Satyamev Jayate

A rather unusual incident happened about two weeks back when I was waiting at the bus stop to get to work. Someone (a man, an African American probably in his fifties who didn't look like a homeless weirdo or a drunk person) asked me if his t-shirt looked okay. I tried to give him an honest answer without being too rude. I am an easy target for questions me when I am outside and I am not on the phone (the phone is going to be my rescuer until I change my lifestyle ;-) ). This person was no exception; he wanted to know if he can ask me a question (usually this is a warning sign :P ). I said a rather reluctant 'yes' and he went to say that he read somewhere that Indian women are made to abort their female fetuses and many women consider abortion a sin. I could see where that was coming from. I hadn't started watching the TV show at that time but I knew what Aamir Khan has been doing and what kind of a reach 'Satyamev Jayate' has on the society at large. And I had to give that unknown person an answer.

In what way am I answerable? My first response was "It's so easy for people to start forming opinions when they read something". That wasn't the nicest answer of course and this person began to explain that he wanted to be educated. I was in a dilemma. Do I appreciate his curiosity (or was it concern ?) on the subject that prompted him to solicit social education from an unknown "Indian" woman on the bus stop or do I just tell him that I had very limited knowledge on the subject of female fetocide despite the fact that I strongly condemn it and hope that my evasive answer put an end of the conversation ? A third element was making me answer though, and that was an innate tendency to not let down the country that I come from. I replied that killing a female foetus is illegal in India (from what I knew) and a lot of change is happening to banish this inhuman practice from the pockets where it's taking place.

And then I came home and watched the show's first episode. I was totally shocked and moved; it was really painful to see and hear what some women had to say (I might have cried if I were on the sets). :( I could see people asking for a fast-track court to expedite judgment on pending cases against doctors aiding such inhuman killings in Rajasthan and the response was overwhelming. I went to bed hoping that everyone gets an answer.

While that story remains incomplete still, something positive has happened on a different front. The Lok Sabha has passed the Protection of Children Against Sexual Offences Bill today. I'd like to believe that the crime and it's perpetrators would be eliminated eventually and that justice would be done to those little kids who have survived nightmares that I can't bring myself to describe. Let the change happen, hopefully the truth alone will prevail.

Adios !

Kindness

It is a known fact that I live in my own world; it's either deep focus or habitual dreaminess. Sometimes I don't bother to notice what's going on around me. This became very evident after I told my colleagues that I hadn't seen a certain person who sat < 8 feet away from me (in 2 whole weeks !). But I get very defensive whenever there's any movement behind my back. After all, I too am equipped with those reflexes. ;) I had a small mirror on my monitor at my previous workplace. It was a fairly useful thing to have ... but I would still jump out of my skin if someone caught me unawares at my cubicle.

Anyway, I boarded a bus a few hours back. I got in, placed my Clipper card before the card reader, heard the thing buzz it's "OK" acknowledgement, scanned quickly to see if the seats at the back (on the right side of the bus) were free, found a good seat and sat down. Only then did I realize that I didn't even look at the driver or greet him ! He would have let out a string of expletives if I paraded to the front on the moving bus and said "Hi ! I wanted to see your face and greet you."

Well, I forgot about all that as I got busy with my phone while that gentleman did his duty sincerely. I decided to get out through the front door as I wanted to see if a friend was waiting at the bus stop. The wheels rolled to a stop as the signal turned red at the intersection closest to my stop ... and suddenly, the door opened magically (I can't miss this chance to exaggerate) !

It was so kind of the driver to open the door for me there. I crossed the street immediately as the bus and everything else on that side waited for the green light. Before getting out though, I looked at his long white beard, then his smiling face and said thanks; I think he is an Indian. I don't remember his face now. I don't know when I'd meet him again on the bus; but after a long %#@!!% day ... it felt good to know that someone thought about me and showed me that they cared ... and for this very reason, that person is my hero today ! :)

Images

I watched Hyderabad Blues by Nagesh Kukunoor and it's sequel a couple of weeks back and was quite impressed with the portrayal of several characters in both the movies. I followed these up with Aashayein, which doesn't compare to the former but has a subtle touch of class in it's own way.

There's a scene in the movie where Padma, a highly vivacious cancer patient pretends to be unconscious to draw attention to herself. She wanted the other inmates of the shelter to know that she's suffering. She goes on say that people would think that she's really brave if she always sports a happy demeanor. She is as unfortunate as anyone living the last few days of their life is, and she doesn't want to be thought of any differently.

I can relate to that statement. When a friend / someone who we talk to is distressed, we don't want them to see a very pretty picture of our lives. Human beings are a bundle of contradictions. We think we are safer when some things are exaggerated / underscored. We want to be strong and dependable and yet we don't want our struggles to go unnoticed. Are we paranoid that something would go wrong if the world perceives us to be more comfortable than we are? Do we even know how fortunate we truly are?

