Meticulously Underthought

The End

2006-12-11T18:58:00.000+05:30

Just a final update if you'd missed the devil in the details of the conclusion of the last post, this little five-year-old experiement is over for good. The same fate is applicable for the work blog, you won't see any new material in either place. I do intend to write at the Wordpress blog, though even that's not been updated for close to two months now.

I have made some great friends from this little joint, I'd not list them down because I do talk to them fairly often even without using the blog as a platform and I know almost all of them in real life too by now. Looking back, that's the best part that I get to take away from this. My life's been all about people and I've had the pleasure of knowing some really good people because of the blog.

Otherwise, I don't feel bad about the closure and I can't bear to read most of the older material anyway. Guess I could safely say that I won't miss it much. So this is one big round of thanks for the tiny handful who still bother to keep dropping by and the friends I've made from this place.

Shyam/Codelust

p.s: for the majority of the visitors here these days who are misled by Google, I do not have naked pictures of Deepa Sahi or inside information about prostitutes in Noida.

The Walk

2006-12-02T02:46:00.000+05:30

There is certainly a lot of magic in Delhi’s winters. Of course, it is hard to find and hidden away from the hours that we get to normally see, when we honk and snake our way through the working day, lost in our thoughts, arguments and other worries that plague our mundane daily existence.

And when it turns up, like at two in the morning today, while walking back from a late night movie with only your own shadow, an empty soul and the empty road for company, it is indeed sheer magic. Places filled otherwise with noise and people now welcome you with the most silent of appraisals. There is almost a feeling of mutual acknowledgement, but that’s just my imagination speaking.

Regardless, it is like a slow sigh of relief expelled by the day, now an unburdened soul, dark and widespread, breathing quietly into your being, and gradually resuscitating life back into your near-dead self. It can’t speak, but it does talk back. It can’t feel, but it does touch you. It is meant to be asleep, but it certainly is wide awake.

During the day, there is colour everywhere. The mushrooms are back on the shelves of the roadside shops. Hands dig deep into pockets, mufflers tie gentle knots of warmth into every other body you can see. It is a season I dread and look forward to at the same time, for things inevitably go wrong, in the worst possible manner, around this time, every time.

For most parts I am rediscovering silence. I am rediscovering nothingness and discovering its value for the first time. I have a million memories to let go of and thousands of instances to step aside. Strangely, the story has never been about me; but it is and it is not at the same time now. Does that make sense? I guess not.

It was inevitable that the seasons would change again, like how it is inevitable that I must finally make a move. This is not home for me, even when I’ve called this place home for the past seven years. This is not love for me, even when I have, arguably, been in love for the past four years? But, honestly, I have no complaints, no regrets and not even a fleeting sense of loss. I’ve felt and done all that. This time it is for good.

I see glimpses, of myself and feelings that I’d thought I’d long lost, every now and then. Sometimes it feels like childhood all over again. There is a familiarity I yearn for. There is that elusive smile I wonder if I’ll ever see for real. There is the warmth of an unknown embrace that I know by heart and one that is familiar to every inch of my skin. I know exactly, inch-by-inch, what I am looking for.

Sometimes I think I have a lot to say, that I will write once again those thoughts out here. Then I realize that this is a conversation that I am having with myself. I am explaining, putting into shape and form my feelings that I probably never tell anyone, maybe not even myself. After 27 years, I’ve realized that I’ve never listened to myself with even half the care or concern I’ve always given others.

I do not know what value this blog will ever hold. It is a twisted logbook of my life since 2001, played out as elaborate game of metaphorical hide and seek. But for all practical purposes it is an endless repetition of the themes of loneliness, sadness, desperation and longing. I’ve threatened to quit doing this on numerous occasions, for varying reasons, but as the updates dwindle to the odd missive credited to the force of habit, I think I am finally willing to let this too go, but this time without regret, pain or anger.

One times one

2006-11-17T00:59:00.000+05:30

When your latest resolution in life goes something like “try and not sleep with friends and people who mean a lot to you,” the connotations are staggering since you could not sleep with strangers in the first place anyway. In a way, you can consider this more as your own sanity’s spaceship (the other one – morality – exploded mid-flight long ago) sending mildly panicky messages back to earth.

“Houston, we have a problem.” And a mighty complicated one at that too. It could have been termed as a life so interesting, only if it was not half as funny as it sounds. Seriously, there should be a default number of attempts at solving a problem available to all of humanity, after which, even out of pity, the problem should resolve by itself. I think that’s a fair enough deal, don’t you think so?

It is not the easiest thing to step back or stand aside from the only meaning, be it transient or misplaced, that you have to cling on to interpret your actions in life. Thankfully, robust and important players, like objectivity and purpose, have returned to the stage. Anger, in the meantime, has played its important part and what a stellar performance that was too. I guess the drama is indeed quite a spectacle; only that it is anything but that when the stage is your mind and the players are elements that constitute your self.

On the other hand, withdrawal need not always be a spectacle, nor should it always be noticed. You can slink away in a million different ways and still be around in the same twenty different ways. And it is not like it has not been done before, but this time it is different. Bridges left uncrossed till recently are now a faded vision in the past. This, in all probability, is territory that we shall never cover again. I guess some equations were changed; a few victories were won and some were lost. The sum of all that maneuvering though remains unchanged. Is that not strange? Maybe it is not.

Meanwhile, the weather is brilliant and the rooms bask in a mildly golden glow of a new, cheap lamp that I’ve grown very fond of. But I don’t like being home much these days, even when most of life is as perfect as it could ever get to be. Sometimes I do feel like a part of me has left me, leaving this shell for someone else who is not me to live in for the rest its assigned life. There is moderation in most things and controlled excesses in others. Life is a fine balance. Life is a walk on the razor’s edge. Life is the fear of a fall on to insanity and irrelevance either side.

Reflect

2006-11-07T23:58:00.000+05:30

I think it would be a lie if I said I was tempted on more than one occasion in the recent weeks to update this blog. It is not like I have lost the urge to communicate; it is more like I have not much to communicate that is new or interesting enough. Life has pretty much settled down into a downright predictable rhythm, even accomplishments and disappointments are factored in according to preset levels. It is not exactly sterile like a sickly green hospital gown, but it not a chaotic celebration of desired excitement either. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle.

You walk straight ahead and the road goes around in circles. Actually, there has never been a definite goal in your life. All your goals keep changing as time passes and as locations change, and in the end the goals no longer exist. When you think about it, life in fact doesn't have what may be called ultimate goals. It’s just like this hornet’s nest. It’s a pity to abandon it, yet if one tries to remove it one will encounter a stinging attack. Best to leave it just hanging there so that it can be admired. At this point in your thinking, your feet become lighter, it is fine wherever your feet take you, as long as there are sights to see. Gao Xingjian in Soul Mountain

Sometime towards the end of last month six of us headed out towards the deserts. It was meant to be my break in Goa in November, but circumstances and planning over much alcohol deemed that it be done in October, right after the folks and relatives had left after their latest visit. The picture you see posted alongside is from the same trip, shot with a camera phone atop a very young and feisty camel. It was good fun. Fun enough to have almost compelled me to do a volt face in my car while driving back to work on the Monday morning when we returned and head out on a full tank wherever the road would take me to. Only if life was that easy and simple. Maybe it is, maybe it is not. The only thing that counts is that I did not turn around and dutifully went back to my regular life.

Truth be said, I am completing this entry a handful of hours after I’d started writing it. In those few hours the hues that colour my perspective have changed yet again and I come face-to-face with my favourite rhetorical question: It does not have to be this difficult. Will it always be like this? Will it always be this hard? As much as the realization alarms me, I know that it is very much possible. Is this what I wanted life to be? Having sworn to stay away from feeling grateful for the pieces of pity thrown my way, why do I find myself back here, in the same familiar wretched situation? I can’t imagine that I ask for it each and every time. Something has to go right somewhere, does it not?

At the same time I guess I know most of this is vain posturing. The world is nice. The world is good. Everything happens for a good reason. Everyone loves you, you love everyone and the world is a place that loves each other. I have ratified the findings as much, I know. Then again, if your core being argues against it when it matters the most, do you think it is fake, it is selfish and easily discountable? I don’t know, I think I am rambling on. And I seriously think you have better things to do in life than to read this crap. Really.

Cold Love

2006-10-18T21:33:00.000+05:30

It is that time of the year again when the shadows creep in pleasantly, much earlier than normal during the afternoons. The days have an almost-golden glow to them, it is a bit too warm now, but in another couple of weeks the chill should blunt it considerably and with that would come out the first of the winter clothes. Winter in Delhi is a heady romantic drink that affects all the senses. Veils of fog adorn the day in differing denseness, there is always a riot of colours on street and late evenings bring out the roadside fires and leftover embers that glow milder every time into their eventual demise.

Thus, it is no wonder that winter always brings with it the memories of all my past relationships - both cold and warm - drifting back into my mind. While watching Closer recently, it struck me that people who have loved me the most have also pretty much hated me the most too at some point or the other in their lives. I never thought that was actually possible till the pattern was way too obvious to ignore and too commonplace to miss after all these years. But the good part is that I don't feel burdened by them. In fact I feel quite free and it is the best I've felt probably all my life.

But what exactly is love between two people? Does "I love you" signify more the fact that I love you for loving me or that I love you just like that? And what exactly is love expressed in terms of percentages of caring and concern? And no, it is not like I don't believe in love anymore, it is just that I think a lot of people misplace it for a lot of other things.

Revenge

2006-10-15T02:57:00.000+05:30

Call it an epiphany or call it whatever you would want to, but when you are up late in the night, largely unwillingly, in a strange room full of snoring people, aided by the laptop that beams out today's Orkut's fortune as "Our first and last love is.. self-love" you'd have to admit that life has a stellar sense of irony or something like that. It all harks back to a time long gone and situations that I just don't fancy ever being a part of, if I could have my way. But life does extract its two penny worth of revenge every now and then by making sure you that don't have it all your way, at least not all the time.

If it can't be irony, then it has to be the proclivity for life's events to repeat itself that must be commended with a royal gesture like the Nobel Prize. It was about a similar set of circumstances, after being in the same building, that I'd written rather bitterly about on this blog a couple of years ago. But this time, there is no déjà vu. I am not about throw in the towel, sport a major sulk, half a pout and despair endlessly about how it is just not worth it and how things will always suck. Thankfully, things have changed at my end, but I can't help but wonder how much change is actually good, right or even justified.

As things stand, I have very little in common with my roots anyway. Not that I care much about it, since I do enjoy most of what I do these days without any regrets, but it does have a funny angle to it when the dear mother mentions on more than one occasion that 'back then' you never used to be this way, which is again a sentiment echoed by acquaintances/friends who have run into me after a very long time. Though I can't exactly say that I am unmoved by the derision I've felt way too often in the past couple of days, I've honestly been intrigued more this unrelenting progress of the self into the unknown without any particular reason behind it.

In a weird way, I am getting to know myself - the real me - in all its good and awful glory for the first time in my life. It feels like fresh, warm blood flowing into veins that have remained dry for a lifetime. It is a journey of discovering the most basic and tiniest of things that most would have taken for granted for most of their lives, even at the risk of sounding like an imbecile most times these days. But for now I think I should get some sleep. It is past 2:30 in the morning and the snoring has subsided in line with the gradual demise of my questions regarding what the hell am I doing in such a cramped set up when I could comfortably be sleeping in my bed at home.

Then again, remember the part about revenge. Yes, that is what this is all about.

All things remaining the same..

2006-10-02T10:35:00.000+05:30

To the lovely folk at Jhanki.com (no linky love for the naughty peeps), blindly pimping your own product in comments on other blogs is not the most brilliant marketing idea that anyone had ever come up with. For prior art, refer to to Sulekha vs the Indian bloggers, ruling 100101. Since I am commenting on it, I would also suggest that it is also not the best idea to run a website that aggregates content related to India on pages with the ISO encoding, switch to UTF-8 and be happy me hearties. You know, everything that RubyOnRails or the next coolest framework with scaffolding and the works suggests to you is not exactly the gospel.

Meanwhile, Shashikant (he's been my favourite blogger for a while now, he really _should_ write more often than he does) tears into the latest broadside on bloggers by someone who I guess is a veteran deskie. The points mentioned there are not worth responding to. Really, everyone deserves to have their monthly, quarterly, annual episodes of outrage a la Oprah Winfrey. Let the man have his in peace. Though, some, like Shivam, seems to have taken it rather personally and as I ~~speak~~ write, is said to be on his way to stage a sit-in outside the Times House at ITO. The man is also said to have hidden a few Google bombs too his jhola to spray the MD with. Ouch.

Life merrily moves on otherwise. It is day three of an unintended mini-break from work today. Since it is that time of the year in north India when painters and construction workers become more sought after than film stars or politicians, the same fate has befallen my humble pigeon hole and it's been a case of mini migrations within the house, from one room to another, for the past three days. I think it is a nice thing to work from home. I should try this more often, but the speeds allowed by GPRS is just one degree short of being truly unusable. Time to get MTNL on the line and make my little Linksys WRT45G visible to the outside world.

House Shopping

2006-09-23T16:09:00.000+05:30

Oh, I have a blog that I used to write frequently on? Good that you reminded me, because I'd almost forgotten that I had one or what it looked like. You can blame the sad state of affairs here on life getting incredibly busy of late, the rediscovery of Orkut by most people I know (and also by people I'd not known in a while) and not having much to complain about in general. It is hectic at the best and sedate at the worst, but in all honesty, it is quite good.

Now that most people that I know have stumbled down the aisle (it happens in some cases after they've reached a fair distance down that lane), the latest fascination in town is to now 'invest' in a shack of their own. It was not for me, but for someone else, that we went house-shopping last Sunday and it was quite an experience. Some of the places we had seen were like a sneeze away from the back of beyond, bordering bona fide villages (with authentic buffalos too thrown in for good measure) and even thick woods in some cases.

If you want to buy a two bedroom apartment (known as 2BHK in Delhi parlance) in South Delhi, chances are that you'd end up spending anywhere between Rs 16 lakh and Rs 50 lakh, depending on the locality. And yes, I am one of those much-derided South Delhi snobs, so sue me. But the sweetest one I had seen was in a place called Freedom Fighters Enclave - a three bedroom beauty that was way too well built to belong anywhere in the land of butter chicken and bhangra, where quality construction is as much an urban legend as good caramel custard is in Delhi.

Only problem was, as you could have guessed, the price. At over Rs 45 lakh the place was a steal, but it was considerably over budget for the couple who were looking at it from the point of view of a second house. For myself, I have decided to keep off any purchase options for at least another year, which should probably convince me that I am more or less settling down here. Right after which, as luck would deem it, would follow the unexpected uprooting of the self. You know, life's like that most times.

Updates

2006-09-15T18:21:00.000+05:30

To think that at some point in life (not too long back, probably five years at the most) I used to write emails with "dat" and "coz" sprayed all over it strikes as nothing short of, well, extreme silliness for me. It is amusing at the best and embarrassing at the worst; the things we have done and the things we continue to do! Ah well, probably the only good thing about life in all of it is that it continues to be unpredictable. Wonder what else would I look back and laugh at some more years down the line? Not that there's been much time to sit and introspect, but that's another story altogether.

The past weeks have been very hectic, in fact dizzyingly so. It is not fun to serve the cricket crazy fans in the country on a high traffic website on a day when Murphy's Law works much better than any service that runs on your servers. That apart, I managed to go for a crazy gig last Sunday (grainy, awful videos here and here), bought two new books (Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain) and a bunch of new music (INXS, Billy Joel, Talvin Singh and Beautiful South). Ergo, I have been doing quite well other than for missing out on 'My-Time', which mostly denotes spending time by yourself precisely in the way you want to spend it.

Eco, as usual (okay, I never liked Baudolino much), is an absolute pleasure to read and you can always sell me any book which is about trying to figure out who you really are, so it is all the more sweeter when it is written by one of my favourite authors. I have sampled only a couple of pages of Soul Mountain since I am not too fond of reading more than one book, time constraints notwithstanding, at the same time, but the tiny nibble I got was stunningly delicious. Of the music acquisition, INXS, Billy Joel and Beautiful South are typical 'best of' compilations, while Talvin's HA is refreshingly different from his normal work and I've been listening to 'The Beat Goes On' almost non-stop ever since.

It is hard to believe that I've done over a year in the new job. The work is not exactly risk-free and doing well is rewarded with even higher targets to achieve, which I actually do enjoy. I think the dreams of doing something on my own is now firmly in the back burner and I do wonder if it will ever be back on top of the priority list. The idea right now is to work really hard for another four years and take a call whether I can slow things down or not. The four year plan depends a lot on optimising resources and generally living better, which I have been able to do little by little, but I still have a long way to go.

p.s: If you have not seen DailyLit by now and if you are one of us lazy readers, you really should. All they are missing is a PDF link.

Notch

2006-09-06T19:33:00.000+05:30

Personal management is an art that is as highly specialised and complicated as personnel management. While the latter involves finding common grounds and meeting targets within a group of people, the former involves finding common grounds and meeting targets within your own group of necessities and limitations. A post today by Jace on 'Moving up in life' pretty much summed up the way I have been feeling for close to the past year now.

As you might have guessed by now, this post has nothing to with the personnel part of it. It just made for a nice compare and contrast situation and nothing more. And coming back to the topic, I can't agree more with the fact that finally, when it all becomes a bit easier and achievable, you can't help but wonder if it was you or the target that ended up being too ordinary, that now keeps you wondering constantly about the next impossible that you should chase after.

But it sure does feel to be taken seriously when you say something, mostly shorn of the 'too-young' cliche and to have things to worry beyond where and what to eat any given day and also not have to keep a constant eye on the expenses just because you splurged a bit on yourself on the odd day. Somewhere along the way you start to believe that you can actually get things done and that good things eventually do happen, even when you are going through a really bad patch.

Net Vibes

2006-09-04T00:57:00.000+05:30

Help! Both The Hindustan Times (in the delicious Brunch) and The Times of India have declared that the Internet is the new happening social scene in India. While HT takes a look at it from the point of view that it has not done a great deal of good to the singles (welcome to my world, thank you) in the city, ToI does a 'what-the-hell-is-it-all-about?' story on the same, with a new mental health therapist (Samir Parekh is on vacation?) also thrown in for good measure. And to add to the mix, we have K's post on the struggle within traditional print houses on how to deal with the whole internet juggernaut, which I could not respond to because of a lack of time and the office firewall barfing on the infamous media blog he'd linked to from his pages.

Internet and social networking is hardly anything new in India. Just because Fropper spends a great deal of money on advertising, it does not mean that social networking, blogging and other 'community' oriented stuff has taken off in India. One of the best kept secrets of the online industry is that you don't necessarily diversify into other areas because there is essentially a market available for your wares, or even that you can do it better than anyone else out there. You often do it out a sheer lack of advertising inventory to pitch new clients with.

For most online properties, organic growth flattens out after a point (with the notable exceptions of Youtube and Myspace) and with that comes stagnation in your numbers related to your most visible property - the hallowed homepage. Almost every top website in India struggles with overbooked homepage advertising slots that are not available for any rates or for anyone for months to come. Thus you end up doing the predatory act, of moving into areas that really do not belong to your core set of competencies - like email, social networking - just for the sake of beefing up your stock of inventory. It often helps, when you get into such forays, if you are a Rediff or an Indiatimes, whose presence in the average Indian internet user's psyche is mind boggling.

Even with a 10% conversion ratio, for such major internet players, the numbers can turn out to be quite beneficial. Let us assume that of the half million unique visitors that an Indiatimes or a Rediff would get on a daily basis, the 10% conversion would translate into 50,000 users from the word go, which is an awesome number for any new service. In such set ups, they are not limited by infrastructure or development costs that constrain smaller start ups. And if you can convert even half of that 50,000 into regular users, you end up with 25,000 users who could comfortably be generating upwards of 8 to 10 page views per user. That's at least 200,000 page views worth of ads you can now now serve on a daily basis. Not bad, huh?

In all of this, the odd man out is Orkut, which is yet another of Google's much ignored services. For some weird reason India has fallen in love with Orkut all over again. The phenomenon is nothing short of an alternative lifestyle, where you have to be a wizard to follow conversation threads in forms of 'scraps' with everyone's replies stacked on different pages. And really, what is it with high traffic websites and awful user interfaces? Myspace, Hi5 and Orkut are nothing short of third degree torture to use. When did they change the rule book that you need to be completely unusable and slow like hell to be successful? And here we are breaking a sweat in trying to brand even our second newborns as a 'two point ohs' and pouring DHTML and Ajax goodness all over it.

Coming to K's post, what I can say for sure is that credibility is not a major factor anymore. One of the good and bad things about recent developments in media is that we are gradually throwing out the 'unbiased' label. Media was never unbiased. Hell, no human is. So how can something that is created by the same humans ever be unbiased? The difference between print and online right now is that they represent different activities. Online can't do a print. Most people don't log on to news websites to read stories in excess of 1000 words. They want it in a jiffy, scan and run back to whatever they were doing earlier. At the same time, print can't do an online. It can't really 'break' news anymore, that's a competency it has long forfeited to internet and television.

What has changed recently is reach. More people are on the internet these days, while you've probably reached everyone you'd want to reach with print as the medium. And even then our penetration is so pitifully low that the potential numbers are worth bucket loads of marketing and ad sales drool. Print also has a problem in terms of inflexibility with target demographics. I can advertise in a publication knowing the target audience, but my message would still be lost on a small percentage, who are the minority within the publication's readers, because they don't fit the profile I want to advertise to. The beauty of online ad delivery is that I can specify by region, by platform, by time and by frequency, who and where I deliver the ads to, even without forcing them to register on the website.

But none of this what is going to create the maximum amount of trouble for the traditional forms, print and television. What is giving them trouble are costs, of production and distribution. In print it is not good enough that you can create a lovely newspaper in QuarkXpress every night. You still need someone to dirty feet, hands and risk other parts of their anatomy in the awful world of print distribution. Costs of newsprint are awfully high and from what I remember it is a process that is still strictly regulated. Most of the publications can afford to sell their wares for an 'invitation price' because it is underwritten by the advertising, the rate for which is hiked every time the new circulation numbers come in, provided you've held your ground or even improved on it. Effectively, the reader gets an increasingly smaller piece of the pie because, well, he does not really figure in the picture.

Television pretty much follows a similar pattern, though production costs are considerably higher there (unless you are one of those fancy nuts in print who still own a printing press of their own), which shows up in exceptionally high advertising rates. Again, distribution is the nasty piece to bite on here. Ever wondered why some godforsaken channel that nobody wants to watch still shows up in your prime band? It is not because your cable guy has a soft spot for the channel, it is because he's been paid a nice sum of money to do it. That guarantees the channel a minimum degree of viewership, which in turn brings more than enough cheers to the ad sales teams.

That leaves us with the question that was asked, how do you monetize your internet audience? For starters, start up costs are minimal on this side of the town. A cheap dedicated server with truckloads of bandwidth will only set you back less than Rs 6000 these days. The average internet set up does not need more than a designer, a technology person and two for the editorial. Even with page views in the thousands in a day, an optimized website will generate enough cash by means of AdSense to cover the costs of at least half of the set up. That, of course, is doing things on the cheap.

