly exciting experience. I watched the takeoff in-the-flesh, and then later followed the balloon all through its flight in a chopper. We veered above Mumbai, Trombay, Alibagh and the highway to Nasik for hours, catching both beautiful and ugly overhead glimpses of India's most complicated city before taking an exclusive return flight with the Man of the Day himself. These are the experiences that make me feel very convinced about having made the right decision about my career!

Dilemma

2005-11-25T02:25:00.000-08:00

The coaster sticks to the bottom of the cup when I pick it up to sip tea. I don't know what to do about it.

BS-chools!

2005-11-14T05:31:00.000-08:00

Education in Indian bschools seems to be about a lot of pointless BS which attracts a section of people who after joining it only gravitate more towards that kind of BS.

At a certain top b-school that I visited recently, I had the chance to interview a few profs from whom I was expecting a good mature conversation about the general management education scenario in the country. I was appalled to hear them talk utter nonsense disguised under jargon. Being the impatient one, I cut the interview short bluntly with a couple of them after they gave me horrifying goobledoock like "augmenting competencies which seem profound at the conceptual level but are immensely essential variables in terms of personal value addition."

All I had asked them was, "Why does a b-school need a festival?"

Hello!! Why couldn't they state their thoughts in simple words? Are the profs in our best b-school such pathetic communicators? To make things worse, this disease is contracted by perfectly normal students. It renders them into brainless duds who begin to talk like one of those text-to-speech conversion software programs. Do these guys even listen to themselves talk? Who will have the time to talk to such people in the corporate world?

There was this extempore competition happening during the visit with participants from top b-schools contesting. It was so depressing to see that none of them was having fun. With grim faces, they were talking total nonsense like "Lord Buddha said this, Vivekanand said that, Gandhi said so-and-so" for commonplace topics like 'Some people are alive because it is illegal to kill them.' It is okay if you deliver such a speech in class VIII in school. But at 23?? Excuse me! Doesn't anybody in the system realise how pretentious it all is?

Whatever happened to common sense?

20 random rants

2005-11-13T06:56:00.000-08:00

Zarine has nothing better to do in life :p so she has tagged me. Since I have nothing better to do in life either, I pick up the tag to write 20 random things about me :D

1- Music is the epicentre of my existence. I wish I had more time and money to invest in all the music I haven't heard.

2- Although I have been born and brought up in big cities, my sensibilities and beliefs are more small-town and semi-urban than cosmopolitan. I identify more with Bhopal or Dehradun than Delhi and Mumbai.

3- I love running and do it every morning. 2-3 days without it and I feel dizzy.

4- I don't like people or being too close to them much, but over the years I have worked hard towards becoming less shy and maybe developing an exterior that helps me get along with people.

5- I am a stickler for privacy and don't like it when people pry too much.

6- My best friendships have been with the unlikeliest of people. They have never said in as many words nor have I ever said to them that they and I were friends. I'd like to keep it that way.

7- I love riding in double-decker buses.

8- I enjoy having an orange bar especially when a little stub of it remains on the stick.

9- I can sleep standing on one leg for exactly two seconds. On both legs, it's 8 hours :D.

10- I like passionate people and doers not talkers. There is no point living a life where you do not follow your dreams.

11- I lack the extreme pessimism that is said to be essential to a journalist. It makes me a complete misfit in the profession and I have begun to hate it. Still, it has been working well for me and I don't know why it is so.

12- I hate Maggi noodles and its mere smell makes me uneasy.

13- I love jazz and would like to form my own jazz band someday.

14- My parents have never for once approved of my eccentric career choices yet they have stood by me all along.

15- I always believed that one could not make new friends after 21 but still made one of my closest ones at 24.

16- I have no time for people who lie because of personal insecurity and find it surprisingly easy to move on without getting affected by them.

17- I think cricket is overrated.

18- I think the idea that guys and girls can be just good friends is a load of BS.

19- I love Delhi for its trees, wide roads and eating places, Mumbai for its workaholic pace and Bhopal for its innocence. Also, I refuse to believe that there can be a city filthier than Mumbai.

