Not another friggin choice!

Disclaimer : As usual, I'm 2 years behind on "what's-up-in-gizmo-land". But what the heck... my emotion is very current.

So I read about these uber smart chaps who want to save the planet (whether they believe in climate change is beside the point), and they've come up with a way to help.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11128_3-9937567-54.html

So from now on, instead of having a million receipts in ur hand, you can have them all emailed to you.

This means for some of you, you'll have additional labels and filters in your gmail and everything will be neatly organized. And you can keep track of every starbucks latte you've had. Some of you whack-jobs will then write this tiny program to extract all the starbucks lattes you've had and plot it on a graph to track caffeine intake and probably correlate it with your work productivity/sleep deprivation/food binges/ paranoia. Note: Please factor in all the time it took for you to write this crazy program, instead of you-know, doing real work. And hey, while it doesn't sound like it, trust me, I salute you.

This is what it means for me.
Another choice ?

This means a series of answers at the checking counter.

Cash or card.
Credit or debit.
Swipe a million times coz the credit card machine really likes being polite and certain.
Do you want it in your hand, in a bag, giftwrapped ?
Do u want a paper bag or a plastic bag.
Do you want the receipt in ur hand or in the bag.

OR

would you like the receipt emailed to you ?

Please give me your email address.
Is it right ?

< I don't even want to go into whether there's going to be an additional verification step; perhaps you have to login, click a link, enter a captcha, perhaps set another online shopping account, with secret password questions and hints. I'm sure they'll tell you that if you created an account, you can set the choices such that the store will never have to ask you what your preferred billing method. Pretty soon, there will also be another one of those iphone apps for it. Maybe you just have to wave the iphone across their computer and it'll figure it out >



You know what I don't care. Just do what pleases you.

Coz I am now going to end up with a million receipts in my hand, bag and in my email address that I going to completely lose track of what I'm spending. This is how financial collapses happen. By giving people completely unwarranted freebies.
Luxury of choice, by definition, shouldnt be this affordable.

Congress! Are you listening! I know you love freedom of everything (including the right to bear firearms ???), but could you please curb some of my freedom to make choices ? Can u mandate that every single store, across the board, does exactly one thing ?

Or

Or

Since you love making databases, can u at least let me register my choice once and have all these guys who're so desperate to keep me happy, know what I want, instead of asking me every single time ?

Coz what I really want, is not to make these many decisions.

All I want is my latte.
And the most I'm willing to do... in order for you... to keep me happy... is to tell u I want it non-fat with caramel sauce. That's it.

If that's good enough for me, it had better be good enough for you.

Putting it simply!

For US : The education system

For India : Absolutely everything else!

world wide waste

A neuroscience professor once told me that the brain is a wonderful thing in that it cleverly managed to ignore much riff raff. And it was important that it did that. Paying attention to too much, storing all the information all the time is a ridiculously inefficient strategy since most information is worthless to the immediate goals of finding food and avoiding predator and the slightly more long term goals of procreating and possibly parenting. Retrieving information within the brain's memory stores then, is worse, much worse, than looking for a needle in a haystack. And the brain smartly decided to only store information that it tended to need, and pay no heed to anything else.

A few apes, a couple of tools, some fire, language, written scripts, a somewhat clumsy wheel, agriculture, animal husbandry, an abacus, an apple, a whirring machine, another apple and etc etc etc later, poof! we get the internet! And suddenly the brain's relieved of its duties to memorize anything. And humans immediately become thirsty and hungry not just for valuable information, but to dwell on any set of words and/or numbers that supposedly form a thought, the thought's coherence notwithstanding.

We've come a long way from Gutenberg's press haven't we ? From having to painstakingly distribute information to those that needed it, we're at a point where we painstakingly plough through the internet, concentrating really hard to ignore alphanumeric sentences that we do not need. Clearly, somewhere in between is a diabetes-worthy sweet spot, and clearly we're too mesmerized to bother finding and holding steadfastly to this sweet spot.