When you have the moolah to throw around, you profile your audience like your life and your entire family tree's depended on it (a certain company based in Mountain View is very good at doing this, raking it billions every month) and keep your costs under control (not in the maha kanjoos way, but in terms of spending in places where you can actually recover your cost or acquire a new bunch of visitors). Marketing and advertising yourself does get you new visitors, but if you don't have a good product to flog, they'd never stick around. So, it is generally a good idea to be at least excellent at what you intend to in the first place. Rest is to incentivize every damn thing. How do you do that? Well, that's worth a lengthy post in itself.

But, to answer the core question, yes, people do make money publishing on the internet and some of them make a lot more than what you or I would give them credit for. The industry still suffers from the age-old ailments of inflated numbers and other artful misrepresentations, but the clients are wizening up and it is a practice that's very much on the decline. The numbers are still nowhere in the region of what print or television can boast of, but, like I said earlier, the production and marketing costs are lower in this side of town too, thus making my margins much more healthier. All you need is a bit of patience, a good product and oodles of respect for the user.

tags: india, internet, online advertising, social networking

Identity

2006-09-02T00:12:00.000+05:30

The air too, like the skies, always turns a dull shade of grey when it is overcast and rainy here. Much before I finally started for home, sometime past eight in the evening, what was left of the late evening sunlight was already being given a tough time in finding its way to the ground by the millions of tiny, needlelike drops of rain.

It is a very strange kind of rain, for even when it rains hard, it is more like a shower of micro-sized pins, than the usual mid-sized splotch that we are normally used to. Surprisingly, it was all fine at the first flyover and quite okay at the second one; but it all came to naught after passing under the third one, when I was caught in another of those infamous traffic jams in the rain.

Logically, it has to be an unsavory situation. The windscreen fogs up, the lighting is always lax, traffic crawls along in four unruly lanes and you can hardly see anything, nor can anyone see you. But I adore such situations. I’ve always loved strange, dark places filled with strange dark people, where there are no set rules and everything from your ancestry to your professional status are of no import.

Chasing down such thoughts, I end up with the essential irritant of a question: who am I? I am afraid I don’t have any answers for that. I represent varied things like a decent professional, a wayward and quasi-estranged son, a good friend who is no longer that to so many and a former lover to some others. But, what do I mean for myself? I don’t even know.

I’ve always lived with ideas of what I should represent, but I’ve never known what I actually am. I could almost never identify with the way I look (helped in no smart part by the fact that I don’t look good from any angle), though I could not figure out which look I could have identified with. And I could never believe, even without any indoctrination, in things I was supposed to have believed in when I was growing up.

Flash-forward to now and having been in this city for seven years now, I can hardly identify myself with where I came from or with anything here. Apparently, my accent has gone a bit wonky in my mother tongue, I speak the language here with shades of my mother tongue and my English represents the places I’ve been, the things that I have read and the things that I’ve seen. In a sense, I can belong only to a feeling of being perpetually lost.

But when it all works out fine, there is this most amazing sense of calm and lucidity; for you are moored to nothing and there is nothing to fight against, because you are for and against everything at the same time, thus amounting to a sweet nothingness. When it does not work, well, it is a mess. You struggle to clasp on to foundations, even virtual or non-existent ones, while searching for even a single smell, a familiar feeling or verifiable memory to hold you together.

Meanwhile, the deadlock disintegrates, and after another traffic light, trees, vehicles and blurry lights fly past me. It is quite unsafe, for I can’t see half the things, including vehicles, potholes and people crossing the roads, out there. But I have grown to like uncertainty to the point of it even being quite a flirty relationship. We don’t quite ‘get’ each other, but we certainly do seem to thrive in each other’s company.

Percentages

2006-08-29T18:17:00.000+05:30

When do you know for sure that enough is enough? It is applicable in both cases - good and bad. If you go by a purely numerical definition, good or bad enough could probably be defined as anything that is 'x' units above the halfway point. That way, if you spend even 49% of your time in a particular situation in a good way (and 51% of the time in a bad way), you would still end up with two additional units of bad. Would that mean it would be a good idea to cut your losses, ditch the situation and move on ahead? Of course not.

The problem with people and relationships is that you can't ever really quantify either. A fair number of people exist in situations where 90% of the time spent is practically living hell for them; but the other 10% is, according to them, absolute heaven, which redeems the otherwise lousy situation. Naturally, in such circumstances, the good is given a higher weightage than the bad. Is that a smart idea? Well, I don't know. Whatever that rocks your boat, as they say, even if I may not agree with it. Moreover, factors such as practical considerations, only serve to muddy the waters further.

The question actually covers a whole lot of things other than just relationships. For example, you know you are putting on weight, but you are not overweight yet. So you get a particular weight in mind that would quantify the state of being overweight or a state of lurching rapidly towards it. But where exactly is that point? Is that point somewhere you can easily climb down from, like a minor flirtation over the lower limit or is it the minimum possible gap towards the upper limit, from where the climb down is a long way off, but not quite over the upper limit?

These are interesting questions to ponder, but very real ones too. People face it every day and deal with it using different methods. Some morbidly overweigh the little good and sign up for a lifetime of unbearable suffering, others make well-judged and sensible decisions that hover around the 50-50 level, which is more or less failsafe, while other idiots like me look for the 90% good and 10% bad to make the call that it is actually enough. Strangely, it is probably the 90% good rule that is the most prejudicial, especially if the other party has the lousy fortune to present the bad 10% up front first.

Reasons

2006-08-27T03:10:00.000+05:30

I think it is about time I gave up on the ‘have no time for this’ excuse and wade out into the open with the possible real reasons as to why I have been blogging lesser and lesser these days. First on the list would be the fact that my blog is awfully boring. I mean, there are only so many ways in which you can put forth the same crap again and again, and when you yourself have trouble reading all that you’ve written, it is a fairly good indication that it has become somewhat more than unbearable.

The second reason is, no matter how much I would want to deny it, that the loss of anonymity has taken a bit of a toll. In the early days, only a couple of close friends knew about the blog, which later grew to include a lot of friends. These days almost everyone knows - including a lot of people at work – about the who, the what and the where. By nature, I am a bit of a private person and these days I don’t get any time to be that. If I have to pretend to be nice and write about how lovely the weather is when it is not exactly beating down with niceness out there, then there really would be no point to this.

Then there is also the fact that I am a bit bored and disappointed with the entire blogging circus, especially in the Indian context. There are a couple of reasons I could come up with as to why it is so, but I can’t put my finger on the real big issue that could be the reason. Quite a bit of it is the inflated participation numbers. There are un-conferences and whatnot going on these days about it, but it does lack the personal touch of the early days. There is just no warmth, but a lot of vain posturing and turf wars over almost everything. Maybe it is also the fact that I find the other side – of facilitating conversations and making the business case for it – more exciting than the conversations themselves now.

These days, every time I sit down to write, my mind just blocks the thoughts out. As an old habit and as something I used to like doing, I do want to write; but, as something that involves going out into the open with what I feel and think, I don’t feel like doing it anymore. At a personal level too I’ve become more guarded, a lot less expectant and generally a whole lot less willing to put a lot on the line. It is not the most brilliant state of mind to be in, but it is not all that bad either.

In general, I think the truth is that I’ve been yearning better company, better conversations and better ways to spend my time. It is true that I have very little of it with me these days and I can’t honestly complain much about it because I quite like it this way and I am treated quite well too. But that does encroach on my personal time. As a person who used to lavish a lot of that on friends and close ones, it is a bit of a struggle now to do that any day or even as infrequently as once a week. That said, the realizations it has led to has been quite intriguing.

The thing is, a lot of the interactions you have on a daily basis arise out of necessities. In regular, mundane life, that could be having polite conversations with people from the milkman to the cabbie, not because it is absolutely necessary (you won’t exactly stop getting any milk or be left unable to hire a cab if you don’t do all those), but because it makes things easier for a variety of reasons; some of which makes things easier for you, while the others make it easier for the other party.

In personal life too, things tend to be the same. It is not that you’d exactly stop being alive if you were to suddenly stop being nice and caring on a superficial level. Most of the people you know and interact with often, would gladly give up stopping by you if you were to guarantee them safe passage in terms of what they desire from you. It is quite the same if the roles are reversed too. How often do you say “that’s so awful” to someone else almost out of an impulse than because you actually feel that is awful? By the same turn, how often do you count on hearing the same from others? Of course, you can accuse me of extreme cynicism, but I don’t think you can accuse me of being not right.

But what’s blogging got to do with any of this? Beats me. But the strange thing is that after what I guess must be a couple of hundred words, I still have not mentioned important things that have happened to me recently, like developments at work, an excellent trip to Bombay and even the fact that I went to work and back on a bike after almost a year and how overwhelming an experience it was. Instead, I am putting up a smokescreen to pretend that I am saying something useful or important, while all that I am doing is to try and bore you to death to see if you ‘really’ want to hear what I want to say?

So, what if a voice stands up and say ‘yes’? That would be quite an interesting turn of events, for I have no clue what I would do in that case. See, I guess what I am getting at is that I am quite a boring person who pretends to be more interesting or intriguing than what I really am. Of course, none of the older imagery regarding myself has been accidental. I’ve played, more than willingly, to the gallery and contributed to the situation in huge parts. I guess I am asking to be left alone, but it is hugely interesting that anyone should ask for precisely that on a blog.

Bloggitus Interruptus

2006-08-26T15:07:00.000+05:30

Honestly, I can't pick between Bombay and Delhi, both seem awfully bad at the same time, though the familiarity of Delhi is always something to look forward to, while the eateries (they almost always do good food in the seaside town as a rule and the decor does not smack of cheapness under the covers) are a pleasure in Bombay.

To cut a long story short, it was three days of not much else but a lot a lot hard work, heavy eating and heavy drinking in Bombay. Now that I am back here, it is time for the follow up, I guess blogging would be one of the parties to suffer immediately as a result, if it has not already. And I've finally gotten an invite at Vox, and it rocks too.

Inconsequential

2006-08-18T00:15:00.000+05:30

I do not know what is more scary, that you have settled into a risk-free rhythm with yourself without any effort or that with each passing day more of the frivolous aims and targets disappear one-by-one? Maybe these are the essential rites of passage, before you take the final steps into the hallowed portals of definite adulthood, that the lack of any real expectations fail to do much more than amuse you, when you can spare the time for it.

There are places where things used to be kept, which now gawk back empty at me and I am baffled once again, for I can't remember what used to be kept there. There are faint echoes of familiar laughter and memories that streak away like shadows flying from light. To strike up a marginal flame, to aid the vision and warmth, I feign curiosity. I feign a genuine inclination towards learning. But I already know how the story goes and all the lessons that are to come. I am such a fake and an excellent one at that.

I could almost say I am married. To predictability and a lack of surprise. The crimes I accuse others of, are the crimes that I too specialise in. I look into your blindness with my darkened soul and float in and out like the tide, soaking up everything, yet retaining nothing and stay un-retained in everything. It is fearful to contemplate that this sentence might be for a lifetime, for a singular count of the ghastly crime of being born.

I look into the eyes of complete strangers, wondering, hoping, that you are one of them, but they never look back, so would you. If your lips were to break, even into the hint of a smile, I could genuinely laugh back, even at the risk of being mocked again, but they never smile, so would you. I plan and I plot, as I walk and I drive around that curve, of the things I could say and the things we could do. But you were never where I was and will never be where I could be.

Sail

2006-08-15T18:16:00.000+05:30

It so happens once probably in everyone's life that you tug really hard at the rudder and hoist the sails in a direction much removed from the one where the usual winds happen to pass by. I have gradually been spending lesser and lesser time under the temporary shelter lent by the awning of youthful exuberance. I am not sure if it was intentional or if it all happened by chance, but the days of endless revelry, reckless love and pining over all things strange have all but disappeared. For better, than for worse, it is finally a good time to chart a new course and look for destinations new, without actually going anywhere.

The Upgrade That Was Not

2006-08-15T14:38:00.000+05:30

Hell has frozen over! Blogger is rolling out a new backend. On second thoughts, it is only getting a bit chilly out here, but it certainly ain't cool enough for things to freeze over. At least not yet. Apparently, the greatest of the changes is in a place where the end user, like you and me, don't see much of. Blogger is going off the static publishing set up (one where it would pick up content from its database and spit out static HTML and XML files based on the templates and settings you had specified) and moving to a new set up where all the content is served dynamically (the way in which Wordpress blogs functions now).

The immediate change you'll get to see is a top bar, quite similar to wordpress.com once again, that will show you as logged in and also display other useful information, if you are logged in. Behind the scenes, and I am guessing here, the entire operation would now move to an application server (probably the same server that handles the posting/editing backend) from the old set up which was probably serving a directory of files based on the host header. The other significant change is the authentication part, for which you can now use your Google account (for new blogs, not for existing blogs) or your old Blogger account. The logic there is quite mixed up and needs a lot of work.

That said, the new beta is a complete dud compared to Wordpress.com. The interface is still the dated, clunky one and true to the beta label, some of the stuff is broken, like the new WYSIWYG layout editor that was spewing out Ajax debug information on to my screen when it was not functioning as intended. Access control is nice, but I did not see the option for controlling access per post and determining access on the blog level is not a fun thing to do.

The good points? Well, the archive links are laid out much better now and there are Atom feeds for posts and comments (per post too) now. There is also something called "labels", which looks like a bastard child that resulted from a love making session between tags and categories. Pretty nice, but once again it is something they should have had yesterday.

But someone really has to get some new default templates into the system pretty soon. I am sick of seeing the same 10 all over the place. And the upgrade itself is symptomatic of how Google treats Blogger, more like a stepchild than as a product that deserves a whole lot more of attention and resources allocated to it. Yeah, I know, it is not easy to roll out features for a framework that supports a huge number of users, compared to something like wordpress.com that is new and had a clean sheet of paper to start with. But it can't be that difficult either. After all, it is all just a data, pulled in and out of database servers and presented on web servers.

Lovely Writer

2006-08-14T13:22:00.000+05:30

Thanks to Chris, I stumbled upon Windows Live Writer. Till date, I've used a variety of blogging clients like wbloggar, ecto, Performancing for Firefox (the current one) and almost everything else that supports the Metaweblog API. And I have to say I am quite impressed. The only weak point I can see is that it does not allow easy Technorati tagging like how Performancing does. Now, for the positives:

WYSISWYG authoring with non-MS Office mangled HTML source.
"Web Preview" that allows you to see the post within your blog's layout without having to publish it.
Multiple account support (meaning that you can post to Blogger, Wordpress, Windows Live Spaces etc).
Spell check (ahem, one feature that's badly needed for most bloggers).
SDK to integrate other services (that should take care of my tagging complaint).
Support for RSD, Metaweblog API and Movable Type API (in layman lingo that means it would support most of the blogging services out of the box without forcing you to wade into the ugly tech details).
Absolutely spanking support for embedding images.

So the verdict for now is that it is really a non-Microsoft product in terms of being usable and irritation factor. There are downsides like being based on .Net and a standalone application. But for most Average Joes, this would really be a great addition to the regular blogging toolbox.

p.s: The spell checker does not have the word 'blogging' in its default dictionary. Now, that's really hilarious.

Update: Tim Heuer, as promised, has made the Flickr and Tagging plugins.

tags: windows+live+writer, microsoft, blog

Satisfy Me!

2006-08-10T13:55:00.000+05:30

When you start a new business in an already crowded market place do make sure you get one thing right - go out of your way to satisfy your initial set of customers and treat them like you'd treat the most valuable person in your life. This holds true even more in the food industry where established tastes and loyalties are hard to switch and you get more or less only one go at getting them to move.

Yesterday night, I wanted to order out from a new joint in Saket, called The Blue Tandoor, because I was more or less sick of the existing joints there. There are more than enough eateries out there, mostly around the PVR Anupam area, but almost all of them follow the cost saving approach to cooking non vegetarian food, which uses the base marinated meat that's given the final treatment/masala/garnishing according to the order.

The only other joints in the vicinity, who do it differently are Cafe Rendezvous and Swagat in Malviya Nagar and neither specialise in doing Mughlai. So, at least in theory, they do have a window of opportunity in serving to a niche within the food spectrum that has a ready and massive audience in the area they are located in. But they botched it up and in a terrible way.

Firstly, their menu card did not have the minimum order figure listed anywhere. Second, it was priced too high, at Rs 500. When your price point of your main dishes is at an average of Rs 250, it would be hard to top that figure. And most people who use home delivery don't often order three course meals, thus making the "sir, please get a starter or a dessert" line a non-starter.

I spent five minutes with them ordering what I wanted to order, after which the chap told me that it fell short of the Rs 500 mark, following which placed the order with my regular chap who was only too glad to serve me, and even better they call up the day after asking if there were any problems with delivery and quality. Five minutes after I placed the other order, the chap called me back clarifying that the manager had said they would serve me. Nice, but it was too late by then.

I have seen this across Delhi, that new joints or even older ones, don't value their new customers. Most times, going out of your way just once for a new customer could win him/her for you for a long time. And good service also works to get you brownie points in terms of peer-to-peer reviews. One satisfied customer often leads to many more from the same segment. Just one among the many points that's lost on them.

Company

2006-08-07T23:31:00.000+05:30

On the daily late evening drive back home there is often not a lot to lift my eyes and thoughts away from whatever that is occupying it at that point. On most days it is mostly all about nasty traffic and roads, messed up by both the weather and the never ending construction and the exceptionally brilliant evening skies on those days when I can manage to drag myself out of the office before sundown. On the odd occasion, when the traffic holds up for long enough, I get to see a couple or two, sometimes in a car, or like today, on a motorcycle zip by and I wonder what is it that they really feel?

Sometimes it is very evident, like it was day-before-yesterday night, on the table adjacent to ours where there were two couples with expressions on their faces that ranged from indifference to regret. Then there are the happy ones, at least they appear to be so, and you wonder if they are one of those couples who appear to be shipshape on the surface and in quite a bit of a mess underneath. But appearances were not what I was getting at here, it is more about that empty feeling that often greets you when get home, park the car, pick up the bag and walk in and there is actually nobody home.

The strange thing is that I am not depressed or down in the dumps about it. I don't have the time for any of that and honestly I am quite happy with where I am and what I do; but I do crave for company that I like every now and then. The world+dog, of course, has the age-old quick fix solution for it: Get Married Like Now! I really don't have anything against it either, but really, I can't look at a person and decide in five minutes, or even five months, if she is the right one. More so because I am completely anal about a couple of things that makes my pool of possible/probable options even more miniscule/non-existent.

A major issue is that I've pretty much crossed the part where I could change myself to fit into a relationship. I've put in a lot of effort to get to where I am and I would, probably never, throw away all that in the name of love or things similar to it. Speaking of which even romance or its embryonic stage - attraction - is something that I've not known in a long time. Relationships are mostly a practical arrangement, but for even that you need to give people and circumstances a chance and enough time. I have neither to give right now. And after three major relationships and a handful of flings in six years, curiosity and intrigue does fade a fair bit.

Strangely, I don't want to be with anyone to get hot steaming food when I come home or get my clothes washed. I manage the former quite well by myself and money does afford good part time domestic help who do their part in keeping the place clean. That said, I do genuinely regret not getting enough time to spend at home. The empty feeling notwithstanding, I love the familiar smell that it greets me with when I open the door and turn on the lights. Then over to the fridge freshly stocked over the weekend, the tiny kitchen and later on to the low bed, the triumvirate of pillows and the television that sits now on the wardrobe.

It is really not that bad and life is good, but who said you can't ever ask for even more?

Oh, just shove it, really

2006-08-07T13:24:00.000+05:30

Because I am number one, very old and very naked too. No other Indian blogger, (and I stress NO OTHER), features on the first page of results for Google search for "looking for females in bangalore for fun with cell numbers", "Nude deepa sahi" and "prostitutes in noida film city". Which other Indian blogger can claim to have done such a lot of invaluable service to the Indian bloggogol? I repeat, like dear Mr Leghorn would have said, I am the nakedest, oldest and number onest. Now that the point is clear, old, loud and very naked, feel free to get on with your respective blogging lives.

p.s: for my honest (cross my evil dark heart) take on this and background information do read this. For I know (because I am the oldest, nakedest and number onest Indian blogger) that all of you clothed, younger and non-number one bloggers have too much of time on your hands. Please to be clicking the Google ads on your way out too and help this naked emperor get some clothes. Please, purty please?

Afraid

2006-08-01T18:11:00.000+05:30

Threesome
Originally uploaded by codelust.

"If you have an infant and the baby has gas, burping the baby is being a good parent. But when you have a 10-year-old who has metaphoric gas, you don't have to burp him. You have to let him sit with it, try to figure out what to do about it. He then learns to tolerate moderate amounts of difficulty, and it's not the end of the world."

-- From A Nation of Wimps.

Almost a month ago I ran into my niece again after seeing her for the first time when she was some seven months old. It is scary to be around the little children of today, for they are anything but children as we know them. They are almost born competitive straight out of the box and have feelings, needs and reactions that are quite different from what we used to have as kids. It must be so very difficult to be one of them these days.

I think we are gradually forgetting that it is okay to be not okay all the time. Somehow we have to project an attitude/image of invincibility and ruthlessness even when we don't quite feel like it. In the process, we often forget that we are human after all and that the same is the case for people around us. Sometimes we just need to take a deep breath, step back and count the good things, including whatever bits of sanity left, we have in life.

We don't need to be scared, at least not all the time.

Enough

2006-08-01T14:12:00.000+05:30

I think a week's worth of self-inflicted torture should be good enough punishment. Don't you agree?

Hello, world. Again.

Aside

2006-07-31T14:58:00.001+05:30

One of the funnier sides of the recent blog ban is that it has given a bit of a glimpse into possible numbers related to bloggers in India. From the numbers on BloggersCollective, which I guess is the largest number of Indian bloggers/blog readers from India assembled in once place, we have more hype than actual numbers to back it up when it comes to participation.

At the last count there were 432 members in the group and if we were to invoke the 1% rule and extrapolate the audience possible, the number would be 39600 (99*400) who contribute to the process strictly within the Indian context. I'm not taking the other 32 into account because a lot of the bloggers become part of the 39K number due to their participation on other blogs and also there is no way to account for Indians who read blogs from India while being abroad.

Attribute an average of 3 page views per user to that number and you'd still get figure of only 120,000 per day, which across 432 blogs is a very low number. Low enough maybe to start a whispering society, but not large enough constitute a readily marketable or easily targeted demographic. Please don't tell me that such a number has been quite effective, as shown by the banned blogs episode; effectiveness and scale are two different things. Besides, a lot of the bloggers are media people, which certainly did help in getting good enough traction on the mainstream media.

Another contentious point is that blogging by itself does not do much. It does well only when it is sold as part of something more easily recognised, like how Indiatimes does it with 'News Blogs' on timesofindia.indiatimes.com. Does that mean blogging in India is no great shakes? Right now, I think the answer is 'yes' and I don't think it will take off at a major level till the vernacular crowd moves in and that is a different story in itself.

Meanwhile, NDTV.com launches its blogging service, replete with avenues for cross domain scripting attacks and numerous other holes. A ten minute inspection of it already has shown ways to steal posts from other people, requiring almost no technical knowledge, making our gaffes look pre-pubescent in an instant. C'est la vie, I guess.

The First Week

2006-07-31T14:58:00.000+05:30

Day one: Well, I am experiencing significant withdrawal symptoms. All of a sudden, there is no third window to alt+tab to. But the thinking has slowed down, emails and issues are being tracked better, but no significant bumps in productivity yet.