20- Finding 20 things to write about me was easier than I thought :D

I tag... everybody in blogdom! In particular, I tag:

Rajat
Neeta (more so because she hates being tagged :D)
Bharathi
Siddharth
Aastha

Good Luck! :)

And then the children slept in peace...

2005-11-08T02:19:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most exciting development of this week is dacoit Nirbhay Singh Gujjar’s encounter yesterday in Etawah, UP. It means the end to 25 unrelenting years of fear in more than four districts of UP and MP.

The word ‘Fear’ has become too commonplace these days, especially in the contemporary context of terrorism, increasing rape cases in cities and old couples being looted and hacked in residential areas.

But none of us city dwellers have been anywhere near to living in true fear, of the kind evoked by Nirbhay among the villages of Etawah, Uraiya, Kanpur in UP and Bhind in MP. For over two decades, these people have spent every moment of their lives with the knowledge that there’s very a high likelihood they’ll be killed by Gujjar the next minute. Imagine the kind of fear which made thousands of people bolt their doors fast not even a second later after sundown and not come out until daybreak for each day of over 20 years.

Nirbhay’s reign of terror had made him a consummate folk anti-hero whose name was invoked by mothers in the state to put recalcitrant children to sleep.

To realise what fear means, one just has to take a walk in the town of Bhind. Every fourth shop in the town is a fully legal arms and ammunitions shop. There are more than 80 shops within an area of two sq kms that sell all kinds of rifles and country made revolvers. People need that kind of personal security in that region.

In many ways, Nirbhay’s end was coming. In the classic good-cop-bad-cop manner, for two years the MP police had been talking of getting him a graceful surrender while the UP police spoke of nothing but death in an encounter for Gujjar. In February 2005, Nirbhay’s relative Arvind Singh Gujjar surrendered respectably with his gang in Bhind to MP police. The same day, the UP police had seriously wounded several members of another gang headed by Rajjan Gujjar during an encounter in Etawah. Such totally opposite policies by the two states must have caused some serious confusion among dacoitydom. Somewhere, Gujjar’s tactical mistakes leading to his death must have roots in this confusion.

Mind you, the good-cop-bad-cop routine was only a coincidence, for the UP and MP police never cooperated with each other for ending their common menace of dacoity.

Only a month ago when MP CM Babulal Gaur visited UP’s Mulayam that talks of coordinated anti-dacoity operations first happened on a serious level. Yesterday’s encounter might be a result of only that.

Furious to Sleepy in 24 hours

2005-11-05T01:59:00.000-08:00

Two of the greatest Himalayan rivers Alaknanda and Bhagirathi meet at Devprayag (pic) in Uttaranchal to form the holiest Indian river Ganga. If one stands at the confluence facing downstream, the Alaknanda on the left flows in calm and serene while the Bhagirathi on the right is a study in fury, a huge noisy angry mountain river. You may take a leisurely dip in the Alaknanda, but two metres away towards the right the Bhagirathi might consume you if you put both legs knee deep into the water.

Only till yesterday.

After the third diversion tunnel of the 2,400 MW Tehri Dam project was closed down earlier this week, the water flow on Bhagirathi upstream stopped, putting the furious river to sleep.

Devprayag now has the Alaknanda flowing ever as calmly on the left while on the right there’s only a small stream, the remnant of Bhagirathi. When the Bhagirathi water level began climbing down yesterday, there was however a backflow from the Alaknanda into the Bhagirathi first, where the Alaknanda water ran in to fill in the void in Bhagirathi. Things began to neutralize soon. It would have been an interesting spectacle to witness.

I have spent countless solitary days and nights in Devprayag in a one-room tenement that I visit every year. It's my yearly pilgrimage to nature. During these annual trips, I get up early at 6am, take walk down to the confluence, past the suspension bridge over Bhagirathi. That early in the morning, there’s daybreak on Alaknanda while a few yards on the right the Bhagirathi valley just kisses goodbye to the morning twilight.