The internet is getting ahead of me way too quickly. It is with almost tearful eyes that I recall the days when I was aware of google and the rest of the world was yet to find out. But now, I barely survived the transition from orkut to facebook. Each time facebook changes its layout I can hear a few more of my neurons committing suicide. I feel unmotivated to open my twitter page despite having an account. And I find it oddly disturbing that weird sounding names are wasting their time following my account, which has no hopes of ever updating a status message. We're now pursuing 0 bytes of information with the same level of gusto that we pursue everything else ?

Each day, I sigh loudly when I realize that there's no way I can keep track of all the stories and blogs and news and gibberish out there. Reddit, digg, delicious, stumbleupon, tumblr just give me internal hemorrhage. A few hours before writing this blog, I sat down to figure all of that out, mistakenly assuming that it would make life easier. Few hours later, I'm moaning and groaning with the realization that all these people are probably doing nothing to nudge humanity forward. We're wasting our time, I, the sour fox, that cannot obtain the sweet grapes, have decided. There's an article somewhere that employees of the SEC are to be blamed for the recession because they spent too much time watching porn. What the rest of the internet-addicted world is doing is hardly more admirable.

It is therefore with some modicum of relief that I accept a lifetime of internet ignorance.

Farmer in the Dell

The farmer in the Dell

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4ndeZMorUI&feature=related

Did you ever see one of those offbeat movies that are supposedly about the human experience in the modern world ? No ? Well, then, come take a look at my life this past week. It all started when I decided that I was going to get the very best laptop I could afford with the 2000 dollars enrichment allowance that my university offered me. They naively assumed that having a laptop at home would allow me to do more productive work. And I naively, for my part, thought that I could fool them and pretty much do my own thing with my laptop. And so I wisely brought the latest operating system - windows vista home premium ( I request that you wait for my cue to groan. This is not the time to groan). And I decided I was going to get the longest warranty I could afford.


A Dell Inspiron 1525
Windows Vista Premium
huge ram, lots of hard disc, a supposedly kick-ass intel processor and so on and so-fatefully-forth


The farmer in the dell
The farmer in the dell
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer in the dell



After all, I had heard horror stories about how the US sorely lacked computer service centers down the road that could solve your problems for pittance by fixing you up with pirated parts. If I ever get to be St Peter even for a day, I'd pave a gilded road from those computer service centers to heaven.And I got myself a big laptop screen. No tablet PC's for me. I foresaw that a good chunk of my day would be spent toiling away in front of the laptop, working steadily to rid myself of any natural experience (it's all digital) and so I figured I'd get the best. And then of course, when I got here, I had to get wireless internet. It wouldn't do for me to sit glued in one place in my apartment. I needed the flexibility of sometimes sitting on the chair, and sometimes sitting on my bed, sometimes near the dresser, sometimes in the kitchen, where I slaved to heat up ready-made rotis. I needed the mobility. At that time it felt like it was going to be my only luxury. And so we had a netgear router hooked up, and I christened the network rather geekily as "dendro" (dendrites for neurons and me being neuroscientist, and dendrites being latin for branches and trees, although ever come across a tree trying to get nutrition from the earth without physically spreading their roots ? you see humans are by far the dumbest of evolution's products, it follows from their dumbness that they think they're the smartest).


The farmer takes a wife
The farmer takes a wife
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer takes a wife

And then I started going to the lab in my spare time and earning some "chillar". Here's where I started getting used to the next luxury. We have 2 screens in each of our labs. Its convenient if you want to read a paper on one screen and have the figures on another screen. It's convenient when you have your program on one screen and are debugging on the other screen. It's convenient when you want to monitor your experiments on one screen while you're lazily surfing the net on the other screen. I can find new uses for my 2 screen system pretty much everyday and its no surprise that I wanted to mirror this set-up at home. I convinced myself of course, that it would in fact allow me to do more work at home. What I really wanted was to watch netflix movies on a larger screen. My devious mind decided that I could watch a movie on the big screen and use the laptop screen to make data presentations and perform data analysis (when the situation demanded it). And I decided that in order to fulfill my dream of a fuller, richer more enriching life, I needed a bigger screen.