It is true that our expectations rise steeply as time goes on and sometimes things don't happen as fast as they would in the best case scenario. But don't we all wish for the best and prepare for the worst? Is being over-cautious curtailing our freedom in any way? There's no straight answer to this question. Anyway, it is rare to find instances where one's outward and inner composure are in sync with each other.

There have been times when I have walked to the bus stop near my apartment in Gainesville after staying up the whole night. I'd be completely exhausted at the very start of the day (because my previous day never ended :P) but my mind would still feel fresh when I look around me and think "It's a sunny / windy / cloudy / chilly day in toy town". Gainesville always reminded me of the "toy town" in Enid Blyton's Noddy. Post Gainesville, I lived in a very serene neighborhood when I first moved to the Bay Area. I often thought that walking into a painting would feel the same if nothing else moved around me (there were joggers, ducks and some other birds to give me a sense of reality :) ). Even beautiful images disappear like flashes before our eyes when our thoughts take us to a different world. I left both these places in a very unsettled state, with several unanswered questions; yet I remember them with a certain fondness when I think about the days that have gone by. Long story short, is the heat of the moment so intense that we never feel the presence of a tranquil breeze? I still wonder ... adios !

Rebooting

I am breaking my silence. Brilliant ! At last, this post has begun. Some good writers would write paragraphs in some random order and then sort them to get the right sequence. I can't do that because I face a different problem sometimes. I stare at the screen, type one sentence, delete it and stare at the screen again. So effectively, I'd have written 50 posts in my mind but I'd still end up with the same blank screen.

I am just going to pick one of those things that I wanted to blog about for a long time and try putting it all together in one post. So what's that thing? That thing or rather those things are smartphones. It all started with my internship at RIM. I became friends with a lot of Blackberry phones. Then I bought my first Android phone in September 2011. It was the Droid Bionic - the newest and flashiest Verizon phone at that time. I got the phone from a Verizon store, came home, played with it for a while and voila, there was a bug - a bad one at that ! For some reason, the signal to noise ratio on the phone was jinxed and there was an annoying hiss whenever I plugged my earphones to play any sound / music. I wasn't the only person facing this issue either. There were tons of complaints on several forums. I should have researched more before jumping into the purchase. Epic fail !

I picked the Samsung Droid Charge right after I returned the Bionic. Though it's specs aren't as cool as the latter's, the Droid Charge is a good phone. 4G LTE & GPS can drain the battery pretty fast, so leaving home with your phone partially charged isn't a good idea. Another pain point is that it takes about 2 seconds for the display to reappear after the screen timeout. Also, the scroll bar on the call history screen doesn't reset to the top after I scroll down & make a call. My Mom has suffered the most because of this. The worst case scenario usually happens when I miss a call from someone and try it to return it too fast without remembering what can potentially happen. When I pull down the notification bar to call back who's ever call I had missed, her number gets dialed as the cursor would stay at the position of last placed call. I hate this !

Speaking of the positives ... , I love the home, menu, back and search buttons, the camera & the super AMOLED plus touch screen ... but there's so much more that a phone can have ... and I began to think about all that within a few days of using this phone. Ironically, my user behavior wouldn't change significantly even if I get another phone with a dual / quad-core processor, newer OS and better specs. But there are trade offs ... and compromises. I thought I'd list out the most important things that I'd look for in a phone (assuming my carrier network supports it). Here goes:

1. Call quality, network capabilities (LTE)
2. OS
3. Processor
4. Display
5. Sound
6. Brand (actually this can be ranked higher ... status matters :P )

My dream phone isn't here yet. There are a lot of cool phones but there isn't one which has the best of all the parameters. Or is there an intelligent reason for not putting together a combination of all the superlatives? >_> Will find out ... but I am still fancying that new LTE phone, or rather, I am thinking about what I can do differently on it to actually feel the difference.

Will blog more on this later. BFN

Bugged

I see a lot of (software) bugs. I find some, I fix some and I live with the rest (not knowing that they exist, lurking in the dark somewhere ... ready to jump at me when I least expect them). :-| Good, that was dramatic enough. I'll start my story.

I hate having unread messages in my inbox. I read email, mark items as read or I trash things that I don't need. Nothing extraordinary there. I'll add that I open my email from more than one computer and I also use email apps on my phone. Yes, yes I am being slightly prissy here (after all that is how we have to be when we deal with bugs).

I did pretty much the same things yesterday - opened a few new messages from my laptop, deleted some without opening them, marked one or more messages as read, opened a few emails from my phone and then I noticed the bug! There was one unread message which was not visible in my inbox. I call such bugs ghosts, so lets call this the gmail phantom (or the black sheep ?! Phantom this time, I'll use black sheep in some other post ;) ).