Day two: It feels like a million voices, all shrieking at the same time, have been silenced. There is a huge void, a deafening silence. I can think of at least four things I could have written about, but would not have written about. I do not know anymore what's the latest list of top ten things that are being consumed at any time by a million RSS aggregators.

I think I have observed it earlier, but I hardly know the domain names or the layout/design of most websites that I read with the RSS aggregator anymore. I can, sometimes, identify by the style of writing who the author is, but most times I just cannot. It seems to be a case of consuming information without the personal context, which is exactly opposite of what blogging is meant to about. It is raw, it is ugly, but it is all about data and the connections they make to each other.

My fingers are very thankful about this hiatus. I am sure they must have been sick of me going through the 300 plus list, clicking and clacking away one feed at a time. But I have not managed to switch yet.

I've managed to miss the new Netscape.com being hacked. I am being unfaithful to my hiatus here, though I did not reach there via the aggregator.

Interestingly, due to searches for nude pictures of various Bollywood actresses and prostitutes in Noida (?!!), traffic keeps coming in, thus proving that with popular enough content, websites don't really die in this age of Google and a multitude of other crawlers who keep revisiting your brain dump. Which begs the question, would it really be a violation of the ToS of Adsense if you create your own content (bona fide) across a vast variety of topics and leave it as it is, earning you dough for doing nothing at all in your old age?

Another interesting observation is about social interaction. I did not know when someone called up yesterday and asked "did you not read my post?" what the post was all about. The thoughts are no longer about what another blogger is thinking/writing/doing and other online things. Life in real life is considerably slower and you get a lot less of interesting things to read/do.

That said, on a blank browser, it is hard to find interesting things to do. Without the delicious 'popular' list and the other feeds I track, there is hardly anything to read other than boring media websites. The future probably belongs to the aggregator, but certainly not only to the aggregator.

Day three: Not good at all. I am tempted to fire up everything again.

Day Four: I am not as bothered by not reading blogs and writing them as much as the weird manner in which I seem to work. Miles and miles of improvement possible here. It would be nice to blame the blogs for your crap, but the problem is deeper and wider than that.

Day Five: I have run out of observations, sue me.

Day Six: I am kind of getting used to this, but it still does take a bit of an effort to keep myself from clicking on the GreatNews icon. But I guess the main theory still holds that for people who can multitask well, the extra reading only adds to your capabilities. But that has the downside of making you feel like you've accomplished something even when you are struggling with your other tasks. In other words, isolate different tasks, compartmentalise time and activity, tweak and optimise individually and the the whole will follow the parts.

Is time for an update?

Pause

2006-07-25T19:18:00.000+05:30

I am considering a mini break from keeping alive the blogs that I run. The office one has been more or less dormant for a while and the Wordpress.com one has not been updated since my return from the vacation. It does help that I don't have much of an audience here, so I can start/stop according to my whims and fancies, but this time it is not about the blogging habit, but about getting the time management and priorities in life right.

The vacation was the first step in setting right a lot things that have been wrong in my life. I am not overweight, but I am certainly not the right weight either. I don't eat right (being fixed now), I don't sleep right and don't get any exercise at all (as demonstrated amply by a running out of breath after playing football with the kids near home for 15 minutes) and I have not been able to find any time to do any amount of serious writing or reading. I am also considering shutting down the desktop aggregator for a week while I sort my life out.

You can run with an existing model, with minor tweaks here and there for only so long. At some point, the patching and rejigging (which progressively keeps taking up more and more time for negligble results) becomes unsustainable and then it is a good idea to junk it all, start from the basics and build from the ground up all over again. And I am at that point where if I don't fix the problems (the number is too high to be solved a couple at a time) right now, I'll be playing catch up for the rest of my life, which is an unacceptable situation.

So this would probably the last transmission for a while now. I would, of course, be available on email and IM. Cya'll in a bit.

p.s: This has nothing to do with my dwindling traffic, Honest. ;-)

Switch

2006-07-24T20:02:00.001+05:30

After a couple of days of swimming in a pool of illogical rage, today, the waters have finally calmed down and I think I can just about see my usual somewhat likeable self in the reflective surfaces. One of the rather detestable byproduct of having to manage more than just yourself is that you can't just pull a glum look and expect the world to just fuck off or do whatever it deems fit. Mix that with a semblance of signs of maturity and you stop believing that the world will end the morning after and that life's not really worth it every time something does not go according to plan or if a lot of things don't go according to plan. If you persist enough, things do somewhat even out in the long run.

Yet another awful result of the 'growing up' is that you lose space for everything - to make major changes, to eke out major chunks of time from regular, boring stuff. It then becomes a matter of minor tweaks, little adjustments, take a bit from here, add a bit there, regress, test again and go back to the drawing board every time it does not work as intended. It is tedious and frustrating for the naturally impatient like me and to add to the mess, episodes like the rage one throws a spanner and the entire toolbox into the works. But yeah, it is a learning process and fun at times too.

The Return

2006-07-21T20:35:00.000+05:30

There are more than a couple of questions I need answers for. They were quite on the lines of what I said I had expected to find, waiting for me, back here when I would get back from my mini-vacation. I am not sure if I had accounted for all the specifics or even prepared for it, but it certainly is no sideshow in the relentless move ahead. I think it was at her place that I read, You have to keep moving, to keep from falling…, and I could not agree more with the statement and its relevance to my situation.

If it were not for the days firmly notched on the calendar, I would have had a hard time believing that it was only last week that I took my much-needed vacation. Things have been that hectic, though I am glad that it is quite enjoyable too. Guess it is just one of those days where you look for inspiration, direction, a helping hand or a sympathetic touch and are unable to find anything in the vicinity.

Evenings these days, with its cloudy skies and the anticipation of the onset of autumn, are a treat for the eyes. It is so wide, open and rich with possibilities that you can't but want to believe that there is still so much more in life to be experienced and lived. It is not like the present is a facade, but you can't always keep smiling or hold back the odd tear. It is not dishonesty, but is not quite the whole truth either.

In the night that eventually follows, sometimes you just have to reach deep within yourself and find a place of warmth to see yourself through, till daylight breaks in through the half-drawn blinds with the promise of a new day. It would have been wonderful if the cycles were not that predictable, but it does aid in the survival of the self. And sometimes that is often a small mercy we are just not thankful enough for, after all that we manage to put ourselves through.

Switch flips back on

2006-07-21T14:33:00.000+05:30

As the greater mortals decide among themselves and pass the buck on for the outage and bring back light into the lives of about 180 bloggers and readers out here, we now pay homage to the expired windfall that manifested in the form of three days of increased productivity.

In other news, Google's servers hosting blogspot blogs get tickled by a nano level slashdotting from newly unshackled desktop aggregators from India and lets out a faint giggle. All is well now in India's blog gol (or gaol?) as non-existent love lives and litter habits of urban pets get an outlet all over again.

Except for a certain third eye who takes oodles of umbrage over his name being misspelt in the contributions thread and threatens to get all of Bloggers Collective banned with his new super powers that extracts secret documents out of deep, dark orifices of the Indian Government.

p.s: suggested garnishing include plenty of pinches of salt and good humour for intended intake.

Hold

2006-07-17T14:07:00.000+05:30

I am back, but caught in a deluge of email, humidity and other vaguess. Meanwhile, the photos are up here.

Eventually

2006-07-12T01:45:00.000+05:30

I have said "it is okay" so many times in my life, but I never thought that they day would come when I would say the same to my own mother, even though I'd forgiven everyone here a long time ago. I had not realized that it was important to say as much, in as many words, and having seen the reaction, now I know better. In that simple act of admission I have managed to, without really intending to, resuscitate a life that's been overturned and turned painfully bitter much more than mine has ever been. At their age, they certainly don't deserve any of it. I think I've finally achieved the only thing that I ever wanted to do here. I am happy.

Sand in my feet

2006-07-11T02:57:00.000+05:30

Generation Gap
Originally uploaded by codelust.

The early morning at the beach was a sight and experience that I have always loved from my school going days and today I got to revisit it, with the parents very much in tow, leading to the odd situation where I, who has not been there much in the past six years, was explaining to them how the whole set up functioned.

The beach in question, Shanghumugham, was pretty much been eaten up by the sea, as it almost always is during the season of incessant rains and sadly, there was not much of the earlier sandy expanse left for me to walk on. That was no deterrent for the desperate fishermen who would venture out into the sea, late in the night, to set their net that would be dragged out in the morning to the shore.

During the vacations, when we were in school, we would go early in the morning to the same beach on our bicycles, fool around a bit in the water and then watch the fishermen do their backbreaking and dangerous job. They would start from two different ends of the beach and start dragging in the net from the sea. After what took more than a couple of hours, the last crucial part of the net would finally make it to the shore and the surprise would come to and end as to whether the catch was any good at all.

It takes around 20 of these men to pull off the entire operation and it is crucial for them to get a good catch every time to make all the effort any good in terms of money and their livelihood. The fish thus caught is mostly sold off to street side vendors who would sell them in different locations in the city with a bit of a mark up.

fishermen
Originally uploaded by codelust.

The problem with retailing fish for anyone is that the damn thing, as you can guess, is a perishable commodity. By late evening almost all of them are desperate to sell off their wares, as in the morning after it would be only fit for the dustbins. It used to be a worst-kept secret to buy fish from these ladies only late in the evening to get any ridiculous price that you could quote.

I can only guess that the margins in it are too low for them to do anything much with the trade other than to barely sustain themselves and their families. And on days like today, when, after the hours of struggle, all they end up with is a catch that even the street vendors would not feel too enthused to buy from them. It is a real hard knock life these guys live. For the effort they put into living each day of their lives, what they get in return is almost nothing. They live the same struggle through generations and a lucky few manage to escape from its clutches, but most largely live and die in the same manner – from one generation to the next.

Not that my heart bleeds for them or something, but it does show up a weird set of contrasts – my reality of double digit increment percentages, fancy cell phones and eating out practically every night and their reality of just endless hardships. Some twains just don’t meet and I feel somewhat awful in admitting my selfishness that I am glad it is so.

Day One

2006-07-10T01:09:00.000+05:30

Expectations - a million different things have been said about them and even then I am not sure if we have said enough yet. I had built this trip up on so many different things and so many different levels and now that it has finally begun it certainly does not feel like much. How funny it is that I expected it to radically change things for me in more than one way and now I sit here, in the same house where I’d lived for 21 years, watching the World Cup final and writing on my laptop as if this was the way it has always been.

Everyone told me the city had changed so dramatically that I would not be able to recognize it. But, other than marginally wider roads, a lot more of mid-sized shops and a lot of IT-fuelled new money, there is not a lot that I have not seen before. On my way home from the airport and the subsequent outing later in the day, I could still see a lot of the same old shops I used to frequent. Yes, they are a lot spiffier now, but spiffy does not necessarily equate to new and I have not been to any of the famed ‘malls’ and I am not sure if I’d seen any in the first place.

But the air here is awesome. It is only when you come to a place like this you realize that respiration, in a place like Delhi, is a distinctly masochistic experience, where you learn to get used to the slow suffocation that is passed off for breathing and make it a part of your life. The traffic is also considerably lovelier and it does feel somewhat like driving around in your living room. Though, after the average 70 kilometer per hour insanity called driving in Delhi, life behind the wheel here certainly does have a slow motion-like quality to it.

The first thing I did after coming home (interestingly, after jumping over the compound wall) was to run around like a happy puppy going into all the rooms, followed by the backside of the kitchen and the terrace. And the funny thing, you know, in everything I’ve seen here again – roads, places and the house – is that they all look smaller to me. I do not know what to make of it, I am sure there are more than a couple of interesting explanations for it, but it certainly does feel like a small pond. I have always known it was a small town, but now it looks scaled down by a factor of one. Weird.

Excerpt

2006-07-07T23:55:00.000+05:30

In the morning mist, on the third day after his arrival, it drizzled for the first time in many months in the little town. It was not unlike the region to have a few drops do more than just moisten the dry and mostly brittle ground underneath their feet. If anything, it was a bit late, but not by much – just like his lumbering presence that came into view a few feet away from the flowers and their seller – the unpredictable arrival of an expected guest.

Though, it needs to be said, he was anything but expected there. His arrival was announced in advance only to the old caretaker who now had a definite purpose to his regular scurrying around. With age advancing rapidly on him, the caretaker could only do the cleaning, dusting and stocking up on provisions and firewood at a slow clip. But his pace and gusto was anything but slow in scrambling together the stories of other visitors - regular, irregular and long dead – to be narrated by the fireside, on those long, quiet nights.

On mornings like that, the internal silent debate invariably shifts towards the necessity of any kind of protection against the elements. Not that it acted as a major deterrent against the walk through the milky whiteness of the early morning in the hills, but, significantly enough, it could make or break the desire to extend it, by another couple of hours or a few more miles. The right decision could make the difference between being drenched in a storm of absolute satisfaction, derived from the stunning desolateness of a distant hillside bathed in a shade of moisture-laden vibrant green and having to rush back to the cottage, having taken on board enough droplets to lay to waste any possibility of the desired recuperation.

On the third, in following the end-game of another such debate, he emerged into his usual point of insertion into the town’s market. And as all rural markets go, this one also did not have much more than the hopes and sales of its sellers resting above and underneath temporary flimsy structures. Over the past three days, he had become less of an oddity for the townsfolk. They guessed, intelligently and predictably, thanks to the regular stream of the cottage’s visitors, him to be another of its dwellers, there for a couple of days, a week or a month at the most; for, other than its desolateness, the town had little to offer, to both visitors and its inhabitants.

Some Loves

2006-07-04T18:21:00.000+05:30

In the past couple of months, ever since the 'no-laptop-at-home-on-weekdays' policy came into being, my interest in reading has somewhat picked up a bit again. One of the major casualties of being able to access constantly updated information online and on-screen is that these days I can seldom bring myself to make time for things like books and movies. Both require patience and a degree of comfort (or discomfort) that grows with each passing frame and page, which is hard to acquire and maintain, just the same way relationships work out. Sometimes it is beautiful, sometimes it is just not meant to be, no matter how hard you try.

In that time period, I have finally managed to finish off Cat and Mouse by Gunter Grass, over a year after it was gifted to me, Pankaj Mishra's Butter chicken in Ludhiana and now I am spending some quality time with Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. Reading Grass is a bit like dating someone who is from a foreign country with the help of an interpreter. The translation is never THAT perfect and the idiosyncrasies of Grass' writing only serve to make things even difficult. This, incidentally, was not the first time I had given Grass a try. All previous attempts always ended with the second or third reference to Mhalke's bobbing adam's apple, which is constantly obsessed over in the book. All said and done, it was a relationship that promised a lot, with large dollops of childhood innocence added in, but it also fails to deliver at the same time.

After Grass, Pankaj Mishra and his travels all over India would have to rate as a classic rebound scenario. Reading him again, after my last shot with him in The Romantics, only serves to bring forth a mental grimace that only the constant presence of the most depressive of lovers can bring forth. The gusto which with he travels all over the country, in an excruciating attempt to find faults and snigger at everything, would make even Julian Barnes bitching about having a bad hair day in England look like Mother Teresa at her gentlest best. But at Rs 35, even if it was a copy phased out from the DPS R K Puram library, it was one of the better books stacked up at PVR Saket. After all, it did cost much lesser than a packet of Classic Milds cigarettes. Though, in retrospect, I have to say the cancer sticks would have been a better waste of money.

Woolf is the archetypical difficult relationship that you love to be in. You can't really figure out whether it is prose or poetry, since it looks like a bit of both and delving deep into her and her words is a process that takes dedicated time and effort. She does not give in easily, sending you off on tangential wild goose chases and an awkward writing style, which structures sentences in a manner that would make what's written inaccessible or incomprehensible for a fairly large percentage of the population. Which begs the question, why would anyone write something that difficult? Is it like a first line of defence or is the author being knowingly obstinate? Regardless, the book has a really delicious opening line "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself..." that got me to ignore the obstinacy and solider on. I might fall in love with it, but I won't count on it.

In its opening 20 minutes, Sideways makes you feel as if you are watching a low budget, badly scripted, badly shot and badly acted movie. In other words, a relationship that is way too wrong and way too common to have any chances of survival. Then it gradually grows, like the theme of wine that runs throughout the movie, on you. Though I will clarify that I am not a winehead to make any claims of 'knowing' my wine. I will also admit that the lead character, Miles, with his failed writing attempts, marriage and negativity reminded me quite a bit about myself and don't get me started on Virginia Madsen. I could have loved the movie for her alone.

So, the big day has drawn quite close and, rather predictably, I have nether done any of the shopping nor have I figured out for sure what I am going to do there for seven days, other than fending off the "son, it's time" comments from the world+dog there. That said, I am getting a day of extensive pampering, with a full body massage and whatnot for myself there. I should not be online most of the time, though I would try and blog it extensively when I get the time. Hopefully, I should have some pictures too up. Even if nothing happens, I would just love to curl up for days on end and watch the rain fall through the windows and do nothing else but eat good food, write and relax, just like the old days. But it won't quite be the same. Some loves are just like that. They happen only once to you.

The Drive Back

2006-06-28T02:27:00.000+05:30

To the handful of the regular readers here, my constant harping over my past is not something new. Sometimes I take it back all the way to my childhood, the way I grew up, the metaphorical overkill of the incidents that shaped what I have become and more recently, taking a step into the future, the trip I am going to be making back home in July, after a gap of three very long years.

On most occasions, to the people I know in real life, it would often come as a surprise to find out that it has been that long since I ventured back there. Actually, the time gap is even longer than that. The first time I went back there after I came to Delhi was because I had managed to overwork myself to the point of exhaustion, I could not carry on any further without risking a great deal of harm to myself and I was way too poor to take a proper vacation anywhere else.

The second time was for my sister’s wedding, for which I rather disagreeably managed to turn up just two days before the event. After spending the event in a trance, where I smiled a lot at strangers and politely talked my way through a harrowing 42 hour period, I started back for Delhi a couple of days later. I don’t remember much about the third time. I was way too stressed out and almost had a nervous breakdown a few hours after I landed at the airport. For all practical purposes, I have not been there in spirit in more than six years now.

All things considered, I guess it would not have been much of a secret that I did not ever want to go back there after I left home in 1999, but it did come as a surprise to many that I voluntarily chose to go back there this year. Most friends do believe that it is because I have somewhat succumbed to the growing influence of age and parental pressure and have decided to sneakily go there and do the logical thing – to get hitched and cross on over to the other side.

All my life I have run away from various things, from my disappointment about the people who should have been there for me, the hurt that has been caused to me by them and even disappointment in myself that I’ve walked away from the responsibility of taking care of parents who are only growing older and unwell with each passing day. My life here was meant to be a clean break from all of that. I had hoped to find my real self, change my life for better and be happy for a change. But that never happened.

Somewhere along the way, I’d forgiven everyone and everything, but I could never find my own feet and would always lean on problems and joys of others to make my day. That, of course, never works. It is not your life, your problems or your joys that you are living. It is borrowed and it is even stealing to an extent. It never lasts for long. Thus, I would end up in various replicas of my past, of feeling unwanted, left behind and feeling that I was just not good enough to deserve anything good. Nor could I ever summon up the courage to stand up for what I felt.

I never thought I deserved something decent; it was the norm to have the second, third or even the most unwanted best. Why should I deserve any of it? After all, I was lousy where it mattered. I could not make it work in my past. It was a pattern, a design and a norm for all the things to come, while exceptions were meant for others. I thought the problems in my life would end the day I forgave everyone and moved on. I did, but the problems never stopped because I missed a minor detail – I forgot to forgive myself for being imperfect and incapable of pulling it all together and have the happy family I always wanted to have.

It has taken me six long and painful years to realize this. It hit me in February this year, when I was driving back after having one of the most happiest (for no particular reason) times in a very long time, that I was feeling inconsolably sad because I felt it fit a pattern – that I was being left behind once again, that I could not ask even that little bit of joy to last for a little bit longer, that I’d have to once again make way for circumstances beyond my control. It was then, when she pointed it out to me, that I realized I had become the sum total of all my regrets, which was gradually consuming me and turning me into one of those bitter, cynical and jaded creepy people. And that was an image I could not stand.

From thereon, it has been a hard climb back. I have stumbled more than I have managed to walk, but at least I have not given up and slumped on the ground as I had earlier. I had fixed my working routine to a better one, gave up on a lot of my craziness and I still could not find the missing piece in the puzzle, which is my childhood and my memories. I had come to terms with it only by mostly wiping it out forcibly from my psyche, but it has always remained there, lingering in the background and casting a shadow on everything I’ve done, most often without my knowledge.

Which is why it is important for me to go back and face up to it. I am not going there to get married or settle old scores. I am going there to bury a personal ghost of mine, which I need to do to finally move on ahead in life, for my own sake. In a lot of ways, it would be a final goodbye of sorts, not probably in the way that I won’t ever go back again, but in the way that the pattern has to end – but not me, not the way I feel for everyone and surely not my life – for me to move on. Maybe I will go back there again, maybe I won’t ever, but it surely will be the end of the phase where that place has played a part in everything I’ve done.

I think at least a couple of friends have noticed the minor changes. I am not there as much for everyone as I used to be and I don’t even feel apologetic about it most of the time. Things will only change further once I return on the 16th. It does make me a considerably less interesting person to be not that dark and cynical about everything all the time and I probably don’t even write that well anymore as a result. But in general, I have come around to accepting that things do go wrong every now and then, but that does not mean they won’t go right ever, but you have to leave a window of chance open for that to happen and I am happier about it.

For all this I do owe a considerable amount of debt to her, for telling me during that drive back that I was being extremely silly, that I could be liked and probably even loved, even when I was not being the stud who’d always have to walk away from everything, with the patented shrug, even when my entire being was screaming inside about the unfairness of it all. Even that I did not have to be anybody to be cared and bothered for, that there was something more to me than just all these and the piles of hurt and regret that I’ve carried along the way. And hopefully, someday, similar to the unexpected set of circumstances that led up to the drive back, a bit of luck and destiny happening my way should enable me to pay her back for it. Otherwise, the least I can do is to say “thank you” for the umpteenth time, to my dear friend Laure.

Breadcrumbs

2006-06-22T19:59:00.000+05:30

It is when you close in rapidly on the crucial 30 mark that you realise that the best of your years are gradually slipping away through your fingers. Hell, I could have sworn that I was 18 almost like day before yesterday. It was a wonderful time: mindfucked beyond compare, fresh into college (I did not do the regular 10+2 scheme back home), cigarettes, booze, a bona fide driving license, plenty of porn (Indian and foreign) and no clue about what I wanted to become. Can't believe it's been almost ten years since all that happened.

Today, cradled in the creature comforts of moderate success, I wonder where should I take my life from here. The truth is, with my non-existent expectations from my self, I have done over all that I've ever wanted to become, which was the rather lowly benchmark of being able to convince someone to pay for me anything that I did. As the infamous 'three oh' draws close, I have to figure out if I want to move further ahead in the same manner or call it quits, settle down and stop trying my fortune with lady luck.

On one of those rare occasions I do wonder what would have happened, if a good friend had not pushed me, rather forcibly, into the train for Delhi that I did not want to take, for I'd all but given up on everything in life. I wonder what would have happened if I had taken up the print job that was offered to me there. I wonder what would have happened if I had said 'no' on the many instances that I'd said 'yes'. And I struggle, more of than not, to stack up all the things that I can remember from the time I've been in Delhi.