Enter the samsung syncmaster 20 inch uber (un)necessity.


The wife takes a child
The wife takes a child
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The wife takes a child

< I've never been a parent myself. Now I am an adult. And I am filled with the realization and amazement that my parents have consistently been able to find a sense of optimism, a bright cheery spirit that made it possible for them to more than just put up with me- to actually love me. Otherwise, their fate, like mine and my syncmaster, would've been all downhill from there>

And to make space for this fairly large screen, I had to rearrange a lot of things on my tiny ikea desk (this is a relic from the time I believed I could live within reasonable means). I am now looking for a larger desk that will accomodate my screen, my laptop, my second hand, dented, but decent sounding (well decent enough for youtube) altec lansing speakers, and extra space for odd things such as empty coffee cups, plates, spoons and other assorted items.A table large enough so you can see everything without having to stumble over everything and risk breaking something expensive. For now, since its summer, my heater doubles up as a makeshift table. It has a daily planner that I never use, a CD from the library on which I am running late fees and kleenex tissues (just coz.).


The child takes a nurse
The child takes a nurse
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The child takes a nurse


At this point, it isn't enough for me to watch a movie from pretty much any site. It's gotta be HD. Because bad resolution looks really bad on my syncmaster. I needed to milk the internet and the screen for all their worth.

The nurse takes a cow
The nurse takes a cow
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The nurse takes a cow


And it is at this point I start noticing that I have never really had great internet speed. And while I've been demystifying many people from back home in India that internet out here isn't all that is cracked up to be, I couldnt kid myself no more. And I decided I needed to fix this. My friend asked me one fine day why netflix was buffering. What did he mean, why was netflix buffering. Netflix always buffers. He says no. I say no ?. He says no! never. I say not ever?. He says never ever. He quickly introduces me to one of those speedometer sites where you can see your speed and I found out to my chagrin that I was getting prehistoric speeds. And I started watching that meter as if my life depended on it. Waiting. Waiting and panting. Waiting and panting and hoping to see that arrow move to the 1 MB zone.

The cow takes a dog
The cow takes a dog
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The cow takes a dog


I call Dell. They tell me, in retrospect, almost mockingly that my warranty is valid till 2011. And they put me to a special department dedicated to solving wireless connectivity issues. It's never a good thing to know they have a whole department for your problem. On the one hand it means they have expertise on the issue at hand. On the other hand its clear they haven't gotten around to solving the problem, otherwise, in these trying, cost cutting days, those departments would've vanished, those jobs would've gone and would be doing their due part in adding to the unemployment rate. See what I mean about being optimistic about your kid ? The kind lady at Dell immediately starts sharing my screen and messing around with the settings and disables something and enables something else (hey, I wasn't passively watching, I took an active role in solving the problem as will become apparent in a bit). And bam, the arrow goes to the right and shows me more than 2 MBps. Am I happy with her service ? Hell Yeah. And 2 days later, the speed drops again. Now I am not just annoyed and vexated, I am incredibly curious about what's going on.

The dog takes a cat
The dog takes a cat
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The dog takes a cat

And I call Dell again. She updates something else. Changes something else. Meanwhile, I am honing my googling skills about what this problem can be. It could be with the router apparently. So I reset the router.Is my router at eye level or on the floor ? Is it far away. How many computers use this network. Have you rounded pi to a gazillion decimal points or a gazillionplex decimal points. And I start doing what every true scientist does. Change one variable, keep other variables constant. Test. Change one variable, keep other variables constant. Test. In order to keep living, I added a fine point to this schematic. Change one variable, keep other variables constant. Test. Breathe! Change one variable. Keep other variables constant. Test. Breeaaaaaaaaathe!


The cat takes a rat
The cat takes a rat
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The cat takes a rat

And so through sheer paranoia, I narrowed it down to this.
If I connect my laptop to the external monitor, my speed drops.