I searched my inbox, refreshed the page several times, signed out and signed back in, but nothing helped. So I slept on it :) and tried something different this morning. I searched for a tweak online and discovered something interesting. There's this nice search field that lets us search within gmail. Type "is:unread" there and hit search, voila! - you get a list of unread messages (including unread messages from the trash folder). I saw a couple of random messages that were trashed, but I found nothing from the inbox. Anyway, I marked the whole lot as read and my problem was solved.

All I know is that some list didn't get cleared correctly, how and why it happened are beyond my capacity to fathom (without any logs). When I searched for all the unread items, the phantom too came along and I killed it. I hate such bugs, you don't know where they come from but they bug you to no end. :angry frown:

There was another invisible bug that I saw a few weeks back. I couldn't become invisible on gmail chat (the Google Talk that's linked to gmail) even after I signed out of all other sessions (I was signed in on my laptop, a desktop and a phone). Apparently, this was a bug that many mobile users have faced and I tried a remedy that someone had posted in a forum. I signed out, uninstalled the app on my phone and reinstalled it. That did the trick. I don't remember clearly, but I think I was able to turn invisible after I uninstalled the app. Anyway, the end result was that I stopped using that gTalk account on my phone. Actually, life's more peaceful now.

I see similar bugs on Facebook. Sometimes notifications get lost or I see the incorrect number of likes and comments on some posts (mine / my friends'). Later, these bugs go away. But as I said, there's a whole bunch of evil bugs in this planet; love them, hate them, you just can't ignore them! Adios!

Navratri

Ganesh Chathurthi (or Vinayaka Chathurthi) marks the onset of many beautiful festivals in the second half of every year. Janmashtami (or Krishna Jayanti) follows closely and then there's Navratri (or Dussehra). Deepavali is next and then there's Karthigai - the festival of lamps.

Since I grew up in Chennai, these festivals formed an integral part of my life although I did not participate much. I had been wanting to blog about Navratri for a long time. Now is the perfect time as Navratri is going to start in another ten days and celebrations would have already started in my beloved Chennai with the usual festive spirit and bustling excitement. Only school going kids would be waiting impatiently to be get their quarterly exams done with before they are let loose in the holidays. :)

Many craftsmen set up shop on North Mada Street (Mylapore) for a couple of weeks and sell dolls of Gods, Goddesses, cricket sets, the conventional chettiar family and so on. The Golu is kept in many homes for 9 days with a grandeur of colorful dolls and decorations. I too have made steps for the dolls using boxes, tables, books and host of things that are conveniently hidden beneath a silk sari or a dhoti. We had a rack too but assembling it was harder than the aforementioned approach and my mom and I chose the simpler option when we didn't want to wait for help. Here is a related post with more images.

Anyway, half the purpose of this post is fulfilled. Now I have to move on the more interesting part. The ten days turn out to be a socializing spree for many ladies. The thamboolam has to be exquisite and my mom and I have racked our brains year after year to buy Navratri goodies. The obvious choices were plastic boxes, stainless steel bowls, shloka books, purses, accessories for young girls etc. At one point, we exhausted all these options and I firmly said that we should give Rs.11 to all aunties and kids because everyone has a surplus of plasticware and utensils (and honestly I was bored of getting potentially useless gifts). My Mom liked the idea too. The experiment was mostly successful except for that one time when some lady / aunty asked "Why are you giving money?" and I tried hard to not say "Seriously, give it to me if you don't want to take it". I used to collect pens and buy plenty of notebooks and eleven rupees was a big deal to me !! Another year we gave away all the extra gifts we'd bought in the past - some for Navratri, some from my brother's thread ceremony. The problem of plenty indeed !!

There was another occasion when one of our guests was a middle-aged woman. She entertained us quite well actually. Our oft neglected veena got some attention from her that day and she chatted on for a while in contrast to many other women. All of a sudden, she asked me "How old do you think I am?". "I think you are fifty", I said. She was so shocked to hear the truth from me. "You guessed right" was all she could say. I still laugh a little wickedly when I think about my honest answer that day. Back then, I was just a girl in my bold teens. I didn't give fake compliments to anyone. These days I do that for fun sometimes or when I am forced to be diplomatic. :) See, I am still very forthright about most things. Not much has changed. :)