After a breakfast of bread and goat-butter with very sweet tea I walk up along the Alaknanda to the higher part of Devprayag town and meet up with some locals that I have made friends there over the years. They tell me proudly that their sons travel 80 kms to and fro everyday ‘to learn computer course at NIIT Haridwar centre’.

When the sun is out and over above, I cross over the confluence from the bridge over Alaknanda to the little island with the abandoned clocktower. Nobody visits this clocktower yet it is always spotlessly clean and you don’t even have to brush the dust off the benches around it to sit. I don’t know how this happens.

After lunch at the bus stand, watching buses from Haridwar and Rishikesh travel diligently up the highway to their destinations at Gangotri, Kedarnath or Badrinath, it is back to my room for a quick nap or some reading.

At the first hint of sundown I trek up one of the many hills around the confluence. From the top of one of the hill, drinking very sweet tea made by a villager, the confluence looks like two small lines of termites coming together to join a single file.

At night, I have dinner with the 75-year-old owner of my tenement. As usual, I have thousand questions to ask about him about Uttaranchal, its culture, people, potential and development. I get my answers spoken in the hill dialect, interspersed with much lore, stories of ghosts and banshees, tigers and leopards, the woman who turned into a tree, et al.

All this will still be possible, but the deafening roar of the Bhagirathi’s fury in the background will be missing.

It is a small price to pay, for Tehri Dam brings with it electricity and economic benefits that will help this backward state greatly.

There has been much propaganda by the media and so-called-environmentalists against this dam, accompanied by claims of earthquake danger by ‘conservationists’ who know zilch about seismology or rock mechanics and everything about impassioned speeches and James Joyce type writing. The truth is that if you travel upstream along the Bhagirathi valley, the locals will tell you how eagerly they have been waiting for Tehri Dam.

Why Natwar Singh's resignation might mean General Elections

2005-11-04T05:26:00.000-08:00

If the Paul Volcker Committee report names the Foreign Minister Natwar Singh as recipient of kickbacks from Saddam Hussein, the routine face saving measure is that the ruling party Congress gets the minister to resign.

But what if the ruling party too received kickbacks from Saddam? By the same logic, should the Congress also ‘resign’?

Surely, the BJP already has this gameplan in mind: if Natwar is somehow sent packing, the Union Government automatically follows suit.

Which is exactly why the Left has come out in support of Natwar Singh.

Brilliant game of Chess, this!

To begin with... gibberish gibberish gibberish

2005-10-30T23:59:00.000-08:00

Writing a good and catchy intro (opening lines) for a story has assumed so much significance in journalism that for many reporters, often the intro is the story. Understandably so, because competition between broadsheets has become so cutthroat, that newsroom bosses remain under pressure to churn out content which will attract the reader first and maybe inform him later. Fresh recruits ‘on the beat’ sent to some press conference carry that distinguishable expression of worry over their faces that voices the concern, ‘Where do I pick up the story from?’

The question is not illegitimate, but its interpretation has changed of late. ‘Where do I pick up the story from’ earlier used to mean which of the so many things talked about at the conference holds the highest importance – thereby deserving place in the opening lines. Now it means what smartass and wittily constructed sentence (even if vaguely relevant to the story and its facts) can I come up with to get the reader read my news item. It is like using Aishwarya Rai to advertise a new electric drill or a bulldozer. Viewer spots a beautiful face staring out of a newspaper ad, and once the attention is captured, we can leverage it to sell whatever… fairness crème, television, cooking oil or Patton tanks.

No real harm is done in writing a catchy intro to attract a reader toward a news item, as long as the item performs due diligence in delivering all the facts in the later paragraphs.

How are fresh recruits reacting to the newsroom pressure for good intros? Quite funnily. I have seen a huge number of fresh recruits set their browser homepages to one of the many websites on the Internet that contain famous quotes by famous people from where they cull out intros for their stories. If the story has a sociological flavour, begin with a Chomsky quote. For political, it is Abraham Lincoln of JFK. If the story is on personalities or celebrities, Freud has blurted out enough dope on people and behaviour to work as coherent intros. And George Bernard Shaw is the all-seasons man, he has said something witty about everything before dying. PG Wodehouse is the resort of the humorously inclined.