My googling shows that it tends to happen when you use DVI cables. But I use VGA cables. The problem seems to have disappeared for them if they changed the router channel. Changing router channel has no effect on my internet speeds.

Yay! Source of problem detected!!!!

The rat takes the cheese
The rat takes the cheese
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The rat takes the cheese

And so, quite sadly, I had to decide to send away my big screen. What would really work for me is a nice, big, optiplex desktop monitor, with a huge box sized CPU and an ethernet port. And if I want mobility, I'll just a really long extension box. I'll get one a mile long. And I wheel my ikea desk wherever I want to go. It's nice, dependant, and wonderfully elegant.



The rat takes the cheese
The rat takes the cheese
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The rat takes the cheese



******************

Epilogue:

I recently found that if I keep the router on the ground, if I plug my laptop to the external monitor without shutting the lid of my laptop, my internet speeds go back to normal. I don't understand it.


But...


The farmer in the dell
The farmer in the dell
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer in the dell

Post Bush Era

Rumour has it that there will be a time in the new feature when we will have to pay airlines to use their restroom up in the air. It is a pity that this is what our being a self-proclaimed-intelligent race has lead us to. Little did I know that I will start having fond memories of peeing in the bushes. Until now, I regarded it as a messy, prickly affair. Those who have experienced peeing in the wilderness will no doubt know the importance of choosing an area with no thorny outgrowth. Those that have experienced it will also remember the exasperation with which, as you sit in the moving bus, finding it increasingly harder to fight your natural instincts, have your entire family overlook spot after spot for seemingly insane reasons such as "oh that place is not shady", or "there's a house far away and there might be people in it with voyeuristic tendencies". Eventually of course, just the thought of peeing spreads around until there's a quorum of people who can no longer wait and the driver is ordered to stop at the next tree that is slightly more than a foot in girth. And then members will disembark the bus, boys to one side, girls to another side, goats, cows and other animals continue to have free terrain (we unreasonable reason that they're not mega interested in such activities anyway) and we answer "nature's call". It is with this in mind that parents will remind you a dozen times before you leave home to go to the bathroom. "We may not get a nice place to pee for a very long time", they'll tell you. But never have I been told that I will have to pee because it's free now but I'll have to pay for it later.
This turn of events is making me nostalgic about the days of peeing in the bushes and how truly liberating it felt. Again, those who've been there, done that, know what I'm talking about, even if it doesn't behoove you to publicly admit it.


It feels as if this, if anything, is an assault to my civil liberties. Whatever it is, the voiding of the urinary bladder is an essential bodily function and cannot be held to ransom. And I wonder if the ACLU, who is now so preoccupied with making sure Bush and colleagues are charged for their "enhanced interrogation techniques", will consider my plea of taking civilian aviation companies to task as well. First they subject us to an extremely agonizing procedure of screening us, making us reveal our smelly feet and socks to them, and making us remove those belts that so many of us need in order not to make a disgrace of ourselves. Interestingly, "enhanced interrogation techniques" is one way of making sure, that those responsible for enhanced security screening measures are brought to book, so that the rest of us can board flights in peace. But that is a matter of debate and I will blog about it later. (I don't wanna be pissing the ACLU off because I kinda need their support for matters just described). But to continue my tirade, I do feel assaulted when I go through security check, and when I find that I have to pay to check in baggages (if I didn't, I might have to walk around town either smelling with old clothes, or stark naked. - another of those protracted civil liberties issue). It deprives me of a right around my extra personal space- aka baggage. But depriving me of the right to pee is just one step short of "umm... you will now have to pay for oxygenating cabin air". What will they do next- have us put a quarter into a slot so that those yellow masks will fall out of their place during times of decreased cabin pressure. "And please make sure you put a quarter for yourself first before you insert quarters for those around you". And "only exact change accepted". I guess it's time for adult- diaper making companies to make a killing though.

Sometimes I see no point to us calling ourselves an intelligent race. No point at all. We seem to revel in finding new reasons to dig holes to fall into and new reasons to pay to dig holes to fall into them.