I'll add one more incident from my reminiscences. This one is slightly sadder. My mom and I were going to my brother's tuition teacher's home as she had invited us to her golu. I really didn't want to go but I had to tag along as my mom and I had a lot of things in our agenda that evening. I tripped and fell outside a shop close to her home just a few minutes before we went there, and my knee was hurting badly. Unfortunately, she asked me to sing and I yielded notwithstanding my pained state and amateurish singing. I suck at remembering lyrics and I chose this song on Lord Raghavendra only because I play it often and I know the verses by heart. I can't do the same vocal acrobatics as the legend Maharajapuram Santhanam but I think I got the effect right in the last stanza. With my bruised knee, I think I let out a groan with all the notes right in Aahir Bhairavi "Raaghavendra ...". I quickly finished that really hard stanza before I made any major blunder and my mom praised me generously. "I didn't know you could sing this song Vidhyaa. I don't hear you sing at home. It's such a revelation." I don't hear myself sing either. I am a backing vocalist to all the stalwarts in carnatic music in the recess of my room. The bathroom stimulates my musical vein as well but I don't like singing before strangers. :-| Anyway, that lady didn't say a word. I could see the frown on her face and I was glad to be out soon. I'll revisit this topic in a separate post. It's not just me, kids hate it when they are forced to sing. Period.

Year after year, my mom and I have returned home at nine or ten in the night with a dozen bags and sundal packets (boiled beans or lentils garnished with a traditional blend of spices for seasoning). Don't even get me started on sundal. It's nice when we make it at home and eat it or the paati downstairs (my veena teacher) gives us a packet. Otherwise, it's redundant and annoying. Particularly annoying is the fact that it is distributed only customarily and very often it doesn't reach the poor and needy. I wish someone would have the backbone to put an end to this or find a nicer way to abide by the customs of one's faith. I can so hear my mom say "Nobody said that the poor shouldn't be fed Vidhyaa. We can give them sundal as well" and me replying tiredly "What are we going to do with all of this Ma?" My dad saves the day grudgingly - "I will finish everything. God, when is this Navratri going to end!?". The problem is, everyone is right. It's so hard to get that balance. As for the rest of the stuff in the bag, the coconuts get grated and cooked eventually, the turmeric rhizomes enter some tray in the Puja, so do the betel nuts along with packets of kumkum and so on. But the betel leaves are mostly redistributed or thrown into the trash. No one eats so many leaves anyway. Still, people who sell those earn a meager income since there is a market for things that are doomed to be trashed in a few days. I would still endorse giving just kumkum and keeping it simple, but some things never change!

In all this drama, the real guests of honor get little attention, except when the haarathi is done or some ashtotram is said. I am talking about the Gods. But they are nice people. They may seem to be silent spectators, but they watch everything and bless all these families with abundance so that they can welcome them back the following year and later too with the same joyous spirit. I'll stop here. Peace !

P.S. It's a drag to search for an image and give credits to someone else. Yeah, I might be missing Navratri. I have just enough time to write a post. I'll celebrate virtually. :) Oh I almost forgot! We have an expert in our family - my aunty. Photo credits to her. It's her awesome golu from last year. Thanks Ankita, your comment helped me add a beautiful picture.

Exam rant

It's weird that I am ranting now although I don't have to take these exams again. This is the story. Both the central and state governments attack the (sufficiently damaged) education system when they are bored. There was good reason to not include the class XII board exam marks in the IIT JEE scores. The board exams test one's ability to memorize formulas and solve stereotyped problems. It's really not a big deal as a student gets very comfortable to face these exams after 8 months of repeated practice, tests and revision exams. On the downside, it is easy to mismanage time when one gets caught up in board exam prep and compromises on preparing for the engineering entrance exams.

Here are some quick comments. Exams don't have to be comprehensive. What if someone can't stand optics, organic chemistry and conic sections? Perhaps there is something else that a student is extraordinarily good at (or deeply passionate about). In the war of cutoffs and ranks, many people accept whatever they get and move on. After spending 14 years in school, a student who wants to pursue engineering is mostly left clueless about his / her strengths.

Wisdom dawns late on many of us. We begin to question what the purpose of school education is only after getting out of school. It's not just in school; overall, in all walks of life, the pressure to satisfy some immediate requirement / deadlines saps one's motivation to push himself harder and think beyond the tight realms of the present. I have known some self-starters and I try to emulate them. It's easy to start anything, but really hard to keep at it. Most of us are driven by compulsion and competition. In fact, we are driven so much that we forget to start anything on our own and engage ourselves in it. There's always a truck load to explanations and excuses.

Overall, I can only say that the format of the board exams has to change. If the exams test one's "real" problem solving abilities, they would be incredibly hard and making those marks count would actually be a worthwhile effort. But if the bar is raised to improve the quality of these exams, a vast majority of students won't be pleased. Or am I wrong? I hope I am wrong this time. I am not an IIT alumnus, may be alumni out there would protest against Kapil Sibal's proposal. Sometimes it's easy to separate an individual's problems from the problems of the nation. I hope I find a way to contribute better.

Signing off ...