Is it doing the reader any harm? Mostly no. Because stories allotted to a fresh recruit are usually not important enough to affect the reader’s life in a big way. Is it doing the young reporter any harm? Maybe yes. Excessive pressure on intros does channelize all energy towards those first four sentences of the story. The remaining 300 words end up being mishmash and a vague representation of the facts. Over time, will this generation of reporters become as good writers as the newsroom bosses they work under?

One look at the Metro pages of any of the half-dozen broadsheets in Mumbai proves this. Beyond the intro, most stories are a mess. They begin with something and conclude with something completely unrelated.

As a classic example, I copy-paste the intro and the final paragraph below of one such story I read and leave it to you to guess what subject the story was about.

Intro: Men are four: He who knows not and knows not he knows not, he is a fool – shun him; He who knows not and knows he knows not, he is simple – teach him; He who knows and knows not he knows, he is asleep – wake him; He who knows and knows he knows, he is wise – follow him!

Ending paragraph: “Some of the challenges involved in KPO will be maintaining higher quality standards, investment in KPO infrastructure, the lack of talent pool, requirement of higher level of control, confidentiality and enhanced risk management." Mr Walia adds.

Nothing Doing

2005-10-29T07:44:00.000-07:00

And then Diwali shopping was taken hostage with our lives being the ransom.

I was in merry mode in the bustling Karol Bagh market with a friend when the Delhi triple blasts occured, and even at 6:45 pm the market did not seem to have any inkling of the mayhem that had happened a couple of kilometers away at Paharganj. Only after I received a couple of frantic calls from outstation friends asking if I was safe did I know that crowded spots in Delhi were the most dangerous places to be on earth at that time.

Our first reaction, naturally, was 'Vacate This Place'. Outside Karol Bagh too, things were pretty calm, even as the rush hour Delhi traffic grappled to remain stable in light of the city's fresh crisis. I must laud the Traffic Police for their management though, for despite the blasts and the accompanying chaos, traffic moved on smoothly on our entire way from Karol Bagh to Bengali Market via CP, all of which are at stone's throw from Paharganj. Before leaving Karol Bagh, we really doubted if my friend would be able to reach her home for the day.

My condolences towards the families left aggrieved by today's blasts. The blasts have occured at prime festive period of both the Hindu and Muslim community. Jaish-e-Mohammed is being said to have committed the ghastly act. I wonder how they justify their jehaad to themselves by ending people of their own community and disrupting a festival that celebrates the same Prophet that they cite to justify the jehaad. No it's not complicated, it's just plain sick.

Jazz update

2005-10-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

I must admit, I had severely underestimated the prowess of a five-string bass until I watched that Flecktones concert video yesterday. Now because Victor Wooten is an unbelievably demented and probably the most brilliant cat ever to hold a five string, he can do to harmonics what Wodehouse can do to the idyllic British life.

There are at least 5 harmonics hidden on each string below the fifth fret, adding up to some 25 on a five-stringer, which can be used to construct a fairly complex piece with a simultaneous bassline no the E and A strings. Who'd have thunk! You have to see Victor do it to believe it. Besides Victor, the only bass player who has experimented so extensively with harmonics is Jaco Pastorius, expecially in the latter half of his career.

Hazaar magajmaari later, I laid my hands on five bootlegs of the Jonas Hellborg-Shawn Lane-Andrea Marchesini India Tour. While the Delhi concert, which I had incidentally attended in 2003, is a tight set featuring a spunky Time is the Enemy. The Someplace Else and Tripura House concerts are quite similar but a little predictable. The two-disc Aizawl concert is probably the most complex and best technically speaking.

Meanwhile, the Sunny Jain Collective is touring India and I hope to catch them while in Delhi.

Of Honeymooners and Fitting Replies

2005-10-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

It so happened, one member of a Yahoogroup that I am member of married (a girl) and immediately left for France for a long honeymoon-cum-business trip in the first week of this month. Before leaving, he turned on the on-vacation auto-reply feature on his email account. Anybody who sends him an email now gets a "I'm on vacation, but I will reply after returning" message generated automatically by his mailbox.