It is then I realise that it is all different from what I've known. Things are different. My life is different. For better or for worse, by my choice or due to a lack of it, this is my life and this is the way I live it. Even with its uncertainties, this is the clearest and the least confusing a perspective I have ever had. With the exception of a couple of recent horrendous mistakes, it is only now I can look at things, without regret and without fear.

It has taken close to thirty years for me figure out what it takes - to spare myself of the numerous regrets that I've burdened myself with over the years and the turns that I have taken, not because I wanted to take them, but because I wanted to avoid other turns. Yes, culturally and geographically I am a lost creature, but being rooted was never my thing. I like to belong everywhere and yet belong nowhere at the same time.

Dare I say it and tempt fate, who never rules in my favour, but it just might finally be a good time to live.

Stale of two cities

2006-06-19T00:38:00.000+05:30

The weather in Delhi, compared to Bombay at least, is delicious. The two day trip to the latter was quite a lot of fun in terms of things other than work. That did not turn out as well as it could have, but they don't always go the way they are intended to, do they? I met more than a couple of bloggers, (apologies to Vikram whom I ran into again at Toto's, while I was in one of my lousy and morosus maximus moods), caught up for a bit with some of the old friends, ate copious amounts of fish, drank a lot of beer and have more or less sworn not fly Air Deccan ever again, other than for the tickets I have already done for July 9th, for its unnerving similarity in user experience to the Delhi Transport Corporation buses.

On coming back, I was greeted by a Delhi bathed in a shade of vibrant green; apparently it was raining here for the two days that I was not here. On most other occasions, I have been kind of sad to come home back to Delhi. This time I was relieved to get back home, it was almost like running into the arms of someone familiar again. The way it smelled (kept clean by the maid, just to clarify), the way the sunlight filtered in, weaker, into the room and the warmth of my own private space, was more welcoming than I can express in words.

Maybe it is also because over time I have stopped being in awe of Bombay. It is big, smelly, dirty and horribly expensive in terms of real estate. But it also hits you suddenly that there are no great demons in the place (first time I went there in 2001, I had mentally prepared myself to be attacked by a gangster at every corner; don't laugh, I am not kidding!) and if it came to it I could move there, or any other town for that matter. I do not know, I am in quite a weird mood right now. Maybe it has nothing to do with any of these and is all about the trip to back home in July.

The parting shot has to belong to the Football World Cup. It has been a bit of a let down even though I am no great football fan. The way some of the major teams have been outrun in the midfield almost make believe that some of them have been playing in the Indian league for bit now. And what is it with nobody wanting to shoot at all? It is unbelievable. Which is only trumped in terms of disappointment by ESPN's coverage of the event. Harsha Bhogle looks as lost and pretentious as Britney Spears would at a Mensa convention and the less said about Vinay and Ranvir and their two bit crummy show, the better.

Tripping

2006-06-15T19:31:00.000+05:30

Oh yes, I am still around and very much alive, but kicking around a couple of things. Between cranky webservers, having to manage another team too as a stand-by arrangement, a pending deadline to write something and planning a trip to hot and sultry Mumbai, there is not much time or energy to spare to write things here. And yes, I have finally booked my tickets for my first official and longish vacation in three years, in July. The place is not much of a surprise, it is back home and I have not been there in more than three years.

In any case, there has not been much else to report. On Saturday I made another visit to Elevate, where DJ Heat from UK was listed as the guest. The opening set was done though by a DJ who I've not seen or heard anywhere in Delhi before. I could get only his surname, Mehra, and he played two absolutely rocking sets of mostly Bollywood, bhangra and Indi-pop, leaving the guest DJ, who played the most crappy set I've heard anyone play, wondering why people were moving off the floor when he laid his hands on the lovely Technics 1200s.

In fact, most of the guest DJs I've seen playing in Delhi (I could not go for the PVD gig, I have to clarify) have been really terrible. The worst of the lot was Dr. Zeus (yes, I will admit rather shamefully that I've watched him perform live), who could not mix even a cup of tea, leave alone two different tracks, to save his life. The golden rule of mixing is that if you cannot beatmix, you should not and just cut/fade into the other channel. That lesson was obviously not taught to Zeus, who made the beats overlap so much that even a herd of horses, on an acid high, running on a wooden floor would have sounded much better.

Musical adventures apart, I must beat a hasty retreat now and get some packing done for tomorrow. I should be in the M city from Friday morning to early Sunday morning. I am not sure, with the amount of stuff that needs to be done there, if I'd get any time for any socialising. So, don't hold it against me if I am just right next door and still somehow not get time to meet any of you M city people.

The Other Life

2006-06-07T13:37:00.000+05:30

On the surface, the Mahajan saga (including both junior and senior) seems to be yet another tale from the rich and the powerful crypt gone wrong, but there is a darker and often untold story in the happenings that won't find much mention in the numerous analyses being played out endlessly in the media these days. The untold story is not of the pressure (when has pressure not been there in any social set up?), peer or otherwise, but that gradually we are leaving ourselves very little space or acceptance for people who are not as good or successful as the cream that shows up on top.

It is no longer acceptable to be just good enough; you have to be excellent these days. Failures or the ones who don't make the cut are ostracized and are left with nowhere to go. If you are not wildly successful these days (with or without the backing of your family or a fabulous legacy to lean back on), chances are that nobody will like you or want to be with you. Minus a high-flying/paying job, expensive car, fancy gym membership and an ability to eat out at the choicest of joints every other night, you don't stand much of a chance in today's society. Strangely, if you look around, most people you know would display the same qualities.

Most of us live by the "work hard and play harder" mantra. Once upon a time, going out and having fun would have meant a simple dinner or a couple of drinks at your favourite joint. That has now been replaced by a trip to the latest swanky pub/club, looking sharp and showing off the latest moves you have picked up at the twice a week salsa classes. What if there is not enough time? We can always make up for it by sleeping lesser, partying even later into the night, gymming and jogging at the most unearthly of hours. I am not suggesting, not even for a second, that it does not feel good. It feels awesome, it is quite a high. But it is a ride that is so highly strung that at some point something has to give. And more often than not, some does, eventually.

If you ignore the circumstances that Rahul found himself in, you can probably empathise with him for a moment. It must not be easy to have a father who was as charming and wildly successful (once again ignoring the 'how' part of it) as the Late Pramod Mahajan. From the reports, it is evident that he was not as successful or as good as some of the other famous politico kids like Pilots, Abdullahs or the Scindias and something did give in his case. The only difference is that he fell in full public view, under the glare of the media lights, unlike so many others who fall off the wagon, away from the flashlights, with only smiles and success plastered all over them.

Lease

2006-06-02T15:25:00.000+05:30

The weather is absolutely wonderful here. I can see the spots of rain marking the open area on the floor below ours and the sky is deliciously overcast in a very Brit manner. Actually, it is about fucking time too. I am sick of my allergic reactions every time it becomes too hot or too cold or when the seasons change like twice in a year and it has been godawfully hot and humid here of late.

In another month, on the 4th of July, I would have completed a year in this new job. Of late, I have taken a significantly lesser role in day-to-day operations and other than a couple of instances where the escalation had gone over-critical, I have not stepped in even during times of significant issues and things have not fallen apart. And that is pretty much a good indicator that the core framework is in place and stable enough to run on its own.

There are quantity and quality issues that still need to be sorted out, but it is gradually falling into place. There are a couple more of minor projects that need to be pushed out, but nothing really major and I can feel the need for a new challenge slowly creeping up inside me. After reading this article on MySQL AB in Fortune Magazine, I've been wondering what are actually my options, in terms of what is already available and what I'll have to work towards.

Half of the fun (and the hardest part to crack) in starting something new is finding the right people to get the stuff done. We've largely managed that here, but it is also brings the dilemma of having to let go of the baby you've so carefully brought up. Initially, the most difficult thing for me here was to come to terms with the concept of getting things done by others than to kill yourself in trying to do it all on your own. Hell, I even used to feel guilty about it most times.

After six years in Delhi, I think it is about time I moved somewhere else. The pragmatist in me has taken time off from things like marriage and family till the time I am thirty, by when I hope I'd be saner/stabler in my mind to do all that. So, it is one of those things -- to travel to a foreign land, challenge your own worst fears once again, meet new people and most importantly get away from this godawful dust that I am really sick of -- that's taunting me again.

As it always is, the specifics of the plan of action are missing in my case. I think I'd rather deal with it once I am done with facing up to another major fear of mine -- of going home. I have not been there now in more than three years and before July ends I should be making a splash-and-dash there. Quite a lot of uncomfortable facts await me there -- family, marriage, property, relatives -- but I think it is a smarter idea to hit it first before it hits you later when want it the least.

I think, on the whole, I've been much happier. At least I don't reek of negativism anymore (or so I hope), but I want more from life. More interesting people, more interesting things to do and more interesting places I want to visit and live in. It would be wonderful to go clubbing in Europe, read the morning paper with a nice hot cuppa in a cafe in Paris, once the south of France has been thoroughly explored and many other such geographical fantasies.

Honestly, the problem I have with getting married and all is that most options I've seen, or how most people would want to have it, would bring for the opposite of all that. Funnily, the ideal life partner would actually be a travelling companion with whom I could probably get married to somewhere along the way. Family, relations and all the cultural mumbo jumbo hold no value or relevance for me and I am particularly selfish on that count.

Tubular Tragedies

2006-05-31T15:58:00.000+05:30

One of the greater disappointments of 2006 has been the rate at which new seasons of my favourite sitcoms have gone down the drain. I do not know what hit Max Mutchnick after season 6 of Will & Grace, but the series has become completely unwatchable. Actually, even season 6 was nothing short of a mini-tragedy. The jokes don't seem that funny anymore, almost everything is predictable and even Karen looks like an also ran. I have been watching season 7 on and off and every time I feel nothing about it.

And you know all hope is lost for television, when even minor indulgences like Amy Peitz, who is delectable as Annie Spadaro in Caroline in the City, turns up with a double chin and longer hair that makes her look like any average brunette in the latest season on air these days. Tragedy truly has no limits. Of course, there are minor consolations like Lost, Desperate Housewives and Coupling, but none of them are good enough to be cult stuff that you'd want to live and breathe with, be it every day or every week.

Truly captivating television is really part black magic -- an art rarely practiced these days. During the early Doordarshan-only days it used to be the mostly tragic Buniyaad and an English dub of a Japanese series called Johnny Soko and His Giant Robot. As kids we would be glued to both and even indulged in the odd mass prayer during one of the all too frequent power cuts. I also remember cheesy, but interesting, ones like Kashish, Fauji (featuring a very raw SRK) and another Japanese dub called Oshin.

The following years saw the launch of Doordashan II on the terrestrial network and endless reruns of Estranged by Guns and Roses in the (two hour?) slot MTV used to have on it, immediately after its departure from the Star TV platform. Axl Rose must by now hold the record, for the most televised jump from a ship, till time and television ends. I guess it all started going haywire somewhere after that, with successive years and seasons of even lower expectations leading to a situation where there is almost nothing truly entertaining on television anymore.

I guess you could point out a couple of the 'K' serials to me, but I can't stand the garish make up, overacting and the endless song and dance sequences. It is all too melodramatic and reeks asphyxiatingly of having been done a million times over again. Discovery Travel & Living, with Anton Bourdain's Cook's Tour and a lot of other programs does provide some relief, but quality Indian stuff on television? Perish the thought.

To end the sad post, I'll point you lads and lasses to the best answer I've come across about why men always entertain thoughts of threesomes in the woman-man-woman combination than the man-woman-man combination, on the internet. And as usual, you can trust rotten.com to come up with the best explanation. Read and enjoy.

p.s: crossposted at the office blog after the required sensitisation of content.

Nomenclature

2006-05-28T21:31:00.000+05:30

Sundays are actually one of the better days to come to office. I popped by today to finish off some minor stuff that had been pending for a long time, organize the 'messed-up-again-in-60-seconds' inbox and also kick off a major technology migration that we have been planning for a while. Seventy percent of the floor's weekday inhabitants not being there makes for a much quieter environment and a lack of phone calls and meetings only help to focus things much better.

But I do wonder if the concept of weekend off or holidays truly hold any water anymore. Even though I have more or less strictly enforced the policy of not switching the laptop on during weekdays at home, it is hard to stay away from work-related thoughts. After all, all it takes is to switch the television on and surf to channel number five to be back in the 'work' mode, followed by the wild goose chase after the 'bigger picture'.

On Friday, rather unexpectedly, I had one of the vintage TC days. As usual, when we have a good time there, we normally end up behaving rather outrageously, but in good spirit, and for a change I did not have to be in 'high' spirits to have a ball of a time. I do not know if it is the unbearable heat and humidity, but I have been gradually going off the boozy nights of late. Call it growing up or anything else, but waking up to mornings that feel like an internal 'Little Boy' explosion is not an enticing prospect anymore.

Saturday was Da Vinci Code day. The movie was unbearable. Not surprising at all, considering the fact that the book itself was barely bearable and in translating it on to the big screen, Ron Howard successfully stripped it of whatever little that was there in the story to appeal to the grey cells. Tom Hanks looked so lost that he could have easily passed off as someone who had a walk-on part in it. Audrey, of course, was delicious. Still, I can't figure out for my life why she did the movie in the first place.

To conclude, you might have noticed a minor change on the blog. I am letting 'codey' die a quiet death and shall, from now on, publish under my real name that I am not too fond of. I might probably consider keeping codelust to myself, I have a love-hate relationship with that one. At some point, publishing under a pseudonym used to make sense in terms of privacy and all that jazz. Now, when people call that to your face, it just sounds plain silly. Much sillier than the dislike I have for my real name. Just to clarify, I don't have a favourite name or a name that I would have liked to be called by. It is just that I don't like this one too much.

India Seething

2006-05-25T20:30:00.000+05:30

One of the rather interesting recent developments in the blog landscape is the mushrooming of angst-ridden blogs by media professionals. If one were to go by what most of them had to say, you'd have to believe that the entire media circus is staffed by angry frustrated journalists, who, given a chance, would jump in, change the way the system works and eradicate all of the industry's ailments in a single swipe.

On these blogs, I have read everything from exemplary displays of copy editing skills, news judgement and operational finesse that would turn even a Fortune 500 CEO the deepest shade of green with envy. I do not know where the great idea came into play that media professionals have to be saints and superhumans to be doing their job and that each and every one of them have to perfect in what they do, even when you know that a copy can't ever be subbed enough.

The curious point in all this is that, if there is so much of goodwill that is waiting to be unleashed behind the numerous computer terminals that dot our offices, why don't any of us quit, start something that would represent all these noble intentions and change the landscape? Of course, that would involve a lot of sacrifices, hard work beyond being the angry young 101st keyboarders and things not as rewarding as annual increments and appraisals.

On an unrelated note, I do not know what to make of the reservation ruckus. I don't like the idea. It is counterproductive and I have always advocated making as much of education free or subsidised as possible to give everyone a level playing field. It ain't perfect, but I believe that is the only way to go ahead with this with the least degree of discrimination.

Besides, you can't exactly overcome social inequality just by making the seats available. You still have to be able to pay your way through expensive schools, colleges and other institutions. But the practicalities of all that is another insignificant story, best saved for another day. What scares me is that, if you were to look at the developments, you'd think that this is a personal battle between the HRD minister and the medicos.

We have a PM who does not open his mouth on the matter, an opposition - that has an opinion on anything and everything - being quieter than a church mouse and whole host of byte givers who have nothing to say about it. I don't have any love lost for dear Mr Singh, but to pull this stunt off he needs the support of a whole host of people who have just melted into the background, waiting to come out into the open once it becomes law, to reap their harvest from either side of the divide.

Those are the real culprits, who will get away, once again, with it, while we chase down the Arjuns and other figureheads. Lage raho India, tera kutch nahi hone wala.

Advertising Sense

2006-05-20T17:15:00.000+05:30

K had asked in the comments to enlighten him about the mysterious ways of Adsense. Since I have been thinking for a while about the possibility of earning a bit of spare change by running a blog or a website I figured that I might as well flesh out a little bit on how it could be possible. I will add a very obvious caveat -- that I am writing this based on my experiences from running a highly-trafficked media website. Applying the same to smaller blogs and websites will require minor modifications and your mileage would also vary depending on the kind of content you are serving.

Before you start on any 'Make Money From Adsense' program, you have to keep two golden rules in mind. The first is to never ever game Google. They watch almost everything pretty closely and even not-so-significant hikes, like from $20 in a day to $100, will easily get eyebrows raised in the Googleplex, which could be followed by a removal from the index of all your pages, earnings and any other good karma you might have on their systems. The second is to generate good content, the stuff that people would want to come back to your website for. If you are going to do content, do it well.

There are three ways to make money from Adsense. The first is the bona fide and perfectly legitimate way, all well within Google's guidelines. The second is to take the dark route and do link farms and automated aggregators like a lot of (even good people) are doing these days, which will eventually get you into trouble. And the third is the grey area, where you are flirting with going over the line, but never actually going over it. It is a risky approach, but you'll need to visit that zone at least once in your great project. But, if you can, always play it safe.

The key to doing well with Adsense or any other online advertising program is numbers. Most advertising programs are of two kinds 1) The spot ad 2) The CPM ad. The spot ads are fixed price slots where you get paid for just showing the ad on your website. With the CPM ad, which Adsense ads are, you get paid only when someone clicks on the advertisement. The simple rule of thumb is that the more visitors you get on your website, the more you get paid for it. With the spot ad, you can ask for greater rates if you have large enough numbers in traffic. With the CPM ad, the greater numbers only increase the chances of the ads getting clicked on. Get your audience first and the rest will follow.

Now, how do you know what the audience wants to read and how do you get them over to your website? With Adsense, it always helps to be specific in terms of content niches always work well in the case of new websites, since they won't stand a chance in getting anywhere near the first couple of pages on Google searches for popular or generic topics (ex: India, India politics). If you write on those themes, there is a fairly good chance that you end up somewhere on the 80th page of the search results. But if you write about something more specific, like how to find a second hand car with buying instructions for non-resident Indians, you'll have a much better chance of being read. The other, easier, way is to find out what people are talking about.

Which is not that huge a deal, but it requires a lot of dedicated effort. Trawl the Delicious popular list and popular tag list every day. Same goes for the Technorati 'Top Searches This Hour' page and the Google News 'In The News' section. Between the three you should have a fairly good idea about what a majority of the traffic on the Internet is all about. The easy way out from this point would be to link to such interesting stories, but that won't get you too far. So, be a nice guy/gal, and add value to the conversation. Put in your own two bits, contribute something unique. Give a reason for users to come to you for the first time and for many more times after that.

Most of the popular content on the net falls into technology (personal tech, computing, home), lifestyle and living (eating, partying, clothing, health food, exercise, sexual health), news (hard core news, gossip, commentary) and the gateway to interesting content (sites like Fark) categories. Most of these have better paying keyword-based advertisements that would be displayed with them. You can even sign up for an AdWords account and see the rates for the different phrases and there are websites that list the top paying keywords (last I checked the highest paying one was above $40 per click), but do exercise caution and not step out of the grey area at the most. It is tempting, but once you get dumped in the Google black hole, a comeback on the same domain is very difficult.

Now we shall deconstruct the numbers game a bit further. The idea in stage one is to retain your regular visitors and then get them to keep coming back regularly. You can interact by either posting regularly or kicking off conversations and replying regularly to comments or even make it a place for people with similar interests to hang out. Basically, give them a reason to keep coming back since all of us are not famous personalities to have just our names pull in the audience. What we are looking at, over time, is to get the same bunch of people to incrementally spend more time at your site week-on-week, in effect getting more from the same.

Next is to keep getting new users all the time. With the old users ads often hit the fatigue/blind spot problem. Even though Google now actively encourages you to 'blend' the ads with your content, regular users soon get used to the idea of a particular corner or a layer being an ad. For getting new users you have to reverse the trawling process by getting listed and pinged on all the major blog trackers and also using the Delicious listings to good effect. With that we get back to the basic idea -- that it is hard work making any decent moolah from Adsense/blogging.

This is by no means a comprehensive or detailed entry on how to get all this done. It is more or less of a stream of thoughts regarding the subject, that first started a comment reply, which grew long enough to be a post on its own. In terms of pure numbers, with good placement and smart content, anyone who gets above 300 - 400 page views on their blog (not personal stuff, unless you happen to be Dooce or the next Dooce in waiting), should be able to start making a tidy sum from their blogs. But to finance anything other than the odd bottle of booze every month from blogging takes dedication, discipline and an innate feel for the medium.

Crossposted to the 'serious' blog.

The Menace Called Verbosity

2006-05-19T16:46:00.000+05:30

Since I really nothing much to blog about today, I guess I will blog about the blog itself. I will not pretend that I am speaking for all the bloggers out there, so don't come after me with a lynch mob for having either berated or emboldened the family of fellow bloggers into paths and destinations bolder or crasser than what they might already have in mind. As I've contended for a long time, blogging is not about the community or the readers for me, they do matter, but they are not the raison d'etre for my blogging. It is an overbearingly selfish pursuit for me, maybe even something of a game of truth or dare in thoughts that I play with myself.

By nature, most people who do blog, be it under a pseudonym or as their real selves, do have an element of exhibitionism in their nature. Why else would anyone grab a bunch of their thoughts and plaster it on a medium where you have no control over who gets to see it and when? Think about it. You can do all of the same very comfortably in a text document at home or do it in the classic way -- to keep a deadwood type diary and pen down all your thoughts. Yes, the audience does matter. The only questions are why do they matter and how much?

When I started writing personal stuff on the net, sometime in 1999, it was on the Geocities platform, using hand-coded HTML. Those were mostly immature, youth-fuelled rants. Then I wandered among many of the early blogging champions -- edithispage, manilasites etc -- based on the Frontier platform, because I am the naturally curious types, who always wants to have a swipe at anything new or interesting. Then came the LiveJournal blog (once totally purged), which was followed by the birth of this blog in late 2001, started purely to test a nifty piece of software called Blogbuddy.

Since that time I have made a lot of great friends thanks to my mad ramblings. I have seen groups form and disband, communities grow and disappear, pointless flamewars and a lot of other things. But I never thought I'd keep this going for this long. Yes, there have been numerous instances when I have wanted to shut it down or when I went for long periods without writing anything. It was largely anonymous for the first few years. Then friends started coming over, which unfurled the veil of abstractions that has been on ever since and the cover in the professional sphere was blown in stages in the past year and a half.

It was never like I absolutely dreaded being found out. But yes, every now and then I can't help but wonder what everyone I know in my real life would think about what I had written. The good thing is that I can't be assed much to figure all that out. For whatever weird reasons they might be, doing this has grown on me and I do enjoy it enough to say "fuck it" to all of that and write more or less all of what I want to write, which is not exactly the easiest of things to do when almost everyone who's been involved with you emotionally/romantically/physically (and daddy dearest too!) keeps dropping by here fairly regularly.

Strangely, from 2001 till date, the things that I've written about have largely remained the same. It has been an almost endless stream of love, longing, living, family, loss and even the odd smattering of lust. Is it not strange how almost all the words in there start with 'l'? Coming back, it does make me wonder how on earth can someone keep regurgitating the same themes over and over again, year after year? Honestly, I don't have a clue. Sometimes, when I can muster up the courage to go through some of my archives, it does shock and please me at the same time to see that certain things have just not changed. Otherwise, honestly, it is really boring to read.