The tower of Babel

About the time I arrived here, all ready to do some monkey brain fiddling, fannie mae and freddie mac had just been bailed out. There were murmurs of recession, a crisis, worse than last time and the time before that, financial and economic jargon that I had never bothered to include as part of my vocabulary. I just knew that they were ominous terms. After all, I had a job, the university was paying me some money (not much but I was feeling glorious about being able to play around in snow when it eventually did come and I quickly realized that I wouldn't have to be on the streets if I had starbucks coffee.) When I first saw those two terms fannie mae and freddie mac I thought : oooh, like ben and jerry's and baskin robbins. Maybe the feds (oh ya, I was also saying government back then... I'm getting cooler now... I say feds) were bailing them out with tax payer's money because the cows had died ? That's what I thought at least. It turns out of course that fannie mae and freddie mac were selling lots of cows to lots of people in the flawed assumption that people are always going to want to eat more and more ice cream. The cows were very valuable you see, because the ice cream was getting sold a lot. So I was metaphorically right after all. But fannie mae and freddie mac were something to do with mortgages. Mortgage! - another word that I knew about simply because I happen to play a lot of monopoly (and lose a lot). I am sorry guys, but this really was how much I knew. At least I'm being honest about not understanding such stuff unlike some people ( ahem! ahem! ahem!). Tax payer's money ? Ha Ha Ha. I wasn't even gonna pay tax- I was going to get a rebate. So much for lots of starbucks caffeine and ridiculous excitement.

Then people asked me to get a credit card. "You need a credit card for everything. You need it if you want to buy a car, if you want a loan, if you want this, if you want that" and I ask "it isn't enough if I have the bank balance to buy these things ?" and they go "oh honey, if you have a good credit rating, you can pay all these loans little by little. If you show them you're responsible with your money by paying off your bills like a good girl, then they know you're going to be responsible with your money, and then they'll give you a loan, so you can buy things that you don't have money to buy right now but you know you're going to get later. Welcome to capitalism. There are always ways to make money". Oh nice. Nice. That sounds, fair and simple, say I, and off I went to get my credit card. Essentially I was going to try and get a good credit rating by buying lots of starbucks coffee. There wasn't much I wanted you see ? But as luck would have it, my credit card application co-incided with mr lehman falling down like a brick of blocks (oh not my term. Some paper said that. I figured out by this time that mr lehman kinda didn't wanna fall, but the higher ups decided not to help him. Sort it out yourselves you lil children, said they), and AIG (that name stuck because of those TATA AIG ads from back home) was getting bailed out (because the children were truly in a terrible mess) and merill lynch was getting taken over. Essentially, lots of stuff was falling apart. And the country was trying to elect its first black president, end a coupla wars, maybe start a few other wars, spread peace, stop lending money to bad bad people, and figure out a way to decide who good people were, who bad people were, try and reiterate that they really were the global leader ( we will be with you in sickness or in wealth)... and amidst all this my credit card application got rejected. So I call the credit card company to be politely informed that I have no credit card history. "Yes ma'am. That's exactly what I'm trying to do. Have a little faith in me. I am a good girl". But well, no one trusts anyone these days. So that's that.

By this time of course sub prime crisis was a very powerful world. On the way to dinner at udupi cafe, a friend's uncle explained how people got loans even when they didn't actually prove they could repay it, but of course things were going to get better and everyone believed it. All I could think was "and they let these people buy houses but they didn't give me my credit card ? C'mon brother".

What a weird weird world this was getting to be. People were living in gingerbread houses. When it rains, we'll stay inside the house and we'll keep ourselves dry. In the summer, we shall eat our gingerbread. By next monsoon, gingerbread is going to get cheaper and we'll repair the house with this cheaper gingerbread. And when it rains we'll go back into this house and keep dry. We're eating and living at no cost. Wow. What cunning ways to do stuff. What, ultimate belief in the happenings of gingerbread. Did we learn nothing from hansel and gretel ? Nothing at all ?