The problem that has so resulted, is that any email sent to the Yahoogroup reaches the honeymooner's email account and makes it generate the automated vacation reply. Since an email sent to a Yahoogroup comes back to the sender, the automated vacation reply reaches back to the mail account in question and elicits another auto-reply. An infinite loop takes over and there's mayhem! Like testerday, group members exchanged some 25 emails all of which invoked the honeymooner's mailbox to go into an infinite loop and fill the Yahoogroup by over 400 vacation auto-reply mails in the past 24 hours.

The honeymooning couple, meanwhile, are understandably, err.. honeymooning in Paris, completely cut-off from the Internet, oblivious to the whole thing. The Moderator, who can block the honeymooner's emails until his return, is away reporting the earthquake in Kashmir.

Any solutions? :D

Dare to disagree with Arindam Chaudhry's IIPM?

2005-10-09T23:49:00.000-07:00

As a solution to dalits' and minorities' electricity problems, Malay Chaudhry (the self-proclaimed management guru father of his self-proclaimed management guru ponytailed son Arindam Chaudhry) calls for giving each dalit household a diesel engine dynamo 'which will give light for 4 hours a day during the night' (akin to having an eggs-&-sandwiches breakfast for the afternoon dinner). He also advocates two tube wells in each dalit village to solve the drinking water problem, complete with a business plan (it's not too tough to attach statistics to an argument).

(Source: 'Renewing India: Let Caste/Community Divide Disappear' in the IIPM full-page advertisement in October 10, 2005 edition of Hindustan Times, Mumbai. No newspaper considers Malay Chaudhry a man worthwhile enough to write a column, so he has to pay and get his articles printed via advertisements)

The atrocious english language slips aside, the stupendously rising fuel prices and the sheer incongruity and drying up of the water table make Malay Chaudhry's arguments sound like those coming from a class VIII student. Is THIS the class, understanding and maturity of Malay Chaudhry, a former IIM Bangalore professor and Founder Director of what he claims to be 'India's no 1 B-school'?!!

You might ask me why I am even taking the IIPM propoganda so seriously. It takes only a pea-brain to figure out how dubious the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM) is as a place to study from their full-page approval-seeking print advertisements.

I am doing this because if you question or pooh-pooh the claims of IIPM from the POV of a concerned consumer, like Mumbai-based magazine JAM magazine did and blogger Gaurav Sabnis followed up with more questions, IIPM stifles your voice by slapping a Rs 125 crore damages legal notice and threatening police action.

Simultaneously, the IIPM PR machinery spruces up fake blogs all over the Internet to discredit Gaurav Sabnis' name. Now what if more concerned citizens question IIPM's unfair practices... will Arindam Chaudhry stoop to newer lows as sending goondas to each home?

It would be interesting to know if there are any cases pending in the consumer courts against IIPM. It is very likely that there are. The AICTE has already objected to the use of the phrase 'Indian Institute of' in IIPM's name.

Meanwhile, several bloggers have come up to back Gaurav Sabnis.

If IIPM actually goes ahead with a legal recourse against Sabnis, they will end up axing their own foot. A defamation case eventually puts the truth to test. Imagine if this blows up into a court case, and a couple of disgruntled IIPM students are gathered to come forward and testify against the institute's malpractices in a court. I am sure the pony-tailed and mouse-voiced Arindam wouldn't consider that an increase in his happiness quotient.

My peon put a fly in my coffee

2005-10-05T04:49:00.000-07:00

Business Risk Management elicits visions of a group of dashing necktie wearing smart-alecs working overtime to protect an enterprise from investment, capital and credit risks, godown damages, hackers and such.

The US-based business risk consultant firm Control Risk Group (due to make its formal announcement of India operations tomorrow), however on its website offers solutions to 'bomb threat', 'audio forensics' and 'kidnapping' too for businesses!

Did you know that companies also outsource to Control Risk Group for protection from...