Which is why I keep saying that the audience does not matter much. It is nice to get the odd pat on the back in the comments or on e-mail, but I write primarily for the sheer pleasure of the act, all for myself. It is also interesting to see how the thoughts translate into the written word, like how much you spin it, justify it and paint things in colours that look nicer to you. Somewhere along the way you can't help but smile at yourself doing the transformations and subtle rationalisations. It is as much an exercise in communication as it is an act of introspection. I don't know if it changes things much, but at least for someone like me, who has a whole lot of trouble remembering things, the blog does act as a book of clues to a time long gone.

That said, the exhibitionism is also a major part of the motivation. It is a bit of a performance too at the same time. You reveal enough to keep people interested, but keep the larger parts hidden away, making it, in some ways, like a softcore flick, leaving a lot to the imagination to salivate and run over, all on a public platform. The curious thing is that by nature I am not a very public person. It takes a long time for me to open up to circumstances and people. Maybe it is like standing in front of an audience and delivering a speech. You just gaze into something unobtrusive in the distance and let the words flow. It is terrifying and satisfying at the same time.

Irrespective of all that I do not know for how long I would keep this going. I am terribly bored in life right now and something as forced and unthinkable as stopping this would make for an interesting challenge. Just flick the switch off one day and start living a different life, all on a whim. I am too much in love with that concept for my own good. And I do miss being able to speak without the abstractions. It must be wonderful to just spew out all the crap in your mind without having to think much. Then again, it is hard work and minus the audience it just won't work out.

Moreover, I have three active blogs now -- this one, the office blog and the secret non-personal stuff one that has been running for over a month now. I have not found the right work/life balance yet to do justice or the right way to generate enough content for all three at the same time. Having finally figured out the mysterious ways of Adsense, it is quite tempting to finally move to a domain of my own and earn a couple of hundred dollars in a pretty bundle of loose change to indulge myself. Besides, towards the end of this year, I really do need to do something different with my life. If it can't be the dream scenario of running something of my own, I would certainly like it to be something like making a living out of writing what I want to write about, on my own terms. I think it is not an unrealistic scenario altogether.

Climb

2006-05-18T18:57:00.000+05:30

Well, this is one of those days when you just don't want to do anything other than curl up with a glass of nice wine, some good music and a nice book at home. I have done whatever little bit I could bring myself to do today. The list of pending projects are stretch further than what an A4 can hold. This week, I just don't have it in me to unclog my head and inject some much-needed direction into things. The groundwork is done, I know the scale, the numbers and the timelines. But it will have to wait till Monday.

I am gradually rediscovering my cooking skills too, that is, if you can if you can call my brand of making meat and other things edible cooking at all. I have been eating out and ordering takeways so much that I must have made at least a couple of joints near my house quite rich in further developing my already well developed paunch. The end result though may not be of everyone's liking. I end up with dishes that are not bland enough to be western or spicy enough to be Indian. I guess you could call it the globalised cuisine. But I like it, which is what counts the most I guess.

Meanwhile, I am looking for better/healthy/non-kinky ways to spend a decent amount of time away from work-related things, and the computer, once I am home, during weekdays and on weekends. One of these days I should go and buy myself a guitar and learn to play it properly than to play it just about enough to make it look like I know what I am doing, while actually I don't. Another long term fascination of mine has been sport climbing. Sadly, at least from what I could glean from Google, there is not much of that in Delhi. Does anyone have any clue about this one?

Rain

2006-05-15T00:44:00.000+05:30

It is lashing everything outside and the time is past midnight. I have waited for this for so long in the searing heat of this summer and yet it is scary and thrilling at the same time. I know not why I fear it. Maybe it is because the accompanying gale is a pretty stiff one and every now and then I hear things falling or crashing, as it often does it this part of the world. I worry for all my friends, some are out of their homes enjoying the Sunday, while I have not heard from some others. I wish and hope they are all safe and that they all are fine.

As it has been the case of late, time spent doing nothing is a commodity that has been hard to find. But I have managed to keep myself happy, more or less, with limited expectations and a slightly better or even positive outlook on the way things are. Maybe it is after all only about perspective and the old adage about the state of the glass being half full or half empty as you may desire to see it. I don’t think life will get simpler from this point on; while the opposite will be the case with complications.

Honestly, the change did not happen accidentally. It just struck me recently that I had become an unbearably brooding personality. The job has also helped a lot in realizing that. Unlike in my previous jobs, this one requires me to interact and carry along a bunch of different people with me constantly, to keep it all together. What I noticed was that even when I wanted to perform efficiently and with excellence, the pall of gloom would cut in, blocking everything off. Eventually, nothing gets done and that is not acceptable for me.

Of course, I could manage the odd day by covering up the darkness and I have always liked the thrill of a crisis, which always makes me perform at my best. But that is the point too, that it does not have to be a crisis or some form of pretence for things to work. That’s just not right. And I don’t like people who are negative all the time or people who are insecure and constantly complaining about things and I’d become all that and much more.

I am also disgusted by the riders that accompany every positive statement I can dig up. “Things are fine right now, but they can go awry anytime.” “I had a wonderful time, but I can’t accept as much because I am afraid it won’t happen again.” I think the twenty plus odd years of my life have hardly been exemplary, but that does not mean that what’s left of it have to be in the same vein too. I have made mistakes, let down a lot of people and been a rank jerk at times, but it is really about time that I let all of that go and try to be happy for a change. I think I do deserve that much for myself.

Dream On

2006-05-10T01:00:00.000+05:30

After two days of being lost in a sea of XML, XPATH and XSLT, I think it might not be a bad idea to resurface on my mostly-ignored blog and post whatever that comes to my mind. I should warn you that there is no particular destination that I am aiming to reach with this post, nor am I looking to make a point. This is just a slice of thoughts from my exquisitely mixed up mind. Read on only if you have time to kill in plenty.

Since life has been pretty good to me of late with a significantly reduced level of self-induced drama, I thought it might not be a bad idea to sit back and take a look at the road ahead and the immediate concerns in my life. And surprise! I could not come up with more than two ever-prevailing themes: career and loneliness.

Of the two, work has been pretty good, especially if I could ignore my own impatience and extremely high expectations. I want everything to happen, at the best levels, like overnight. Which, obviously, does not happen, leading me to wonder every third day if I am any good at all. But yeah, two or three more years of this and I would want to do something different.

Sometimes I think I’d eventually want to build something big and successful, become unimaginably rich in the process and then give away most of it to people who actually need it. Other times I want to throw away all of what I have now, go to a remote place, find my own little peace and write down a lot of things that I might not even show anyone. Is there some way by which I can do both and be the happiest man on earth?

On the personal front, I have always been a weirdo, with different tastes, preferences, opinions and aims than most people I have known. I did not grow up wanting to be different; it is just that at times what the rest of the world was doing just did not make any sense. At a younger age, I used to argue passionately over the things that caused this senselessness. If I remember right, I think I also used to believe that you could make a difference if you wanted to. That makes me laugh now.

But I could never figure the reasons for why I was different, if I actually was different at all. It was never the case that I was exposed to a lot of people who used to step away from the norm. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was probably because I had practically brought up myself. The only things that keep you any meaningful company then are the different people you conjure up in your own mind.

There are no real value systems to speak of then. The imagined world becomes a huge canvas that you can paint into landscapes and characters more palatable to your own sensibilities. The chasm between that and the real one gradually drifts so far apart that what people actually do and mean stops making any sense after a while, nor they carry any import. They are just there, like an appendage, while the fantasy lives on your own mind.

But I have digressed. Yes, the loneliness. The first time I fell in love was when I was 17. It was amazing and somehow it pains me to realize that I’ve never felt that way in the relationships that I have had after that. Even though I was the one to put an end to it, some four years down the line, since it was not going anywhere, I was only pre-empting a ‘no’ that she was having difficulty telling me since I had just about made it out of my first brushes with the absolute pointlessness of my life. But, to my credit, I could not have tried any harder in it or done much more and she had already gone beyond her limits in trying to keep me propped up. We were just evading the inevitable for as far as we could.

The second relationship. It started as fling; at least we had convinced ourselves that that was the case. I could not digest the fact that relationships could take life in a fling, she could not understand why it could not be so. Two similarly stubborn people getting together is always a bad idea, especially when your respective approaches to the same concept are diametrically opposite. I kept denying it, while she tried endlessly to convince me. Much heartache and tears ensued, mixed with the first chapters of my latent heartlessness. It could have ended better and I knew better, I just chose to ignore it.

The third relationship. What do they say about people who never learn from past experiences? Back in fling land again and that too with some vengeance. Faces, bodies are an indistinguishable blur. I am working nights and running rapidly through different people during the days and somewhere along the way, in the background of a major personal disaster, one of them, known rather famously as ‘friendships with benefits’, turns into familiarity.

Instead of contempt, it bred convenience, with the constant tolling of the warning bell that this was not meant to be, in the background. She moved in with me for close to a year. It was a case of extremes. The things in it were really good, while the bad was the worst. The bells were ignored; I gave up practically everything else that was important to me. I knew I only had a short lease on that life and had to take in whatever I could at that point.

Somewhere along the way, convenience turned into comfort. In fact, too much of it and we all know how know too much of a good thing can be bad. Many an honest conversation later we decided to call it quits when the going was still good. It baffled everyone who knew about it for various reasons. I laid out my escape plan, stuck to it and made my way through, even if it was a struggle.

Which culminated in the fourth relationship. Rebound, stupidity, wishful thinking, intolerable cruelty – you could rightly accuse me of all those and still not be done with it. I must have broken all sorts of records for being insensitive with that chapter of my life. Looking back, I don’t see what I was trying to achieve other than to mess up someone nice who did not need anymore of that in her life. But that’s the bitch called hindsight; she’s never there when you want her around.

Then there are the many friends, with whom my emotional involvement is never a comfortable equation. Somehow, I seem to take great pleasure in stretching the limits of the emotional connections that are made and if you are looking for stability in life, that is not just the route to take.

The trouble is that all of the above is every bit a part of me. I can only walk away from it all at my own peril. The foundation stone of any relationship is a weirdly pure element of selfishness. You need to have something to take in it, failing which it becomes charity and those don’t survive for too long, nor is it fair on anyone involved. If my selfishness commands such weird and infeasible conditions, is it any wonder that I do wind up being alone most of the time?

Even otherwise it is not that easy. I don’t look like a million bucks, I don’t have a million bucks and my job won’t ever earn me a million bucks. Those three not being there dents the desirability quotient in my case considerably. In other words, it is only another weirdo who can stand by me and survive me, if I were to be just myself and be happy about it too.

I’d love to say that none of the regular stuff like marriage and family bothers me. It does, especially when you have parents who don’t leave a single opportunity to hint that somehow my marrying would make them secure and healthier overnight. I would also love to have my wedding, not a grand or lavish ceremony, but by a beach, surrounded by just a handful of people, facing the wide blue ocean that would open out into eternity.

I can almost hear the chorus of voices shouting out loud “dream on!” Bring ‘em on.

Untitled

2006-05-06T00:22:00.000+05:30

Actually, I have been quite at peace with the way things have been progressing of late. There is a staid dullness to the proceedings, with the (dis?)pleasures of a predictable routine that shines through each passing day. But I am not one to complain, since there is not much by means of things going wrong and that is a luxury in times like these. Each day is nothing but a name and a number that changes on the calendar; nothing is lost, nor is anything gained.

There is, though, a lot going wrong around me. Elderly people becoming frailer and more insecure than what they ever were, ghastly accidents, best laid plans going awry, best of intentions bringing forth the worst of results, differing degrees of chaos and little instances and incidents that I choose to turn my head away from, rather than observe, analyse and worry over endlessly. If I were not fully awake, I could have even mistaken it for sleep walking.

There is something new in all this about me – an enhanced degree of selfishness that I have gotten quite comfortable with. I have worn it like a tight jacket around me; tight enough to keep me comfortably isolated, but not tight enough to cause me discomfort. If I had known these splendid virtues of selfishness earlier, I would have willingly subscribed to it, but you do learn such things only at the appropriate times and not a moment before when it is meant to be. You can’t obviously learn it a moment after, if the ‘appropriate time’ theory is actually right.

And I am learning to keep quite a few of my thoughts to myself. Not that I really want to, but I don’t want to rush over them with anyone, like the passing dust storms that are all over Delhi these days. If you have the time, patience and diligence, then I might. Otherwise, I am quite glad to keep them to myself. They are not quite secrets. The circle of friends who are closest to me know practically every little thing about me, including my best fantasies and the worst nightmares. But these are different. These are more like observations. I don’t even know if they would make any sense to anyone at all.

Why does being with someone almost always turn us into the kind of people we have hated? Maybe we don’t see it when we are in a relationship, because even I have done the same at some point, allowing mistrust, than trust, to lead the way. We twist, bend, wriggle and contort ourselves into these mummified personas that are at least a million miles away from who and what we really are. Relationships are not meant to do that us. It is weird when all of us – educated, uneducated, liberal, conservative, intellectual, non-intellectuals – end up in the same shitty corner once we are with someone. Why is it so?

After a lot of the above-mentioned contortions, I have had enough. I don’t want to waste my life trying to be someone that I am not. This is me at my ugliest, clumsiest worst; which if you can meet eye-to-eye and still find something worth trusting, putting a bit of faith and effort into, we might have something to go ahead with. Otherwise, this is the part where I get off the play that has been acted billions of times already.

Meanwhile, do welcome a close friend of mine who's taken a sudden shine to blogging. And yes, I do have a huge thing for shoes, I should warn you, before you read all that she has to say.

Return To Sender

2006-05-01T19:14:00.000+05:30

Verbosity has always been my bane (or boon, depending on which end of the deal you happened to end up on) and mixing technology with that does not always bring forth the best of results. That joined with a natural ability to ponder over points and nuances that mean nothing to others (and everything to me), leads to interesting collections of conversations in the various e-mail accounts I have used over the years. Oh yes, I have a huge addiction for communication, at least I used to, and some of the e-mails date back to as early as the year 2000, when using impropah English to communicate did not result in summary execution by the grammar Nazis.

Some of the e-mails are amusing - youthful enthusiasm, extreme idealism and the works. Others are acute embarrassments, to put it lightly, including episodes in my life that I can't remember without feeling sheepish beyond what I can explain here and numerous silly dalliances with rank strangers on the internet (that is another saga in itself, best saved for another time). But most are about the chaotic relationships I have had with my friends. Amusingly, some have even had e-mail accounts at Garfield.com and I have seen one that was sent using Pine. I have certainly lived an interesting life, even if you were to ignore conversations that were held on one side almost entirely in koans.

I have lost touch with most of the people I have all these mails saved from, some for good, while others blip back in on my radar every now and then, only to disappear again. I can't be quite accused of being stupid in feeling like the old bridge under which a lot of water has flown over time, can I? But it is nice to have these to look at, since they are pretty much the only genuine and un-obfuscated accounts of how I ended up being who I am and where I come from. The blog with its myriad decoys is of no good there. Redundant storage and the free email model willing, I should have these to keep me company in old age too. Technology with a nostalgic hue, now, who would have thought about that one?

Real Illusion

2006-04-27T19:23:00.000+05:30

Inside Out
Originally uploaded by codelust.

Is being too busy a good enough excuse for anything at all? I guess not. So I won't dish out the same thing here as the reason why I have not blogged in a while. But it has been a good break from the normal proceedings of all gloom and dullness here and strangely, I have not missed laying it all out here much. It is good, sometimes, to have your handful of secrets.

Actually, contrary to blogular perception, I am not a manic depressive, by a long stretch. I do manage to smile, be happy about things around me and other people. If there are any problems, it is with the fact that I don't tend to gloss over problems, mistakes etc and I do have this irritating knack to over-analyse.

The wise one, in the comments, had asked me post five entries on why I like my life. Five would be way too much, so I think I will make do with a couple of lines. I love the independence I have in it. I could actually pack my bags tomorrow and head out wherever I want to. It is another thing that I've never managed to do that. But the option is there, probably as a last-ditched roll of the dice.

The people I have loved, I have loved with all my heart, be it in my own weird ways. I have had the fortune of knowing more than a couple of people really up close and felt better for it. I love the fact that I have managed to make something of my life, even when I have always considered myself less than smart or talented enough to do whatever I do these days and also dream about better things for tomorrow.

Coming from a strictly middle class Indian family, with little or no academic aptitude in me, it is a wonder that I have gotten this far. In fact, quite a lot of the times I do feel that I am in place that is way out of my league, but I am not complaining and feel quite happy about it. I tend to forgive very easily, which makes my life a little bit easier on the complications side, while I do find it hard to forget, which instantly negates it.

I love the fact that even after making more mistakes, made mostly by me, than what I can count, I have managed to cling on to hope in my life. I love it that even in pitch darkness at times I have managed to come out to the other end, that I do feel life can be better and happier, even during the best or the worst times. And with that I think I should shut up and try to find my way home.

The View

2006-04-18T14:38:00.000+05:30

The Perch
Originally uploaded by codelust.

Yes, I am showing off my new perch. I like it much better here, nestled in a corner far away from the noisy edit bays and the travel/administration bunch. I get a view that is pretty neat by the generally arid and dull Noida standards and it shows too. I had put in a longish day yesterday, having another crack at getting a subversion repository up and running here, and was back in office before 10 AM today, which is a record of sorts for me. In any case, on Monday, I started with the umpteenth attempt to clean up my act. It is working in parts – I’ve stopped smoking at home and started going to bed early and eating a wee bit better too. There is a lot to be done, but at least this is some start.

Otherwise, the withdrawal from practically everything continues. It occurred to me last night that I can’t even remember when I last felt some passion in anything that I do. A couple of years ago, it used to be different. I used to passionately love and care about the ones I felt close to. I used to work passionately, regardless of the outcome. Now there is just a dull detachment. I do make a pretty good effort, but the crucial, final 1% is missing. It makes things easier to walk away from and be mostly unaffected by negative developments. But it also feels like deadwood, making it hard to conjure up even a smile, or that odd peal of genuine laughter or even a couple of heartfelt tears.

And it is not just the private sphere; the public half also has gone AWOL. Even when I have not been one for blog meets and the whole ‘community’ thing, I used to participate, at least on a handful of blogs. Now that too has gone, helped in good measure by numerous flamewars and whatnot. I do read most of them, but even when I don’t, I feel that I have not missed much. Is it the bane of predictability or is a case of high expectations? I do not know and I don’t care much either.

In real life, the surprising change has been that I’ve fell off the partying wagon just like that. The dark, smoke-filled, crowded places have been a magnetic escape for me in the past four years. It all started at the famous Turquoise Cottage (also known as TCs to most of the Delhi crowd) in 2001, if I remember right. That time, working with the IE, I was this wide-eyed-wonderer, caught between the amazement of having a place in Delhi where they played the kind of music that I liked and the long straight hair of a female colleague who used fondly call me “the villager”.

Since then I’ve done most of the joints here and enjoyed it to the hilt, even doing unbelievably crazy stuff like riding on the rickety motorcycle, well past midnight, with the then girlfriend behind me in a short skirt and thigh-high boots, from Chanakyapuri to home at Saket. And the last two years were the peak of the craziness -- working till late in the evening, a splash-and-dash at home, then more alcohol, dancing and revelry and then coming back not earlier than 3 AM. I miss the dancing part, though. Not that I could twirl anyone or do the Salsa, but I guess I’ve managed enough to not be given weird looks and even be given once a wee bit of space of our own in the non-existent floor at TC.

Falling off this wagon was not a planned course of action. I guess the indifference has been there for a while now. In the past year I’ve felt out of place everywhere – be it TC or be it Elevate and everything in-between. When you have to coax yourself to try and fit in with the bouncing masses even as the heart has opted out before you even got in, it is a fairly good sign that something’s gotta give; and soon. 2006 has been a disaster for me at TC. It started with a horrible set of circumstances, which left me feeling angry at myself for things that had not a lot to do with myself. Two more visits followed that have now become part of my infamous and numbskulled attempt at trying to settle down – in love and married – crashing and burning one of the rare good friend I had left with me. Then there were two other instances where the babysitter me was in his full glory. Not that I mind taking care of people, but too much of it is not fun either.

When you have only the past to keep you company, more than the present, anywhere, that is really time’s tide gently lapping at your feet asking you to move on ahead or step back to move in a different direction. That’s what I feel about Delhi these days. I have fond memories, conversations and some beautiful times associated with most of the places. Beyond that, in the present, there is nothing. All I see are people, like the ones I see coming in and out of the compound below – total strangers who are of no interest to me, with whom I want to have nothing to do with.

Questions

2006-04-14T16:15:00.000+05:30

Would you rather be aware and possibly entertain a situation that offers no solutions, or be willfully unaware and terminate the same probable conclusion even before it can manifest itself? Or to make the question even simpler, is self awareness and making an effort with regards to it an overrated concept?

If we assume that happiness is the touchstone of all actions regarding humanity, can we also assume that it also stands independent of the rightness, wrongness or the degree of selfishness of ones actions, making at least a hypothetical state of perfection, creating an ideal world that is selfish to the core?

Miracle

2006-04-10T01:25:00.000+05:30

It has not been a spectacular Sunday. How can it ever be that when it is so swelteringly hot as it is these days. But it was one of the better ones. I woke up feeling unlike the usual congested self. Still, I coaxed myself into inhaling some steam spiked with Karvol Plus that still kicks like the wildest of mares on the first few inhalations. Then I finally managed the energy to kick start and move the motorcycle from the position of rest it had assumed many months ago. And after having watched What A Girl Wants, for reasons still unclear to me (okay, I'll admit, the girl is pretty in a weird sort of way), I set out on a walk that ended up being quite long, in excess of five kilometres, bought some fish and cooked it, stuffed my face, watched Desperate Housewives and Lost and here I am.

See, the funny thing is that I do like being alone and doing things for myself. I like the space and the freedom it gives me and the concept of catching up with yourself after a terrible week of surviving your own very fucked up state of, physical and emotional, affairs and actually just relax, give up and not do much to a set plan. But I do miss having someone around -- not to pick up my dishes, not to cook for me, not to give me a shoulder to cry on -- but just the physical presence, of being able to hug, hold and generally feel wanted. No, I am not talking about sex here, even though that is also a bona fide need, but this is different and hard to explain. You know, just silly stupid things like sitting together, having coffee and not doing much else. Is that weird?

I do not know if everyone feels so emotionally raw most of the time or if it is just me. Probably I should not be asking these questions since I have been making a conscious effort of late to stop the obsessive analysis of everything. And it is nice to close your eyes and not have the cacophony of thoughts swell up in front of you. Strangely, I can't bring myself to write anything more beyond this. Funny, is it not, how the verbal juices dry up totally when there is nothing sad or terrible to write about? But I am hauling up eyelids and with a great deal of effort looking beyond the immediate arid landscape. If miracles are truly possible, this is your chance. Please do appear in whatever form or shape you can afford to do that. I shall only be too welcome to have you in my life.

Imagine

2006-04-06T13:31:00.000+05:30

I must have spent at least an hour last night, knowingly dreaming through the house and the colony I'd grown up back home, before I finally slipped off to sleep. It was not just the old chest infection-turned fever that caused the delirious trip, somehow I was quite enjoying it and I wanted to do it. I guess you could call it an exquisite work of the imagination, but it was nice all the same, to go through all of that experiencing extremes of joy, anger and sometimes sadness during various times.

It started off at the main road, from where I walked down, remembering each and every house on both sides and the people who lived in them and my memories associated with them. I could also even imagine the picture of a younger me climbing over walls and running around, the cricket and football games we've played on the streets. I could have sworn that I almost heard my own voice, even though it is something that I hate listening to.