How people make money out of lending circularly is something I will never understand. I know it falls from interesting math equations. That's very nice. Please feel free to bandy unintelligible equations at me. But I think using common sense is more appealing. Especially if you want me to start being responsible for my actions, then I need to make sense of my actions. If I lend you a banana, and you lend the next person a banana and that person lends me a banana, we still have only one banana. How silly is it to think we have three bananas. Ask my monkeys ( those organisms that are way below the evolutionary ladder, with a less developed brain). They know it. That's why they never share their bananas. They chatter away and do silly things and do not engage in speculation and would rather eat one banana today instead of waiting on the three quarter chance that they'll get three bananas tomorrow. And we say that it is because monkeys have limited ability to be able to factor time into their decisions- well thank god for that. Because we humans do such a neat job of it don't we ? I may not know a lot of economics ( oh heck. I know none), but I could've toldja that its a waste building a lot of houses, that people who spend more than they have are always gonna spend more than they have, but honey, there's got to be money somewhere, and you cant keep circulating it, because well... you're all going have to pay up someday.

A so called investment advisor advised my friend "don't pay off your balance every month. Keep some of it and pay it off next month. Pay the interest and your credit rating will improve because it shows you can carry credit wisely" Of course you're going to improve my credit rating. You're interested in the interest aren't you ? But watch out. You're tempting me to never pay back. That's what the sub-primes did didn't they ? The joke's on you bozo. No wait, the joke's on them. No wait... umm... oh shit... its not a joke anymore is it ?

And then today, I try finally to apply for a credit card again. And I get a huge spiel about my interest, how it was between 3 and 9 percent plus prime rate as defined as the highest number in the wall st journal in the last 90 days and that right now it was at 4.5 % bringing the apr to between 8 and 13 %. And I wondered... who really understood all this ? Everyone just saw that as a rule interests were getting lower, and it happened like that for a while now, and maybe the engine's stopped whirring crankily and was finally coming to a standstill. Oh ... the engine was just about gathering steam.

The story goes....

"The people decided their city should have a tower so immense that it would have "its top in the heavens."(וְרֹאשׁוֹ בַשָּׁמַיִם) However, the Tower of Babel was not built for the worship and praise of God, but was dedicated to the glory of man, with a motive of making a 'name' for the builders: "Then they said, 'Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.'" (Genesis 11:4). God, seeing what the people were doing, confounded their languages and scattered the people throughout the earth."

(Source :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel)

Did we want to reach for the heavens ?
Guilty as charged.
Did we want a glorious name.
Guilty as charged.
Were we greedy ?
Guilty as charged.
Were we disrespectful to the age old supply-demand spiel ?
*ahem.... there's always going to be supply, we're always going to demand no *
oh... we dont understand, is it ok? will you let me off the hook ?
Umm... no.
Ignorantia juris non excusat. You aren't excused from not knowing the law.
But no one explained to us.
And that's our collective problem innit.
As the story of Babel goes... we now have our languages and our equations and our crazy models reduced to a bunch of terminologies that no one understands.
We believed that someone understood. That if it should all collapse, that someone would have the key to putting it all together. And in all possibility it would never collapse, so really we were only just panicking. And so we decided to go high up into the heavens, when we really ought to have simply sat around and built houses with roofs just high enough to keep us warm and dry for a reasonable period of time... until we find ourselves in a better position to live in a slightly better house. There's that age old story about the hare and the fox. There are lessons to be learnt in such stories. It never does anyone any good to try act too smart for one's own ignorance.
Now, the tower stands unbuilt.
And we dont understand.
No one speaks the same language anymore.
No one understands anything anymore.
And while we can blame those silly tower builders forever, we encouraged them too.
And now we don't know how to fix it.

And that's the story of the housing babel.

- In idiotically simple terms
Janani

The curious case of Wilbur and Orville

I write this as I sit at Newark Liberty airport,waiting to get to Pittsburgh. It's been a long, crazy journey. Unfortunately,in these times, when anyone can afford to fly, when anyone can practise amateur terrorism, when any firm can buy two planes and call themselves an international carrier, my long crazy journey is probably not unique. It is becoming the fate of millions like me. Millions like me who are getting frustrated and irritated at too young an age. Flying to us, is not that glorious ride in the heavens, amidst the cottony clouds, overlooking mountains and sea.... nein. To us flying is but a necessary menace.