Construction Fraud
Corruption
Defensive Driving Training (when the CEO is attacked by a biker gang at Worli sea face)
Extortion (D-company, beware!)
Product contamination (is there poison in your project leader's masala-chai?)
Anti-money laundering.

I say, what about the biggest risk of them all: intra-office romance?

Fodder for the green men!

2005-09-30T00:34:00.000-07:00

Finally, higher education in Bihar has received its long awaited shot-in-the-arm through the route of foreign-university collaboration. A university in the UK has started a course in Astrobiology. Astrobiology, as the discerning mind would immediately grasp, is man's age-old hunger to search for alien life.

The course, besides studying astronomy, will also examine 'popular culture, including films like ET and students will also study obscure texts' related to extra-terrestrial life.

Aliens according to popular culture and obscure texts (and lately definitive literature like 'Men in Black' and 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'), are strange looking people who disguise themselves as people and clandestinely mix with the Earth public and work from inside to destroy humanity via economic and social misdeeds.

Now we know for sure where to find these Aliens... among the politicians of Bihar! Hence, the students' field trips and live experiments are largely going to be in Bihar. Now the question is, will these students do enough research to help these Aliens find their way back home?

Our celebrities just don't get it

2005-09-29T00:53:00.000-07:00

Former Beach Boy Brian Wilson on his website has made an open offer that if you donate $100 for Katrina victims, he will will give you a call on your phone and answer a question of your choice.

True to his word, people have actually testified to receiving calls from him after they made the donation (courtesy Boing Boing).

I wonder why celebrities in India cannot do something like this in the times of Tsunami or Gujarat Earthquakes. A similar offer by people like SRK, Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Shekhar Suman or Sachin Tendulkar would do magic to calamity donations. What we do see them doing, though, is participating in an all-star show the proceeds of which they claim would go into a relief fund. And we all know how much an educated man trusts such claims.

Whoa-cabulary!

2005-09-27T09:19:00.000-07:00

OK, the week gone by, counting from today, is the one that I wrote most extensively in since moving to Mumbai. A list of Top Words and Phrases I used in my newspaper writing in the past week. They keep ringing in my head.

nagpada, chappell, building collapse, eloquence, beach, delighted, saki naka, reliance, patel, VoIP, a study in stupidity, bluetooth, parochial blasphemy, underrated, indian penal code, commendable, investment per megawatt, susu kare chhe, bourses, sensex, zoomed, climbed, hedge funds, flew, sped, tarannum, bungalow, bookies, dabhol, stem cell, kaun banega marodpati, entwine, lokhandwala, sylvan, 26/7, eviscerate, cellular, fixed, gorgeous, MHADA, MMRDA, BMC, vilasrao, biotech, alternative, sectoral, earnings per share, core banking solution, basel ii standards, capital adequacy ratio, organic network, promoter group, paid-up capital, premium, jungle mein mangal, naxalites, rr patil, ipod, itunes, sex scandal, cocaine, main toh bas naukri kar raha hoon, relief package, bridge, port, low pressure area, subir raha ko gussa kyon aata hai?, broker, value addition, VAT, marginal pricing, nefarious, nepotism, vixen, gandhian, pole dancer, Q1 profits.

In other news, I enjoyed test-riding an iPod Nano today. That installing its supporting software on my office computer nearly crashed it is another issue.

Man is a Political Animal!

2005-09-27T06:59:00.000-07:00

If politicians have the right to behave like animals, why can't we let dogs vote? They have paws too.

A look into history reveals that politics and animals have consistently been in cahoots.

Last week in Bihar, a group of dissidents of a national party took out a rally featuring a battery of pigs and donkeys, drawing a similarity between their own state and that of the animals.

Devi Lal, our former Jaat Deputy Prime Minister's state residence in New Delhi had two well-bred buffaloes from Rohtak as housemates. The old man refused to evict the bovine beasts from the state property, insisting that he could not run the country properly without two fresh glasses of buffalo milk every morning. Cops on security at the house confessed to have mistaken the beasts for the D-PM and vice versa on many occasions. Why two buffaloes? Nobody knows, but the second one was for backup, one might guess. Even Saddam Hussain kept two lookalikes.