It was not a painful experience, though the chasm between that life and my life now was a bit disturbing. I can positively identify with both and yet they are such extremes that I cannot understand how can that be possible. Maybe, as a dear friend recently told me, the chasm exists only in my mind and perception, which is probably true since I don't think you can't change much of what is at your core.

Smile

2006-04-03T16:12:00.000+05:30

I don’t have a picture to go with this one. Maybe I do, but I don’t want to bother looking for one. When I started writing this one on Sunday I had typed in a few lines about how last week has been an extension of the week before in hell and how I was getting used to it. There were also things said about how I was having imagined conversations, with people I know and myself, in my head, while outwardly I had withdrawn into my shell and stopped speaking to almost anyone. Then, I just could not write anymore. I just gave up and tried to see if there was something else I could do.

Afterwards, on a longish and relaxed drive, I realized how stressed out I was and that my mind was working overtime, bordering on the neurotic, even when it did not have to do that. It really felt like my own internal cacophony was building up to a crescendo, with endless iterations of self-analysis and analysis of every minor thing that was happening around me. It is a pleasure of the most masochistic type to make yourself a test buggy and note down every single action/reaction cycle you through, as a study of your own nature. At the same time it is obsessive and massively self-destructive too.

Emotionally, I felt clogged from the inside like someone with a chronic case of sinusitis. It has been building up for a while now, not helped in the least bit by recent events. Gradually, your ability to breathe diminishes to the point where you almost choke yourself with your emotions. Then comes the numbness - of being not able to smell, breathe, taste or even feel anything. Then you wonder about what went wrong and look desperately for a rope, even the tattered ends of a straw, if there are any available, to grasp on to. It is in those moments that even more mistakes follow, the kinds that long term problems never get fixed by.

What snapped me out was the meeting with a friend on Sunday. It has been one of those weird friendships where there is a connection made even when there are no common grounds or even major similarities in personalities. It just felt different, comfortable and it felt like I was walking out of my own clogged up, rotting skin. It felt nice to be able to breathe again, to find that there was still warmth left somewhere in the cold confines of your own soul and that you could be liked, without having to project an image of invulnerability and strength as a year-round project, even when you are just being yourself.

Later, I called up an old friend, talked to her for a bit. I thanked my lucky stars that I could actually trace in me a little bit of the fondness that I have always felt for her. My home, empty and dark, awaited my return and I hate when the dread of going back to an empty home comes back to haunt me. But there is only that much you can run away from your demons and they really don’t feel so funny when you come across them anywhere other than Calvin & Hobbes comic strips. Bree’s (rare?) histrionics and Jack’s past provide an adequate distraction. Sleep, attempted later, is one lousy client that almost never turns up.

When Monday morning eventually arrives, I welcome it with all my heart. Anything that provides a purpose to my hours and keeps me busy is a welcome visitor. Of course, with inflexible caveats added in for good measure. I have already walked away from one confrontation; I don’t need any more of them for a while now. The road back is very long and difficult. The spirit’s been close to being broken for a while and alarmingly the body too is following suit now. Before long, at this rate, the situation would become unrecoverable. I guess I don’t have that level of masochism within me. The small mercies one has to be thankful about in life.

In darkness

2006-03-30T00:49:00.000+05:30

In darkness
Originally uploaded by codelust.

I think it is possible for me to say with a fair degree of certainty that 2006 will go down in my life as the year that I’ve torched the precious few remaining bridges that have helped me from drowning in the waters of insanity. In the past eight odd months I have done almost every single uncharitable thing I thought I could not have done and the answers that I want to know are far from coming anywhere close to me.

It was somewhere during the weekend that passed that I hit the lowest I have fallen to in a very long time, without the help the of alcohol and with the help of the singular realisation that even after almost six years of actually being on my own, not a lot a had changed. I could not figure out what it was that I could differently or if I even had it in me to start all over again. But something I knew for sure was that I just could not go on like that.

There was a lot I wanted to say to people that I liked and even to the ones that I did not like that much anymore, but, for reasons that varied, I could not speak to even one of them. Which was, for all the so-called improvements or changes that I have enforced over the past six years, a situation eerily similar to the state of emotional comatose I had left home back in the fag end of 1997. I did not feel bitter or angry, but sad beyond what I could express in words or any other manner.

So, where do we go from here? I have not made up my mind yet. There are faint ideas and things resembling plans. But hey, it is not easy to pick up the pieces for the umpteenth time and look for variations to draw when you have tried almost all possible ones. For one, I think I will be a little less naïve and stop taking the spoken word for what it is. It does not quite work out that way. Even if you can handle your own craziness (just about that is), it is not kosher to assume everyone else around you can.

In all honesty, I am not the best person you would have known, but I probably would not be quite the worst one either. Somehow I have to enforce what I have preached for a long time in my own life – that you have to make a positive choice if you want something to work for you. Having no faith in yourself or your abilities do work against that edict, so does waiting in the shadows and hoping for hand-me-downs or choices driven by a lack of others. The good thing is, even if I don’t know what works for me, at least now I know what does not. Or is that a bad thing actually?

Finally

2006-03-27T00:16:00.000+05:30

03-26-06_1903
Originally uploaded by codelust.

After all, it is all about the connections you make, is it not? It is so rare and hard these days to find one of those. Through the day, I meet so many people and with each I spend a split second looking into their eyes, trying to catch that unknown half-glimpse that will set them apart, in terms of how they are and what they have to say. On most days, it is like fishing and not one materializes. Even when they do, what comes across quite often is derision, delusion and plaintiveness. None of which represent that unknown I want to know.

It is so easy to go through the motions on a day-to-day basis, smile and listen your way through things, but inside you take half a step back every day till you realize one day that you have walked half a mile and a lifetime away from the ones you have known and the ones that have known you. Sometimes, all of this happens so unknowingly that the sudden distance and the stench of your own isolation startles you out of the trance that is called your existence. And in the eerie silence that follows, you make an unpleasant love with what remains of your memories, dreams and life.

In a couple of weeks, the summer will come visiting once again in its sweaty and intense self. I should be worrying about the air conditioning that I will have to get done this year. I should be over the moon that the years of hard work are paying off finally. But I am not. I am thinking of leaving. For where? I don’t know. For what? I don’t know. I’d like to believe that I have plans and that I am charting out my own destiny. But the truth is that I have none. I have nothing to call my own other than this lingering feeling that I have finally had enough. Maybe it is indeed time to move on.

Game

2006-03-23T02:37:00.000+05:30

The Key
Originally uploaded by codelust.

How can it be that you are leading more or less of the life that you wanted to live and still be tremendously bored and disinterested in most of the things that are in it? The feeling sways between phases of benign indifference and an all-conquering malignant disappointment. It is not like I have had it quite easy in life. I have had my fair share of problems and self-doubt and I still have both in decent quantities, but it is also not the case that life has been too unkind to me and there is nobody who leads a life without problems. So, is it a case of over-expectation or do I brood just for the sake of it?

At least earlier I used to look forward to new things to light up my life, even for a short interval. Now almost everything induces at the most a tired “oh” from me and most times I just don’t care much. It is not that recent a phenomenon though. I remember, even before I came to Delhi, things that would send most people into an emotional twirl doing nothing to me. And it is not like I don’t feel much, I still do and uncontrollably at times, but it does not progress much beyond that. You know, “shit happens”, “things do work out every now and then” and life trundles on unaffected for most parts.

Maybe it is an overarching sense of self-importance that acts a platform from which I look down on people that is the root cause of all of this. And I do look down on people with regards to my strengths, while I dismiss my shortcomings as abilities that are only of social and no personal import. But it does lead me to play this cat-and-mouse game, where I look to be understood and not be understood at the same time. The trouble is, I am losing interest even in that game. It is just way too boring. After a while you tend to know all the steps, all the right things to say and all the conclusions in advance.

All this has one funny side product. To keep myself convinced that I am still very human and normal, I work myself up into a state of excitement about things I know I don’t give much of a damn about. It is like window shopping for the sake of doing it. In a way, it is like parole time for me from the staid emotional jail term I have been sentenced to. But what worries me is that the same does not extend to people anymore, I can’t be arsed to have my heart go flutter or genuinely work up some heat into the frozen innards of my heart. “Why bother? This too shall pass”, is the only refrain.

To end on a considerably lighter note, I had recently heard from my father that he had stumbled on to my blog (hello father, if you are still reading it and really god save you if sit down and read most of it). I muttered some half-hearted explanation to him about what a blog was and if it was written by me in the first place. You see, I was just not in the mood once again. It has become a very over prevailing theme of late, but, looking at the brighter side, it does help me sit up late in the night and write things on my blog that would not make sense for most. Can you see the game?

The Return

2006-03-20T03:22:00.000+05:30

Cabbie

Unlike most others, I came home to an overflowing mailbox and a burgeoning unread list in my feed reader of choice – GreatNews – after two days in Bombay. It is almost three in the morning and after dedicating more than three solid hours to catching up on the information deluge I have decided to let the matter rest for now and pick the gauntlet up once again later in the working day. But strangely, even in the overwhelming relief that familiarity brings, I have not felt the typical elation I feel when get back to Delhi after any trip, nor did I feel totally out of place in Bombay, which says a lot.

Contrary to my expectations, I did not have an easy time during the trip. The initial plan was to take it easy with the work part of it and then spend time catching up with friends that I wanted to meet up with. Two of them, one due to the developments in Navi Mumbai and the other due to the improbability of the distances involved, fell off the list. But I did finally get to meet a blogger who is now more a personal and close friend, some four years after I first got to know her and also met up with another old friend and the gang from back here, who recently moved there. The spoiler, though, was the work part, which I have to admit was quite satisfying that took up most of my time.

That said, the romance I have had for the city did dwindle a lot this time around. A lot of it probably has to do with the fact that in my first trip there I stayed at Colaba and worked at Nariman Point, giving me some of the best parts of the city to exist in for the seven days I was there. The second time, about eight months back, was spent between Lower Parel and Bandra, with the office providing for most of the transportation. This time, I ventured out on my own a lot more, getting stuck in places like Mahim and Bandra and I even managed a late night and early morning trip to and from Lokhandwala. Even the sea food did not do much to rescue the situation this time, but I did appreciate the fact that I did not have to drive. I had not realised that driving takes away so much of energy and effort.

If you do know the secret, be sure to let me know about how the cabbies of the city manage to propel and direct their old Fiat cars at the speed and in the manner in which they do. They judge the space requirements better than any feline I’ve seen till date and the way in which they get their braking spot on would put any legendary formula one driver to shame. Another thing to note was the new domestic terminal at the airport which looked totally out of place and spanking good in its glory. We seriously need more of those. And why on earth would someone want to use a card system to regulate wireless internet access within the terminals? It kind of defeats the purpose even when have creatively named base stations like ‘Tusnami’ showing up on the network list.

In retrospect, the trip was pretty successful. I did manage to have two pretty useful and exhaustive meetings and also have a fruitful crack at deciphering the impenetrable legalese in two corporate agreements, leading me to believe that I might have finally found the real calling for me in life – in law. Really sad jokes apart, it is always a pleasure to connect in a professional capacity with the people of the city, there is so much less faffing around and wastage of time. I also managed to have a bit of run in with the mutual funds kind of crowd at the company’s event at a beautiful five star hotel’s premises in Bandra, though ten minutes into it I could see why I could never be good at it. It is just not my thing, I am happy being my geeky, asocial self. Well, at least for now.

Grip

2006-03-15T21:43:00.000+05:30

I mean, what is it? What is it that holds you together? Is it family? Is it friends? Is it your boyfriend or your girlfriend? Is it your husband, or is it your wife or your children? It has been a long day for me.

After having stayed away from the colourful chaos outside for the first half of the day, I have hit that dreaded low in my life where I collapse under the effort of having to hold myself up together all the time. Thus starts the mad search for a conversation, for any conversation, that will throw a rescue line your way and save you and your sanity, be it for a couple of minutes, hours or even a day.

This is the moment where all the resolve to hold your own ground goes to the dogs. The promise of the conversation claws at you like the worst withdrawal an addict can suffer from. Every wrong thing you’ve ever done eats at your conscience for having landed you in this spot and you feel bitter about every person, for whom you’ve ever done any right, for not being there to help you out. Not that it helps a lot to have your non existent ego play up at that time not wanting to ask for help. Eventually, after a long walk, everything calms down, material needs to be cleared for the office presentation and dinner needs to be cooked.

Life is nice as long as it is maddening and abnormal.

Ponder

2006-03-14T01:24:00.000+05:30

Looking for something...

Yet another Monday crosses itself off the calendar and I am back on my familiar perch at home, desperately trying to keep my mind away from not being able to have a conversation I badly want to have. It is not often that you run into someone with whom you don't need to have anything in particular to talk about and still have a nice time for reasons beyond any explanation or theories you can come up with. It does feel nice to be confronted every now and then with experiences that shatter your overtly jaded and cynical outlook towards everything in life -- that you can be liked as a person without having to pretend to be the ever-so strong and dependable entity, which becomes a pain when you have to be just that all the waking hours.

I have also been pondering about my long term plans. I had given myself time till I turned 28 to let things keep running the way they are now. After that I wanted to either pack my bags and set out to see the world without any specific destination in mind or set something up of my own. Honestly, I can't pick between the two. Both are equally difficult to pull off and both involve leaving one comfort zone or the other for me. But I am quite bored of Delhi and the people and I have been pondering if it is about time I got down to making good on my long-standing threat to just pack things up and leave one fine morning? Somehow I do feel that I have broken a lot of things here beyond fixing and there is a scent of a rut and the hint of an inroad into a vicious circle and I don't want either.

Setting something up of my own. Well, that is a toughie. An objective analysis of my abilities would get me a rating of zilch in terms of business sense, networking and having the knack to work well with different people. That would leave me with my only saving grace of being a problem-solver and that alone is not enough to start something. It is tempting though, since I have a fairly good idea of what can do well in the market now and how to build it, but that would take away two good years of my life and there is the risk of coming face-to-face with boredom once the initial crunch is over. But I am scoping a couple of ideas out. Getting it running and making it work, well, that is a totally different ball game.

The weekend should probably see me once again in Mumbai on a work-related trip. A change of environs should do be me a bit of good, away from all the brooding, sulking and the general chaos that I manage to place myself in the centre of all the time. It should also be fun to gobble up some good fresh sea food too. It has been a while since I have treated myself to that.

On a day like today

2006-03-10T14:35:00.000+05:30

This is around noon, at the DND Flyway, on my way to office in Noida.

It has been drizzling all morning and the weather is so beautiful that it makes you wonder what you are doing going back into the middle of meetings, plans, projects, problems and allocations.

Anyone for a nice blanket, mugs of coffee, slow music and lots of meaningless conversations?

Fork

2006-03-09T16:22:00.000+05:30

No, I have not budged an inch. I am still kind of holding my ground, in a not very useful manner, in both personal and professional life. The personal has been splattered all over this place since 2001 in all its complicated glory, but there is not much mention here of the professional. I guess that is because I have always done pretty okay work-wise and even in its unspectacularness the various gigs have managed to pay most of my bills and helped me acquire and maintain the necessary creature comforts.

But that can't keep restless creatures like me going forever. In all honesty, I am doing quite well now and there is a lot more that needs to be done. But there is this lingering feeling of wanting to do something that is your own than to power proxied efforts. After a point it becomes hard to not be able to apply your learnings in the way you want to apply it than the way you are forced to by circumstances. And of course, there is the lure of the pot of gold if you can hit the venture right. Do you perceive a faint whiff of ambition in the air? I certainly do.

What is encouraging the feeling are two things. First is that the Indian market is getting primed for major action. Even with its current minisculeness, any convergent form of media stands a better chance of doing well here in the next ten years than it does in the west and at some point every major player (retail, online, offline, name any damn thing) would want to jump in on the bandwagon. So, if you do it right, there is a major opportunity that did not exist even a couple of years ago. If you can build it well, someone will definitely want to buy it.

Second is a follow up to the first point. There are not many people out there who are clued in enough to build it well. Of course, there are many major players like the Infys and Wipros, but they are mostly solution providers and architects who can't do much without a proper vision or purpose given to them in the first place. Moreover, to build it right, you need to understand the medium and its experience and that is not something many have. Can you visualise a solution that mixes rural marketing with the ease-of-use of an AJAX interface? If you can't then you would not know what I am talking about and the opportunity is that are not many out there who do.

All technology is eventually an abstraction. It is a bridge that connects complicated automation to easily understandable/identifiable/predictable actions on the user's end. Where it used to fall apart earlier was high entry level costs. Connectivity and computing infrastructures were prohibitively expensive and the abstraction was there only to the extent of making it barely usable for technology savvy crowd. What has changed in the new world is that the entry level costs have come down. And they have come down to an extent where it even makes sense these days to absorb that cost component entirely, without passing it on to the users.

Some have already realised this. At least one friend is planning to move out of his regular media job to setting up something of his own. The inherent risks are very high especially if you can't find someone to put up at least the seed capital for the venture and the first two years would mean an existence which would have to be frugal at the best and terrible in terms of your savings, that is if you have any in the first place. But if you make it, the payback can essentially take care of the rest of your life. And that is the point that I keep pondering, if such a thing is possible at all or not or if I am just daydreaming?

Razr Redux

2006-03-06T15:16:00.000+05:30

It has been over two weeks since I acquired the Motorola Razr v3i and I guess it is time for a review of sorts. At Rs. 14,500 the phone is not what can be called as cheap. Since the Motos don't have even half of the resale values that the Nokias have, you can expect both the retail and second hand prices to fall drastically over the coming months. If you are going to invest heavily in a new phone, wait it out for another couple of months, you can probably pick up the same phone for at least a grand knocked off the price I picked it up for.

The negatives: Don't buy this phone for the iTunes player. It is dreadfully sluggish and you are much better off saving the songs directly in the memory card and playing them one-by-one. Besides, the transfer rates are abysmal, making syncing the damn thing a horrible pain. The screens scratch quite easily and the keypad touches the display, when the flip is closed, leaving marks on it even when you painstakingly keep it free of your ear and thumb impressions.

The camera is quite okay for still images, but it is quite lousy if you have to record video. If you want to either with any decent quality, you are much better off buying a proper digital camera. And most importantly, if you have fat fingers this phone is just not the thing for you. I have already lost countless text message replies after accidentally pressing the abort button trying to press the auto-complete button.

The positives: It looks quite snazzy and feels quite robust, though I have not given it the 'drop-it-five-times-a-day' acid test yet. The battery life is pretty decent and the unified socket means that I can get the phone charged at the same time as when I am using it to browse the Internet via GPRS on the laptop, without requiring an additional cable or a power outlet. But I have to say the bundled hands-free kit is the cheapest of the lot and a downer for the price you pay for the handset.

The address book plays real nice with the office Exchange server via the Motorola PC Suite and syncing that at least is not a pain. There have been no lock ups or other issues while using it as modem for the GPRS connection and even when it has been slow, the connection's been much more stable than the lousy cable-based Spectrasmart nightmare I normally use at home. If you are using Airtel GPRS do make sure that you select Service Type 1's option as WAP than HTTP.

All said and done I am quite pleased with the phone. It does most of what it says it can do without ceremony or hassle. And that is about it.

There is no fun like ignoring your own flaws and picking at the ones that the competition provides you. After their previous two flawed attempts at providing RSS feeds to the discerning audience, NDTV.com has made a third go at doing the same. The registration part has now been taken off and the feeds are now provided without any form of authentication. That is where the good news ends and the bad news begins. The feeds don't validate anymore, since the tags are messed up beyond belief, and the <link> element in each of the item (which points to individual stories) is now empty, leaving the users with no way to read the story straight off the aggregator. What fun!

The Beginning

2006-02-28T17:26:00.000+05:30

This should have been titled 'In which I learned to stop crying and love trouble in my life', but what the heck. Anyway, that would not have fit in with my fetish for single word or two to three word titles. But the crux of the matter is that the visitation is over and I have survived it much better than what I thought I would. I do not know if it is that we've lost the appetite for the infamous fights or if all of us had decided to become all grown up at the same time as a welcome coincidence, but we did manage to have a couple of constructive and sane discussions punctuated by a lot of driving up, down and across the city.

Eventually, everybody held their ground without threatening to kill each other (or themselves for that matter) and I was allowed to stick to my 'don't-wanna-get-married' and 'living-life-differently' themes without being asked if I was gay (at least not openly, as far as I know, though I have to debrief all the relations they'd met). But my health has taken a huge beating in the process. I can't remember when was the last weekend that I actually got to spend at home, lazing around and getting some much needed rest and like it is happening with K, the abuse I had earlier wreathed on my body is now coming back at me with a vengeance.

If I can be stupid enough to ignore to the impending physical meltdown, there is a near-clean sheet that awaits me. I have mercilessly slashed and burnt everything that has been close to me, including the incredible hurt I have caused to someone dear just for her only fault that she loved me, and now I stand with pretty much a clear view of the road ahead. Like everything else in the same vein, the anticipation was much greater than the actual event. When it came, it came on a day when all my insides were clogged with a bad sinus and chest infection, at the ITO crossing, with Tiesto's Adagio for Strings blasting from the stereo. Weird, but nothing special.

In difference

2006-02-21T20:22:00.000+05:30

The problem and the opportunity is that life is a game of possibilities. The same indifference that hurts you the most can be turned around as a positive feature to ward off unsavoury feelings and reactions to many an unpleasant thing. On more than one occasion I have hidden behind my greatest botheration in recent times, the same indifference, to avoid being drawn into conversations and debates that only hold more hurt for me. All those times I end up asking myself if I even care what anyone thinks, if it even matters to me or if I even care what happens to anyone around me.

It is more or less true that I don't really care much anymore, which is different from not feeling about anything. I do feel, but I don't feel that it is of any importance. I feel afloat most of the times, going through the motions and watch life rush by me, not wanting much, not asking for much, just wanting to exist till I have to and then disappear without telling anyone or not letting anyone notice, that I ever did exist or that I even left. Now is a death of sorts actually and I don't mind or fear it much. In fact I might even go to the extent of saying that I do enjoy it a fair bit.

To be lost and to not belong can't be the same thing. I have come to realise, contrary to what I think, that I am not lost at all. The thing is that I just don't belong anywhere. Everyone tries to make me hold on to something, anchor me in something, while I cannot. I just cannot. I keep rolling like tumbleweed, gathering only age and more grey, while love slips gently through my innards every time, even when I want to desperately hold on to it. Now I am tired and I am weary, with no fight left in me, so I am indifferent, for all I can do is to roll and roll forever till when decay and disease will finally consume me.

Now you're no longer talking, And I'm no longer listening
There's nothing left to say, Said it anyway, Said it anyway....

Two heads are....

2006-02-20T21:29:00.000+05:30

02-20-06_1810
Originally uploaded by codelust.

That is the dual monitor set up I have now at work. Not quite as sexy as the Dell 21" monitors or dual 17" Dells that I've seen so many people brag about, but double the screen width, even on two 15" monitors is quite helpful when you got to keep track of a lot of things at the same time. My preferred set up for now is to have my browser and e-mail client on different screens while the putty consoles reside in the same monitor as the one that houses the e-mail client.

It also helps that I have a corner seat, which allows me to leverage the best from the set up. I've gradually migrated away all my work stuff on to the laptop. The system at home now only has a whole lot of gaming and music stuff on it. The only major use it sees now is to run the occasional DJing run in the night when I want to relax a bit. Now don't even ask me how music that goes thumpity thump can be relaxing, it is a freak thing, you gotta be one to understand it.

Meanwhile the Airtel GPRS connection is finally up and running. Strangely it works well when I hook up the laptop to the phone and dial out from it, but using the phone's browser just keeps returning me to the same error "data server not found". Anybody has any clue why that happens? I can't be assed to call the terrible customer service and find out why. If and when I do I will let you know. And oh, I am getting a max of some 7 Kbps on it. Not really great, but I will live.

What remains to be done is for Airtel (yes, them weird creatures again) to dig up my neighbourhood and send me waltzing into ADSL land. Then to spend another 3.5 k in buying a decent Netgear wireless router and we should be all set to go. But for the time being it is time to say hello to mobile computing. Any guesses for how long this fascination will last?

Sharp Edge

2006-02-20T11:56:00.000+05:30

I finally succumbed to the pressure and became the quite clumsy owner of a Moto Razr v3i last week. When I went to the shop, I wanted to buy a Nokia with the usual bells and whistles (GPRS, E-mail client, Java, Sync, camera and the works), but all the models looked like packets of butter, lumpy, unwieldy and heavy. I have a bad habit of dropping my phone at least once a day and it really did not look like any of the Nokia models would have survived such torture at my incapable hands.

Not that the Razr looks keen on being dropped thrice a day, but it does feel quite robust and most importantly it is quite compact and light. I can live with the fact that the camera is only some 1.23344444444 megapixels (who in their right mind would want a digicam without a flash for doing serious photography anyway?). The iTunes player is no great shakes and syncing it is the usual pain that is the case with the iPods and I really don't want to bother with the pain of syncing music for driving. I'd rather suffer the delightful and predictable tedium of the old car stereo for such eventualities.

The only sour point, as Russell noted earlier, is the eye candy-rich interface which does not allow for too much customisation and you end up with a feeling that you are missing on some option somewhere. I've not managed to get the GPRS working, even after some four calls to Airtel, guess it would take another round of screaming before they manage it. Even if it is half decent, I can probably get my ass off the lousy Spectrasmart connection at home even if the GPRS gives me only 14 Kbps, which is the maximum I get on Spectrasmart.

Relate

2006-02-20T01:13:00.000+05:30

The one feeling that is overwhelming me now is exhaustion. It has been three days since I have been far removed from a life and a routine that I am used to and one that I love to live. The bright side is that I am neither running nor picking a fight at every possible juncture, but the hard thing about living with a past that is anything but forgettable is that, even in a situation where there is not a single act of intentional provocation, every word said and every moment spent drains you out, physically and emotionally.

But one thing I am certain about is that I love my other routine life, even if it does not end up making the people whom I am supposed to love and care for happy. I guess, with all the whining that I do, I don’t sound thankful enough for it, but I am eternally grateful for it, especially when you consider that I was a total and possibly unrecoverable wreck by the time I had just hit my twenties. It has indeed been a long journey from there, most don’t even recognize me from that time, but that’s okay, I can live with that.

Over the past three days I have heard everything about almost everyone I’ve known back home. It has been a veritable nostalgia trip. I have felt curious at the best, indifferent at the most, with helpings of angst filling up the blanks in between. Sometimes I do wonder what they, if they do at all, remember me as. I do wonder how can I feel so distant and unattached to the places and people I have spent twenty plus years of my life with. Am I just deluding myself, or has the umbilical cord actually been severed? I just don’t know.

There are a lot of expectations from me for a lot of people. The folks and the relatives want me to get married before the end of the year because I am “ripe” for the picking. Now, which fruit would I’d rather be, jackfruit, mango or, if you take into account my skin colour, an apricot? And oh, it is “perfectly okay” to fuck around till you get married and then settle down with a perfectly “virgin and cultured girl” who has “excellent values”. Apparently, everyone does these things these days and it is no great secret either.

Maybe I should make use of the rare opportunity and ask for anatomical specifics. I could even start a new trend that way, create history and make a name for myself! But I won’t. This is just a temporary interlude or a brief digression for me. Meanwhile, the expectations are there from my friends too. In the past six months I have changed a fair bit and most of the changes are not good ones according to them. I’d rather not call them good, bad or anything else. I am just learning, teaching myself to figure out what is important for me and how to stand my ground. In today’s world nobody’s going to do that for you. Either you do it for yourself or it just won’t get done.

By the way, I am not saying that I won’t ever get married. I am only saying that I will get married only to the person whom I am THAT comfortable with, in a manner that is in accordance with my viewpoint of how such a special occasion should be celebrated. With my exceptionally high expectations, there is a fairly good chance that such a turn of events just might not happen, but I don’t really care much for lineage and legacy. It is a fuckall world we live in these days and last thing I want is to knowingly be with someone and be unhappy about it. It is just not fair on anyone in that case.

Of course, there have been plenty of queries: “don’t you miss home? Don’t you miss your family? Even people who go abroad come back a year or two later to visit their homeland, you don’t feel anything?” Actually, I don’t miss it much. I am curious as to what changes might have happened there, but other than that I do dread seeing people who are too caught up in making their lives and lives of other people miserable for no good reason at all. And it is not like I am absolutely happy here either. But at least I am trying to see what my heart is asking me to do and that is no simple feat in itself.

Even though I’ve managed to cross many a shaky bridge, I still do have differing degrees of self-doubt in different things in my life. At times I do wonder if I really know anything at all about what I am talking about, brining forth the earlier mentioned “being on to something” feeling, which I don’t quite know if it is real or if it is something that my mind is tricking me into feeling. But there is something resembling a path that I can see through the thicket, with time and I luck I should be able to hack through it.

Knotted, twice over

2006-02-18T15:52:00.000+05:30

I don't think it is such a good idea to make a decision in the fear of something you want to avoid. After two hours of a conversation, where the other side was trying to convince me why I should get married as soon as possible, I have emerged more or less unscathed and even more convinced that marriage is just not the route for me. How long can we really live in fear that we will all grow old some day, that we'll catch some horrible disease and be immobilized for the rest of our lives and make all our decisions based on things that might or might not happen some time in the future?

Let us be honest, with the lifestyles that we have these days, there is a fairly good chance that most of us would have at least one major ailment even before we pass the midlife crisis milestone. All you probably are going to get is some 10 - 12 prime years of your life where you should put in the best you can and if you are going to blow all of that up making decisions based on your fears, you really won't get anywhere. And no, I don't hold anything against the people who don't follow the same lonely, tortuous route as mine. It is just that this is my route, my choice and my only way.

This is a particularly difficult time for me, not as much in terms of emotional turmoil as it is in terms of the decisions I am making, even in cases where I could afford to put them off for a while. I'm making changes that will have a long-term impact on my life and possibly in the lives of people around me. But I've really had enough of being apologetic about what I am and hiding behind the shadows about my feelings. Even if I have just a couple more years to live, I don't want it to go to waste doing the done thing. I want all of it to be the best (at least for me) and nothing less will do.

Have you ever had this sneaky feeling, in the back of your mind, no matter how hard you try to deny it, that you are on to something?

Loud & Unclear

2006-02-16T19:09:00.000+05:30

Other than the obvious disadvantage of not being able to hear what anyone else is saying, there is no better joy than listening to your favourite music, at full blast via padded headphones, in an office that is worse than a fish market when it comes to ambient noise. Meanwhile, I've been more adequately compensated, accidentally though, for being issued a crappy Celeron M lappy by the office, when I discovered it could do dual displays and I've now hooked up the 15" monitor of the old Dell desktop which has not yet been taken away from me. The forecast for the next ten days is quite stormy, the folks are in town from today evening and that should see my already convoluted persona and psyche getting even more wonkier.

Trial

2006-02-14T02:18:00.000+05:30

I won’t pretend to submit to any compulsions in terms of form or matter in writing this. In any case this is not a multi million page view hot destination sort of blog. This is my tiny little 24 visitors a day (if I am lucky, that is) blog and other than the unlucky souls who come here searching for nude photographs of Deepa Sahi, only to return cursing the logarithmically driven binary creatures who sent them here in the first place, the others I presume are the loyal few who keep returning to consume the same drivel that I dish out every time. So, shall we throw the fancy clothing of norm and propriety out of the window and settle down to the regular business, stark naked, outrightly jaded and indulge in the same old repetitiveness?

Lament is a powerful concept. It enables you to cover up for so many things. Add a dash of pathos and a mild flavouring of poetic largess to it and you can serve up a gourmet meal that can satiate a fair number of unsuspecting souls who want to identify, sympathise and be a party to help get you overcome your still-unknown predicament. If there was ever such a thing, I would have filed long ago under the aegis of Chapter 11 for moral and cultural bankruptcy. On either count, I have long run out of any standing to sustain my operating costs or dream of any justifiable expansion, or even continue normal operations as most normal people would deem fit under normal circumstances. But such is the lure of pathos and the chorus of support it brings forth that the tune in itself takes a life of its own. Yes, I am being mildly insulting, but only at myself.

When I started writing this I wanted to wonder about the dichotomy between what dreams are made of, both during the growing up years and the initial years of adulthood, and what we really end up chasing after. But the pertinent point is that if we really did want it, we would have chased it down with all our might. Instead, we run for the better part of the day after all the petty and minor things and come evening, and later night, we console ourselves by the warmth of the fireplace of pathos, ruminating about how it all slipped away. The thing is, such things never slip away. We can always have it if we want it badly enough. Did it ever occur to any of us that we spend more time mourning the loss of something we have never had than spend an additional minute every day in chasing it down? Of course, I will clarify that writing about it does not count in bankruptcy proceedings. Bring the charges on.

Ominous

2006-02-11T08:54:00.000+05:30

It feels like someone has flicked a switch and turned my life off from the way it used to be. I cannot quite recognize the person I have become in the past couple of months. You can call me insensitive, wayward and inconsiderate and I would admit to all of those without batting an eyelid. Mind you, it is not like I am doing all this with an intent to piss off everyone around me. They are more like, to use an uncharitable phrase, collateral damage, there is little you can do to help me, the best you can probably do is to stay out of my way.

But there is an underlying desire to be the worst I can be and see how many can stand or survive that. To quote the now deceased Bill, “I'd like to believe that you're aware enough even now to know that there's nothing sadistic in my actions. At this moment, this is me at my most masochistic”. There is no other agenda at play other than pure self preservation. In a lot of ways, it is an act of desperation, a final gambit to go all in with what you are and see if the gamble pays off. If it does not, well, it is not quite worth struggling on in this manner anyway. There is only so much that emotional duct tape can do to hold yourself together. Eventually we all have to fall in one way or the other. I guess it is finally my time to do the same.

In the process I am hurting a lot of people around me, people, to whom I have been anything but cruel and inconsiderate before. But this progression is not about them, it is about me. It is a journey that I have to make for myself. It is a process whose logical end I must seek out by myself. I do not expect any mercy or sympathy. I’d love to say that I don’t care about such things. The fact is that I do, but at this juncture I don’t have the time or patience for those things. The simplest way of putting it across being, don’t come any closer unless you want to attract a lot of unwanted trouble your way. And if you do, please don’t complain later or tell me that I did not warn you.

Talk To Me

2006-02-08T01:01:00.000+05:30

Google now has a new feature which allows you to save the Google Talk conversations. If you enable it, all of the chat transcripts end up in a new label called 'chats' in Gmail. It is a mighty useful feature, especially for the lot of us who are prone to chatting under the influence every now and then. Unless, of course, you happen to be in China or some or some other snoopy place.

The feature also allows you to chat within the Gmail interface with your contacts. I have not tried that one out yet since nobody I know seem to be up at one in the morning. This, though, is nothing new though. It was earlier attempted, minus the Ajax wizardry, by a company which is not synonymous with the word 'innovative'. Brings back some old memories about conversations regarding where they could have been.

To wind up the marginally geeky post, if by some chance any of you are trying to compile and run Squid as transparent proxy, or as a reverse proxy in my case, please do not forget to run the command ./squid -z (the flag used to be the uppercase 'Z' earlier) before you attempt to run the executable. Trust me, this can save you a lot of tears and heartache, as I found out rather painfully.

Special

2006-02-06T00:16:00.000+05:30

What is life without a little bit of drama, a sprinkling of emotion and the smell of elation -- of things we have lost, things we have gained and the years we have lived? In the short years that we will get to live, if we can’t find at least five minutes of every day to stand back and look at the scale of everything around us and feel special and insignificant at the same time about everything we have done -- that we have done so much and even then it amounts to nothing, what is there really to live for?

You know, the thing I feel constantly about my life is the inevitability, of the end, of the lack of time that lingers in the air like stale cigarette smoke, of the truths we search so hard to find and the truths we try so hard to run away from. In the midst of all of this, the only saving grace are the rare moments when you feel special. It is that feeling you get when you are blessed by an act of kindness by a stranger that came out of turn or for no good reason, when you know you deserved none of it and still it happened to you.

It is the feeling that I get when I hit the wide open road after being stuck in some thirty minutes of awful and maddening traffic, when the world opens up in front and on both flanks. In a matter of a couple of seconds the horizon on either side, obscured in a veil of mild mist, shapes somewhere in the distance and the road snakes on endlessly into the distance. It is so much like life then. There is so much to discover on either side. The promise it holds ahead is tantalizing. It is so very special and uncertain at the same time.

And once in a while you get touched, more in your soul than in your body, like some sinful music that affects your entire being, where you are understood even without even having to speak a single word. For that short while you sway, you sing and you dissolve in it. Soon enough, the deafening noises come back, but for those five minutes you are the luckiest human being alive. You feel special, you feel blessed. The music ends, but the melody lingers on forever, to live and die along with you some day. Is it wrong to want to feel that special every living day or to spend each of those days, wastefully, looking, yearning and desiring that feeling, be it even in vain?

Maxed Out

2006-02-02T17:09:00.000+05:30

Yes, I am very much here, but time is a resource whose availability is very much scarcer than what is required or desired. In addition to my regular responsibilities that crisscross the lines of technology, journalism and borderline business development and alliancing, I have been admining the babies that keep the showpiece up and running. So it has been a week spent in the dark realms of PHP, Apache, Postgresql, Centos and plenty of MRTG graphs. If someone had told me a couple of years ago that I'd be fine tuning Apache for maximum performance and redoing web application architectures to make a living, I would have laughed my heart off. But it is not so funny when it actually happens, apparently.

On the other hand, there is a degree of lucidity and peace that has come visiting me after a very long time. It is not like I have acquired awesome degrees of purpose and meaning to my life overnight. It is just that I have decided to let go of a lot of things. If all these years of extreme and near-obsessive thinking has not brought those about, there is a fairly good chance that many more years of the same won't do much to achieve it. That being the case, I might as well enjoy the good things that I have in life and dump the things I can't fix and not kill myself in trying to fix them. So, really, I don't have much to crib about and I won't work hard to try and find something on those lines. Even with nothing, I can be happy. Really.

Desis Critical

2006-01-28T01:27:00.000+05:30

What in dear lord’s name is a ‘superior blogger’? Is it someone who is superior by his/her own admission, or is it a title that is conferred by a select group of pundits, who must themselves be super-superior to confer that title on lesser mortals? Regardless, it is amusing to see blogs taking on more and more mainstream media-like water into their hulls with advertisements pasted all over the pages.

I guess they have ‘costs’ to cover, which surprisingly is a line of reasoning that I attach myself to when I have to answer why the websites of the media companies I have worked for have the same Technicolor advertisements plastered all over them. Actually, I don’t have any issue with any of this, other than the fact that we bloggers don’t like to hold the mirror up to our own faces as much as we love to show it to the others. Do we actually hate our own faces that much?

Something Different?

2006-01-24T21:00:00.000+05:30

Once the required hours of sleep was dealt with on Sunday, after an all nighter which lasted till six in the morning for a server migration, I proceeded to try and sort out the complicated set of circumstances I have managed to place myself in. Once again, I found myself rambling, spewing forth disjointed streams of consciousness, trying to explain the whys and the wherefores. Actually what happened is unimportant. What is important is one of the disjointed thoughts that crossed my mind, about how most of us have forgotten our dreams or even how to dream and how we have settled down into little predictable and ordinary corners without even realising it. How did we get here?

Knotty

2006-01-21T18:16:00.000+05:30

On Friday I heard a great thud, one of the many that I have heard recently, of yet another one biting the wedding dust. The number of people I know who are single, and planning to stay in the same slot for a while to come, are rapidly dwindling. I don't have any problems with the ones who have made the progression. More power and all the joy in the world to them, but it is unfair to make us, the ones who still hold out for various reasons, feel like we are some sort of abnormal beings to not want the same or to have the same priorities as others. I would not even drag in my usual "there should be more to life" line here. Even without it, this is just plainly unfair.

But, is the lesser beaten path a real alternative? Can you really exist in this world sans the padded walls of a formally/legally/socially endorsed and certified relationship surrounding you, or are we just deluding ourselves and, like the ones who have made the transition often claim, only biding our time till we sign up for the regular programming? In that wall-less world, there are two possibilities: The first is where you are essentially the lone wolf, living without any long-term commitments, footloose and fancy-free, but always on the edge. The second is the classic live-in set up or even the case where you are married for all practical purposes, but without any of the formal problems associated with an actual knotted situation.

The problem with this logic is that you are naturally assuming that the marriage option is a non-starter or that it is a bad one, which is not really the case. There are other reasons too as to why marriage does not work for some. Speaking for myself, the primary reason is that marriage often brings forth an implicit degree of exclusivity in the relationship. A certain number of feelings (and I am not talking sexual ones here, open marriages are paradises where only fools reside) are not allowed outside of its boundaries as a hard and fast rule, which is based more on mistrust than trust. Additionally, as a person who has major trust issues, there are not many avenues of workarounds available for either problem.

Then there is the issue of validity of the institution of marriage itself. It is tougher these days to stay married than to stay single or attached and unmarried. Almost every couple that I know are having problems (yes, you can justifiably ask who does not have them?) and it harder then to ascertain whether the padded walls actually help in improving the situation or whether they actually end up worsening it. A lot of the problems are swept under the carpet and indiscretions are fine as long as they happen away from the public's view. Everyone admits to problems in hushed tones, but they speak of everything being fine and dandy when they speak in a clear voice. Is there not something wrong about that, or is it just my lone perception that it is just not right?

Why is it not right? Well, for one, an institution like marriage should ideally be built on a lack of pretensions. There should be absolute honesty and clear communication and there should not be the involvement of a gazillion 'experts' on the matter, ranging from relatives to numerous friends, who end up making a mess of even fixable issues. Is marriage not meant to be something very personal -- a celebration of something special between two individuals, than a reflection of the collective will of a group of individuals? In this age and time it should not be too hard to block out the unwanted elements from a relationship. If you can make something that involves factors as tough as the collective will of many work, why is it impossible to make something much simpler work outside the confines of the same padded walls?

Of course, you can rightly accuse me of highlighting only the problems in marriages than the positives, but the same works in the opposite direction too. But somehow the thought of involving hundreds of people in something that is extremely personal disgusts me. Why would I want to have random people commenting on and criticising the handful of people I love and care about, after having spent copious amounts of money and effort into putting up a grand 'celebration'? There is so much more you can do with that money. If you feel charitable, give it away or set up a trust fund. If you want to enjoy it, go on a cruise somewhere or invest it in your own future. But for heaven's sake can't we do this differently?

The Edge

2006-01-19T17:14:00.000+05:30

To describe the situation accurately, a quote from the Bard's classic work on the famous Roman emperor is in order.

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream:
The genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

Well, the context is actually significantly different. I am not on my way to killing anyone or myself for that matter (though the exact point of my existence has always been questionable), but this interim is indeed a hideous dream, with no sign of internal peace anywhere in sight. But I do realise that I stand at the very edge now from where I can either drop blindly or hold this unbearable ground for the rest of my life. Things have to change and they have to change soon. Eventually, those in the middle only get run over. To survive, you need to pick your side. It is about time I picked mine.

Life now consists mainly of troubleshooting and other regular duties at work and a bit of gaming, mixing practice and sleep at home. The thoughts don't wander anymore, they are more like a rampaging herd now, leaving me clinging for dear life. There are conversations, but only among many shades of myself. I seem to hate any kind of company and desire the perfect non-existent. The only respite comes in the form of music -- two Junkie XL remixes (Dilruba by Niyaz and Talk by Coldplay) and RR Workshop's Electrolux. All three are excellent tracks and don't ask me where to get them from, let the lord be your shepherd and lead you to greener musical pastures. Talk, I believe, expresses it best:

Are you lost or incomplete;
Do you feel like a puzzle,
You can't find your missing piece?
Tell me how you feel
Well i feel like they're talking in a language I don't speak
And they're talking it to me.

Halt

2006-01-17T17:56:00.000+05:30

It has indeed been a strange winter. The cold was not the sorts normally associated with Delhi and other than for a day or two there was no fog at all. And yes, I am knowingly writing about it in the past tense. Driving to work today, the sun was so bright and strong that I had to turn the fan on to get around it. Looks like the weather gods have gotten their calendar totally screwed up. We are going at least a month ahead of the scheduled change of seasons. Can I please have my normal winters back?

Have you ever had that feeling that your life is coming to a grinding halt? Initially the slowdowns and stoppages happen in fits and starts, later it stops more than the times it manages to keep moving. Things that mean a lot to you either dysfunction completely or keep malfunctioning with alarming regularity. Yes, life is a bitch, but there are times when you just can't keep up appearances and have the classic clown-like smile permanently plastered on your face. Do forgive me, but it is not like I feel low by choice.

I do need a break. In fact the last proper break I took was some three years back, if you can ignore the couple of extended weekend trips to here and there. The fact is further embellished by colleagues who tell you "when did you sleep last time, a year back? You look like you are going to collapse" first thing when you meet them in the day. But where do I go to? I don't want to go to my so-called home. I don't want to take a vacation with anyone I know. I'd really love to be able to go somewhere and not have to talk to anyone at all.

Fat chance, like they say.

Gash

2006-01-12T20:53:00.000+05:30

It has been one of those days. I am tired, emotionally and physically, beyond what I can express in words. There is an impending final slash that would sever the tattered sinews of the last relationship, which I can't come to terms with. It has become a wide open gash, both in my soul and psyche, that is encompassing everything around me these days. I wish I could just forgive myself, forget the whole episode and move on or have another go at it, make it work and walk into the golden sunset. But I can't seem to do either and I seem destined to wander, for a while at least, not being dead or being alive.

It has shaken me to the core that I can affect anyone in such a manner. Ideally, it should be flattering, It should have provided my ego with a tremendous boost. Instead, I feel shattered from the inside. I just can't seem to come to terms with the fact that I am going to pay the price of losing that person entirely from my life for the treatment I have meted out to her. It is not a fair enough price, in the sense that it is way too less for the crime and the heartache caused, but I can't seem to stop asking myself "why did it all have to come to this?" After all that I've seen, I should have known better. Apparently, that makes no difference to me.

Take Two

2006-01-10T19:37:00.000+05:30

There are two ways in which you can approach a problem. The first is to wait for someone else to fix it for you. The second is to fix it yourself. If you apply the same methods to arguments and beliefs, the logic becomes quite interesting. Using the first approach, you can wait for someone to come and challenge your beliefs and arguments and change yours to his or her's if it is convincing enough. Or you can challenge your own beliefs constantly and change it when you better your existing ones.