The charkha-weilding Mahatma Gandhi mentored what was probably the world's most traveled goat, which he took with him on all foreign tours. One European country even accorded the goat in the esteemed 'state guest' status.

Of course, every now and then politicians turn into the equine to be traded like silk in greedy government formation attempts. Some actually behave like stampeding horses when put inside an assembly hall and armed with mikes with weak bases fixing them to the tables.

Anti music-swapping tool is ineffective

2005-09-23T01:57:00.000-07:00

Infuriated by file sharing programs that supposedly make musicians like Metallica take to begging bowls and encouraged by the ruling against Kazaa in Australia, the IFPI, a British music industry conglomerate akin to the RIAA, has launched an anti music-swapping tool that searches for file sharing programs on your hard drive and then proceeds to delete them. The conglomerate has further called upon all the world's offices and colleges to run this tool on PCs in their premises so as to ' increase efficiency by preventing workers from wasting time downloading music' and protecting copyrighted music at the same time. You can test-drive the program here, its called Digital File Check.

Now don't tell me these people can afford to write bad software, because on my pc, which has both WinMX and Ares P2P clients, it fails to locate any of them!

Now just to be sure the files were not protected and all this was not a surreal abberation, I copied the P2P program files to several locations on my hard drive and ran Digital File Check again in a rather uneducated but rational-sounding attempt to help it trap the P2P devils but to no happiness.

Any takers for this software... whatsay, Pointy Haired Boss?

Offshore

2005-09-21T04:45:00.000-07:00

Big ideas and projects take too much time to take off in India. Protesting environmentalists, a free media, ballot-happy legislators and the gang are forever finding faults with development. Stay orders in courts, misleading media reports, protests that go beyond the right to freedom of speech are tools that delay power projects, housing schemes, flyovers, highways and industries.

A very dangerous and unpardonable specimen that poses a high risk to development is the uninformed journalist, the media's in-house ignoramus.

In April 2004, several villages near Satara in Maharashtra, the hub of wind energy in India, turned against windmills because they believed that the windmill blades drove away rain clouds, causing a drought.

A local newspaper ran a story 'confirming the villager's concerns': "The large blades of a windmill first attract rain coulds towards them using magnetic power. The blades then slash through the clouds to cut them into pieces, thus affecting rainfall and causing a drought."

Soon, the local MLA sensed that playing the tune of the people and the media is best for future election prospects. The next day he was seen leading a rally demanding the demolition of the thousands of plush windfarms in Satara spread across thousands of acres and worth hundreds of crores of rupees. He even produced rainfall statistical data for the last 4 years, attributing a universally bad monsoon to the windmills' rain-killing tendency.

Not to be left behind in displaying utter stupidity, the country's only Ministry of Renewable Sources of Energy in the Maharashtra government ordered a probe into the issue.

Not one soul of consequence came forward to talk reason for weeks. The controversy died with a big Indian Express story pointing out the stupidity of it all, the only oasis of rationality.

I am a firm supporter of renewable sources of energy, be it big dams and hydro projects, wind, biomass or the lesser prevalent solar and geothermal. With fossil fuel prices going up and the Kyoto Protocol in place, I think they provide a great opportunity for the country to build a cheap and robust power infrastructure from the start and and accumulate carbon credits. So incidents like the one above and the following one evoke a sense of comic frustration in me.

Very respectable publications in their editorials have been creating a lot of hype about offshore wind energy projects. They tout it as the ultimate solution to all power problems in India. One of them even assailed the IPO of Suzlon Wind Energy, world's sixth largest wind ev\nergy equipment manufacturer, because its Red Herring Prospectus did not mention anything about offshore projects. I find this obsession with offshore wind projects preposterous, just as I find rain-water harvesting as a solution to water problems in India plain dumb.

Offshore wind energy projects, incidentally, are windmill farms installed on the sea, a few kms away from the coast, because wind patterns are stronger out there.

India has an on-land wind potential of 45,000 MW, of which a little over 3,000 MW has been installed. The remaining 42,000 begs to be converted to installed capacity. State governments are putting in place laws favourable to renewable energy installation. As much as 875 MW wind capacity was added in 2004 itself, the third largest in the world for that year.

Offshore wind projects are at best a futuristic technology. They are installed mainly due to two reasons, first being the lack of enough landmass in a country for on-land projects (European countries, for example) and the second being opposition from extreme environmentalists who (legitimately) oppose windmills on land because their rotor blades are known to kill migratory birds en masse.

Other than that, offshore projects require nearly five times the investment per MW as on-land wind projects. They cannot be installed in large MW chunks and are still at research stage. The cost of power per unit from offshore projects is insanely astronomical.

Most of all, it is slightly too much to talk vigorously of the expensive offshore wind projects in India when only 7 percent of the on-land potential has been converted.

Information, Interrupted

2005-08-29T06:52:00.000-07:00

In 1996, I traded three coins (two Irish cents and one South African schilling, to be precise) from my vast collection with a friend for two words that have changed my life, as they have of billions of people across the world.

The two words, if i remember correctly were 'dubey' and 'dubey1234', the username-password couplet to the VSNL shell account that let you reach websites on a text-only interface.

Exactly one month later, a more generous friend offered to give me a 'proper TCP/IP Internet experience with graphics' on another stolen VSNL account. He, however, refused to reveal to me the username-password, choosing to instead come to my home and login whenever I asked of him.

Nine years later, Internet access is one of the cheapest commodities in the Indian urban market. The future costs of Internet access are anybody's guess.

A subject that has been very central to the development of Internet utility since the turn of the millenium is related to the rural areas.

Small to medium sized projects networking villages to cleanse up the traditional mandi system, exchange of agricultural information and forging inter-village marriage alliances have reached some success.

Low literacy, however, remains that biggest bottleneck towards leting Indian villages go online in a big way.

Proponents of removing the so-called 'digital divide' exhert a sense of urgency in planting computers in a mass manner in the villages, at a pace that cannot be matched by the increase in literacy.

In my opinion, the 'digital divide' is a flawed concept that only serves the purpose of those who want to see computers proliferate across Indian villages. It fails to solve the real problem, that of the lack of access to information.

The inflated importance attached to the 'digital divide' and the urgency to plant computers in villages creates unnecessary complications, the least of which makes a whole workforce of software minds engage in redesigning popular software platforms in local Indian languages that can be understood by all.

While this community of computer-planters grapples with these complications and experiments with new ideas, the Indian villager is not getting access to any information.

A viable alternative that has been gaining support is that of community radio.

A small radio station made to cater to a small area costs less than One Lakh Rupees to set up. If given into the hands of the community, the possibilities are immense.

Local panchayats can form content policies, a village-level group can create the content custom made for the local needs and disseminate information in a universal format. Public-private participation with the intervention of NGOs can broadly provide the required censorship.

Community radio, however, remains illegal in India for all the wrong reasons.

One would fear the upper-castes in a village take over the radio and use it for lower-caste oppression, or political parties use it to brainwash votebanks.

The Indian Government, however fears an altogether different problem: that of national security. What if a jehadi group takes over a radio station and converts it into a hate-breeding anti-nationalism tool?

The apprehensions are obviously hypothetical and overinflated. The success of community radio in Latin American countries, with all its cocaine mafia, military-civilian tussles and trigger-happy rebels is there to see.

The government in India, can start off by legalizing radio in the interior and problem-free states like Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Goa, Haryana and Punjab. Small pilot projects to test the waters can be a good beginning. Given the free press and public scrutiny in the country, rest assured that these projects would be fairly guaged for feasibility and viability from all angles.

The government, however, will have to take an initiative first. If it engages the various organs of society into a debate, the effort will not be fruitless.

The hesitation of the government to do even that bit is disheartening.

Ten years after the Internet changed Urban India, we require a similar revolution in the rural spectrum. Given the progress we are making in education with respect to rise in population, community radio is a information empowerment solution that the government must consider with absolute urgency.