Using the first approach, you can stand on the shoulders of giants, peers or even lesser people. It mostly absolves you of owing hundred percent responsibility of your own actions and curbs independent thinking to varying degrees. But the benefits this approach are considerable. There are other people who have taken the same route before you. There is prior art in the case to consult and refer. You can build on it and make it better or you can use it implement a time-tested solution.

From that point of view, the second option has mostly negatives, if you can call them that, attributed to it. There are no existing paths, you have to clear your way through the maze, you make up the rules and chart out the map as you go along. The journey (yes, I can't ever seem to let go of that metaphor. So, boo) is long and unpredictable, the thinking is independent but chaotic, and the buck starts and stops at the same place - with you. There is no safety in numbers here, there is only the pleasure of discovery.

So what is all this weird thinking all about? I don't quite know. It is mostly an objective effort at self-reflection (can you really reflect on another person or anyone else for that matter?) and an attempt to see if there exists a possibility whereby you can step aside from your natural self and move into shoes, clothes and skin that are not necessarily yours. Which side do you or I belong to? I don't know for sure, the world is hardly ever purely black or white, but what's the harm in wasting a couple of idling thought cycles on things like these?

Smile?

2006-01-06T17:25:00.000+05:30

Something that has been bothering over the past few days is how unhappy most people I know are these days. It is an unending sequence of things that have gone wrong, things that are not working out and things that were never right from the word go. Even in the case of exceptions, where they are happy with their current state of being, scratching a bit under the surface reveals a state of guarded optimism at the best and steadfast denial at the worst. My own case, which I have totally given up on, is no different. Why are all of us so sad and miserable? Does there exist a situation where you are happy without being delusional?

Languishing in my bed yesterday, after yet another emotional dust up, I was wondering where have all those people who used to make us smile vanished? I don't mind being around to cheer up my friends and I do end up playing the joker more often than not to lighten up moods and situations. But after a while it gets to be really tiring. Your own backlog of problems never get properly addressed in the first place, that probably never will anyway, but the killer is the persistent onslaught of problem after problem. I can't even remember when was the last time I had met someone who made me smile.

A large part of the problem can also be attributed the way we live our lives. I dearly love doing things which I know should not be doing. I'll admit to it not for sounding saintly, but to selfishly preserve my own sanity. I had forced my friend into being in a relationship with me a month after I'd broken up with the person I was seeing for close to a year before that. As my better (and much ignored) instinct and a handful of close friends had pointed out, it was way too early for all that, I lost my nerve in galactic proportions somewhere along the way, did all the things that I should not have done by being unfaithful, inconsiderate and downright insensitive. In such a situation, the line "I am normally not like this" means shit.

That I am a prick of the greatest order is no great revelation, I have known that for a while now, only if I could convince everyone around me about it, life would be considerably easier. But coming back to the topic at hand, why is that these days we end up doing all the things that are required to destroy good things than to protect and embellish it? Is it because quick fixes are easy? And if we are choosing the quick fix route, why do we clamour for destinations that can only be reached by routes that hold at least a glimmer of permanence in them. Are we all nothing but naked hypocrites holding a court full of like minded and deluded people?

Of course, there are other possibilities. There is never enough time for anything and there are a fair number of deviants, including myself, among us. In such a situation, when you differ from the norm, is there any reason in expecting any fruits that are accrued only by following the norm? I guess the answer would be "no". I am not attributing even any half decent possibilities to this. If you look for a one night stand or a string of flings, that is precisely what you get. It won't get you any emotional sustenance, even the physical sustenance is doubtful at the best, but why do we still look for both when we say we are in it only for the short run?

Saved Message

2006-01-05T03:16:00.000+05:30

I don’t know who I hate more: Me or the rest of the world, I simply fucking hate everyone. Can I please not be myself, or whatever the world sees me as, and just let go of everything and hate once and for all myself and everything around me, forever and for eternity? It is not the alcohol; it is not any other substance. In the words that I speak now are the truths that I have always hidden.

I don’t feel cold. I don’t feel insensitive. I just feel a distinct lack of purpose. I feel like I am a prop, in someone else’s play. I don’t have a part to play for myself. I don’t have any explanations for myself. Not that you would be interested. Not that you would listen. Not that I have a point to prove. Not that your point has any significance within my context. After all, what am I? I am just a prop. I have always been. I will forever be.

The First

2006-01-02T00:10:00.000+05:30

And so it starts, the New Year, in all its cold glory. After two rounds of revelry that reminded me a fair bit about a time gone by, I have woken up into a world where the calendars have turned over and there is a new number that I have to get used to – 2006. But beyond that hardly anything has changed. There are no remembrances of 2005, good or bad, that I want to write about. I don’t even know if it was an average or a good year. Honestly, I don’t give a damn, onwards now into the new one.

I have been hit by one those things that I have managed to somehow avoid in all my five years of blogging: a tag. The idea is to list one’s top five quirks and here are the ones I could think up. 1. I sleep on my stomach with my face buried in the pillow because sleeping on my back does not allow me to breathe properly. 2. I can’t eat cooked vegetables, while I can eat almost all of them in the uncooked form. 3. I always lose my pens and umbrellas. 4. I can’t handle any kind of attention. 5. If I have the time, I love to stand in queues and observe people around me.

2006

2005-12-31T02:47:00.000+05:30

What? It is New Year’s Eve? Who gives a damn anyway? It is just another day. The morning after, most of us drag ourselves to back to work and life goes on. What is so special about it other than hordes of drunk drivers on the road and half penny crappy joints charging you your soul and ten times over to steal an insignificant kiss with the significant other at the point where it strikes twelve? Oh, oh.

There should be more to life, should it be not? There should be more to it than having put an end to a very difficult relationship. There should be more to life than having excelled at losing a friend you should have kept with you with all your might, thanks to your own stupidity. There should be more to life than working your ass off because you are scared to see what is left of your own life. Should it be not?

But no, there is not much more to it. You just attribute farcical values to it. You just aim to be one of the so many. You just listen to what everyone says than to what you have to say to yourself. But is there anything that you have to say to yourself? No, there is not. Everything just draws a terrible blank. An unparalleled emptiness. A state of feeling nothing beyond compare. A gesture that is no gesture at all.

It should not be about unwritten farewell letters that you badly want to write. It should not be about lives you want to save that can’t be and don’t want to be saved. It should not be about behaving way beyond your age. It should not be about holding yourself back from speaking your mind again, for the umpteenth time. It should not be about causes that mean nothing to you; but it is all that said above and much more.

But as we speak, live and breathe, it will all repeat itself. It will recycle itself over. We’ll rediscover ourselves in the preset ways. We’ll bask in our own glory of having achieved what has already been achieved million times over. We will convince ourselves that there is nothing more to it. After all, we all are just so very ordinary. We have nothing better to aspire to other than another vague year with a new, unique number attached to it.

So here is wishing you all a happy 2006. Live it up, because the next year will practically be the same, albeit with a different number. Hey, at least we do know how to count. Isn’t that sexy, progressive and some awesome achievement?

Note: Post edited and cleaned up for clarity and language detoxification. Blogging under the influence is not the best of things to do.

There You Go!

2005-12-28T15:15:00.000+05:30

What the heck, I might as well lift the rest of the veil away and reveal my own very drunk and drugged Neanderthal-looking mug to the lot of you. Well, yes, that is indeed me. In fact I look much worse in real, bless the photographer and his lighting. Look ma! He's even made me look fairish. No more Fair and Lovely for me. Yay!

Year End Err?

2005-12-24T06:52:00.000+05:30

Five thirty in the morning is not really the ideal time to update your much-neglected blog. But a combination of factors – sucky RPM-installed server components (Apache, PHP Postgresql), the weird ways of Unicode and really thick fog – has ensured that I am finally left with a little bit of time to dust off the environment here.

These days home has become a place where I just drop by at weird hours in the night or early morning to get some much needed sleep and have a quick shower before I head out for the flyway and make my way back to the office. It has been an insane week; actually, make those two weeks. Due to the unpleasant surprise of an earlier-than-planned launch, we ended up rushing things through the door in whatever shape or form we could.

My crazy lead developer and I have done some 13 days on the trot now, with more than a handful of overnighters and late nights thrown in for good measure. Even if adrenalin were to be the food of product launches, I don’t think we would be able to play on for much longer at the same rate.

Strangely, after having blogged pretty consistently for close to five years, I don’t feel at all like blogging in my official capacity. It almost feels like being transplanted from the coziness of your tiny little home to the uncomfortable and exposing environs of a steely building. It feels impersonal and unfamiliar.

Maybe it is also a case of selling overkill. I’ve been trotting out catchphrases and thinking so incessantly about the product that when it comes to an activity like writing, which I can only do consistently when it is unforced and pleasurable, I draw a complete blank. I will readily admit though that the wider and grander audience is a great draw, but it is just not good enough a draw right now.

Moving on, it looks like another year is about to end. 2005, was it? It has been a long time since most measures of time made any significant difference to me. Most days look and feel the same. Months are measured by cycles of bill and rent payments.

Years are those irritating celebratory demarcations wherein you have to find out ways to keep yourself safe and far from depression at the same time. If you stay home, to be safe or because you don’t have anywhere to go, it sucks because the whole world is outside and you are not. If you go out, it is crazy, dangerous and
awfully cold. Die if you do, die if you don’t.

The good point is that you will only die sooner with this passage of time.

By the way, on a slightly technical note, has anyone noticed that the MSN Live Mail beta now works on Firefox too? Well, kind of works, that is. A couple of tabs have gone missing from the top and there is no reply button. But it does work more or less the same as on Internet Explorer, minus the right click context menus, with IE Tab extension.

The writing interface has also grown a very Microsoft Word-like spell check on-the-go feature now. I have to admit that it does feel pretty spiffy now, maybe even spiffier than Gmail, though I’d wait till it is deployed across the entire user base before I pass any judgment on that.

Is there anything else that I wanted to write about? Don’t think so. I can hardly haul up my eyelids and keep them open for any decent period of time now. Besides, it is half past six now. The thick fog should have lifted a bit by now and I think I really do need sleep.

Waiting To Inhale

2005-12-20T19:04:00.000+05:30

Yes, I am very much a-live, just a bit short of breath. Normal service will resume soon.

Can Never Negate Internal Blog Noises

2005-12-17T21:47:00.000+05:30

Okay, I have been rather cruelly outed and left to fend for myself in the biting Delhi cold. Not really. It was just a matter of time anyway before the thin veil of anonymity that I had hung over myself was lifted voluntarily or involuntarily. Anyway, quite a fair majority of my tiny audience do know about my real persona, so there is nothing quite devastating or earth shattering about it and in any case I don't score big on the fish scale for it to matter much. Maybe now I can finally dump the really dumb 'codey' persona? Guess it is also a good time to word that standard disclaimer about not representing my employer and also find a bit of space for it somewhere on the sidebar.

In such hectic times (I have some 13 tabs open in my text editor and another 13 plus open in my browser displaying various pages of the site all at once for the first time), quoting from a book should be the last thing on my mind, leave alone reading it. But when someone writes like this: "If you work in the city long enough, it begins to deal with you on a personal level. Streets reveal their moods. Sometimes the signal lights love you. Sometimes they fight you..." it takes away whatever teeny weeny inclination you might ever have to actually sit down and write something serious someday. Is there nothing that has not been written about already?

Spartan Love

2005-12-15T15:19:00.000+05:30

Google has released a baffling extension to Firefox called Webcomments. The name they have given for it is a bit misleading since it is actually about commenting on your blog about the blog you currently have open in Firefox, than commenting directly in the blog that you currently are on. How it works is by running a search on search.blogger.com for the URL you are on and then it returns the results in an alert at the bottom right corner of your screen. You can then either click the results and see the full entries or blog about the entry (in a 'blog this' fashion) using the 'Add Comment' feature. Confused yet? Well, so am I.

Interestingly, when I open my Gmail mailbox, the alert pops up with a link to something written by Britneys Clitoris. What is happening is the daft extension is searching for 'link:http://mail.google.com/mail/' on blogsearch.google.com and returning a whole lot of spam blogs and on that same results page I get an alert that points to a blog by Jaundice James. This could turn out to be quite an interesting way to kill your spare time, which I don't have much at all, so the matter and the extension shall die a whimperish death in the next couple of minutes. Dear Google, next time, please try and not create a requirement around a new feature. You see, sane people normally approach things the other way round.

In other Google developments, the 'Move to Trash' option has disappeared from my Gmail drop down. Does this actually mean now that all the mail thus deleted would actually be deleted than being marked invisible on Google's many datacenters? Speaking of which, I am a bit curious as to whether I am the only who terribly dislikes the idea of having all the Google pages display my id on all the Google pages once I am logged into Gmail or Blogger? Can I please have an option to opt out of this and have my good old spartan Google homepage back. You see, I have pretty low self esteem and I don't like being reminded of my own pitiful existence every other minute. Will saying pretty please help?

Incidentally, the past couple of entries on this blog has been done in a very old school style using Lynx on a Linux server. Due to bandwidth constraints, the regular funky Blogger posting interface almost never opens here at work (Reliance also probably has some routing issues) and I am quite pleased to report that the text-only version of Blogger degrades very gracefully on the text-only browser. There is another workaround possible with Wbloggar, but that software has a strange bug which duplicates posts every now and then instead of updating them. So it is going to be the evil pleasures of the text-ridden black screen for me for a while now.

Divides

2005-12-13T18:18:00.000+05:30

Which side are you on? I must ask you this question since I have never figured out which side of any divide do I belong to. Theoretically, I am an Indian who hails from the southernmost state in the country - Kerala, who was spent the last six years of his life in New Delhi. Practically speaking, I use an alien language - English - to communicate more than my mother tongue - Malayalam - or Hindi, which is the national language. My lifestyle and beliefs are asynchronous with both the western and Indian versions of the same and culturally I don't subscribe to any beliefs, nor do I celebrate any of the known festivals. Mostly by intent and a little bit by accident, I really do not belong to any side.

I was born a Hindu. I did my schooling for ten years in a Hindu school and did the next five years of my education in a Christian institution, though I have to clarify that the latter did not force down their faith down my throat as the former used to do. Interestingly, I can still mouth a couple of chapters from the Bhagavad Gita in mangled Sanskrit, though I would be totally clueless about what I am reciting in the first place. I have never believed much in the concept of a God, though I do have the habit of praying to anyone who is listening out there, when it comes to matters concerning the wellbeing of the handful of people I really care about. Here too I don't have a much of an opinion. Neither am I a believer, nor am I an atheist.

Politically, I grew up in a really mixed up environment. My family was one of those staunch en masse Congress voter types who would go the extra mile to hide their latent sympathies for the Jan Sangh/BJP/RSS variations. A lot of my friends and people I knew were staunchly aligned with the Left side of the political spectrum and in the early years they definitely had my sympathy. Over time, I have grown to dislike and disown each and every political formulation. As an art from that stretches the limits of logic, politics does interest me, but beyond that it I find it to be boring, tedious and largely repetitive. Strangely, for all the disdain I have for it, I seem to track American politics more than the Indian version these days.

For as long as I could remember there has always been music in some form in my house. I grew up listening to Hindi and Malayalam music on All India Radio and the folks were great Carnatic music aficionados. Somewhere along the way my fascination with western music came alive which took a pretty circuitous route from the usual suspects of Michael Jackson, Boney M, ABBA to rock, heavy metal, grindcore, jazz, finally ending up with a lot of electronica and off beat things that sound good to my ears. With that progression my old contention of any genre, but what I like, being rubbish disappeared. I still do like Carnatic, Hindustani, house, trance, rock and lot of other things, but I can't find any favourite divide here either.

I do agree and understand that a lack of belonging need not necessarily be a bad thing and I do seem to love hanging in this state of suspended animation - switching from one island to another, not necessarily because I love it, but because I can't find that niche or that warm corner to tuck myself into. In effect, I have nothing against anyone or anything, but mostly I don't quite like too much about anyone or anything. As a direct result of this I have succeeded in isolating myself further into a corner which is not necessarily mine or of my liking, but at least I don't have to tolerate anyone other than myself in there. The reasoning and the logic behind this is a bit warped, I know, but that warpedness is another story for another day.

With Love From Durgapur, West Virginia

2005-12-12T20:04:00.001+05:30

Interestingly, on Zend's talent page there are a lot of Indians who manage to work from both Alaska and other places in India at the same time. After seeing a couple of "Delhi, AK, Alaska, India" cases I dismissed it thinking they all must be part of some offshore web solutions company which must have been contracted to work on site in Alaska. But it did get me thinking why Alaska of all places? The mystery only deepened when I saw "Virudhunagar, TN, Tennessee India" and "Durgapur, WV, West Virginia, India".

PHP coders must be going places these days, I thought upon seeing these. Which also must explain the reason why we can't seem to hire any of them even after having hunted hard for over two months now. I mean, compared to working in freezing Alaska and Virudhnagar in Tennessee, Noida must look like the wastelands of Timbuktu. Of course, none of this has to do with horribly designed forms on US based websites which make the 'state' drop down a required choice even if you choose any another country than the US.

Neo Commander in Chief

2005-12-10T17:47:00.000+05:30

The US Air Force has released a new mission statement which reads something like this:

The mission of the United States Air Force is to deliver sovereign options for the defense of the United States of America and its global interests -- to fly and fight in Air, Space, and Cyberspace. Linktrail: Jeremy > Danny

After reading that, I got vision of the portrait of the US Commander in Chief, who can now fly through cyberspace, as someone who closely resembles Neo in The Matrix.

Blue bulbs phenomenon hits Bloggers

2005-12-08T15:33:00.000+05:30

Special Correspondent Wrathus Sourgrapes

Fused Filament, Thursday, December 08, 2005: In a dramatic development, the blogosphere (the collective orb of bloggers) was hit yesterday by an acute case of blue bulbs. Chaos erupted after it was discovered that the main bulb that lights up the blogosphere decided to blow its filament overnight and none of the bloggers (the entire A-Z list) could come to an agreement over how to get it changed in the most effective manner.

According to trustworthy sources, the collective immediately sprang into action and set up an online petition, a poll and a threaded debating forum to discuss the situation. Chronic blogger Kumar Permalinkum who was spearheading the initiative said no effort would be spared in replacing the fused bulb. “It is a travesty of incredible proportions, the bulb that shone the way for us is gone, we need to get it changed now and thus we are going to change the world. This is going to be only the first example of how we will achieve that end. For now we shall discuss this matter to till it reaches its logical conclusion – that someone should go up, unscrew the old one and replace it with a new one.”

As the issue gained traction across the blogosphere (with over 2 million links to the tag ‘bulb’ on Technorati), influential voices such as members of a prominent libertarian cartel weighed in with their opinion on the situation. “It is pathetic that a fused bulb does not have the freedom to stay on in the holder for as long as it wants to. Attempts to bring in any regulation regarding the changing of fused bulbs should be opposed tooth-and-nail. Every bulb on the planet should be allowed to pick a time for going bust of its own choosing and convenience”, said the serious cartel leader who requested to keep his identity undisclosed even in the light of the new darkness.

The fused bulb also seemed to have affected the bloggers who are part of the blamestream media (BSM). Prominent BSM blogger Yumm, in her latest post, wrote: “Bulbs are such rocking things. I still remember this bulb and its gently glowing filament, at Tizzy of course, which was the only thing between me and the ex that day. Sigh, I do miss bulbs.” Not one to be left behind, another BSM blogger Clodlost wrote: “Bulbs are such ephemeral things, they light up our subcutaneous lives and go away in an egregious manner, thus lighting up an interval that is insignificant to the sordid soul’s life, but significantly important in the karmic progression of insignificant things. In any case, bulbs are like twenty quid a pop, like everything else in life they are pointless and replaceable.”

But the worst affected of the orb was the Confederation of Bloggers Against the Tony Pailed Man. Reports said that their members were seen in cities all across India and the rest of the world seething in outrage that the Tony Pailed Man and his coveted Institution of the Double Eye had nothing to do with the incident. “How in the world can this be? Tony Pail is responsible for all that is wrong in the world. I can show you documental evidence that his great grandfather once cheated Edison out of two dollars, which was a clear move to affect the development of light bulbs. Can’t you see the obvious here?” asked a confederation leader who was willing to be identified by only by his blog URL, http://crewcutsrule.blogspot.com.

As the night wore on, more developments related to the bulb were reported from different quarters. The two disparate versions of the Delhi Orb Meet, who were involved in a vicious fight about which Orb meet was the bestest, found a common platform in the blown bulb to set apart their differences as they met by a common scented candle to mull over the developments in an environment of mutual suspicion and hostile bonhomie. Both camps, though, did clarify that once the new bulb was in, normal sparring would resume. The dimly lit environment also found another taker in a BSM stinger, who, in the guise of a candle seller, was seen taking notes discreetly in the corners under the light of a pen torch.

Least affected by the bulb outage was the ElleJay blogger community. Senior ElleJay blogger Dimbulb said: “We have been dealing with the issues of failing bulbs long before any other blogger community. In fact, we even have a thriving community, Bulbous Failures, that deals exclusively with this kind of thing. For that matter, we even married off ZeroWatt and FortyWatt only last week in a candlelit ceremony online.

The last group to join the fray was the Opensluice community. This was largely due to their professed indifference to the issue due to the use of invalid spark up by existing bulbs. “It was an accident waiting to happen. We have been advocating the open bulbs precisely for this reason. We have never had any problems with our cluster of open bulbs that are actually old lanterns now retrofitted with an embedded version of Linwicks. This just another validation of our motto, ‘Only the command line can save your operating soul systematically’, said community leader Regex Ramanujan.

As the hours wear on since the time when the bulb went bust, a distraught world is asking tough and discomforting questions like “How many bloggers does it take to fix a light bulb?” and “When will the blogosphere finally see the light in this new era of darkness?” Only time and bandwidth shall tell.

With inspiration inputs from other fine sources of authentic reporting, The Onion and the T2N2 Network.

Telly Ache

2005-12-06T19:34:00.000+05:30

I think I can now officially say that I am exhausted to the point of near-total ineffectiveness. After a disastrous tryst with the famous dish called nehari at the Karim's joint in Noida, most of the weekend was spent in a state of being that comprised my ribcage attempting to drive its tenants, the heart and the lung, out of it. That was only enhanced by a degree of tautness all over my body, accentuated with searing pain in each and every joint. Not to be left behind, the spine also felt like it was missing out on too much fun and by Monday morning I had made the magical transformation from being a reasonably healthy 26-year-old to a slouching 80-year-old with an acute case of arthritis.

Through the best part of the suffering I had no clue that it was the hogging on Saturday that was to be blamed for all the chaos. Instead, I had a sneaky feeling that I was now in the grip of some terrible disease that threatened to throw my life off its very self centred track. I was listing all the sins I would have to forego from that time on and was even planning my classic debut semi-autobiographical work on how I dealt with the very perilous situation when I finally got to office and saw that all the others who had participated in the Saturday fest had gone through a similar fate. Thus ended prematurely my potential tryst with fame and stardom, which, I must add, was not without a sense of relief.

It is actually a rare pleasure to have the time to sit down a blog a bit these days. A television news channel operation is more or less like a tiny planet in its entirety and even though, thankfully, I am not in the thick of the action, there are so many things to track and take care of. The start up situation is an exemplary rendition of Brownian motion and it is amazing how the million tiny pieces, including technology and personnel, fall into place to form the images you get to see on the screen. But what stands out the most is the power of the visual, which can transform the most inane and pointless of scripts into a work of absolute wonder.