Let's start with the aircraft service that desperately needs more airplanes if it aspires for any kind of excellence. Even as I type out excellence, I realize I've dug my own grave. By today's standards the aircraft service I refer to is probably considered excellent. Why ? Because it manages to maintain a high profit margin. How does it do that ? It crams too many people in too few planes. It takes care of them with too few people. There are no 24 hr manned desks in the airports. They use their manpower wisely by manning the desk only for a few hours around the time of the flight departure. Another way to increase profit. They tie up with other airlines. Another way to increase profits. They are, in other words, simply excellent, bringing the
entire world to your doorstep. It is such smart cost-cutting techniques that make traveling by air such an affordable nuisance. It is going to grow to the point where mankind will depend on it to the extent that any overhaul of the behemoth will be impractical and impossible. What complain can you have of services that manage to bring the world to your doorstep ? My complaint is, by the time I open the door to get to this world, I am so miffed that I simply do not want the world. I'd rather have my door open to a simple, decent, predictable, faithful yard. Maybe even a few weeds won't really bother me.

So they have this way of bringing all the passengers from far and wide in india to brussels. They then mix em up and redistribute them to many place far and wide in the US. It's a lovely idea. Until, one of the incoming flights gets delayed at Brussels. Then all the outbound flights have to wait until this incoming flight arrives. When I was going from Pitt to Chennai, my only problem was the wait. The wait, I managed to deal with by sleeping on one of the many couches that brussels airports is so thankfully filled with. When I was coming back however, I had a connecting from new york to pittsburgh. And of course, if my flight to new york got delayed because of fog in delhi, then I'd miss my connecting. What do I do, I asked ? Of course, there are
three different answers you get. And you are faced with this daunting task of figuring out which of these three people are saying it like it is. Of course, they've been taught to apologize profusely. That bit truly is very endearing. One of them told me that the staff were working at the reconnecting and will make an announcement. Wow! I thought. Efficient. But it is also true that most of these people will not do anything for you until you tell them to. We're a species that try and perfect the art of doing nothing in order to get rewarded. Another told me that I will have to arrive at new york and talk to the jet airways staff.But my connecting is american I screamed. h! Then you'll have to talk to them, they said. I didn't wanna believe any of them.

Then someone came up with this brilliant solution of routing me through newark because that flight was actually on time, and I could take the continental airline from newark to pittsburgh. Interesting. They could do all that ? Wow. The digital age and all that spunky stuff I thought. Sure. Go ahead I said. But... my checked bags ?The checked bags were sitting in a red box (the transit box), and by policy they could not be taken out until they reached jfk. Security is always the most pressing issue see ? It was getting muddier already. How in the world was I supposed to feel comfortable to go to Pitt via newark on the continental, while my bags would come to
pittsburgh via jfk on an american airlines.It looked like an ingeniously architectured passing the blame game. Ingenious- defined as the inability of me to figure out who to sue (continental, jet, american, the wright brothers ?) should I be insane enough to sue. There were too many factors involved. I couldn't trust anyone could do it right. But of course, me being terrorist suspect and all, cannot be allowed to walk into that red box and say "that and that- they are my bags", and wheel them behind me to the newark flight. It actually only need be that simple. But it is so full of loops that mr terror can use, that simple minded souls such as I are being forced to live
extremely complicated lives. I am not allowed to walk into mr red box. I had to renege control of my own darling bags. This is the mad world we're living in. And the story got worse. At pittsburgh I was supposed to file a claim about this weird baggage story at the continental desk. And the continental people would take care of bags that were going to come on an american flight.

If Alice, of alice in wonderland were with me, she'd have tagged along with me instead of the hare or the mad hatter. Lewis caroll would have taken my story instead of his, because I was living in the land of "curioser and curioser". With some reticence I managed to get myself to newark, where the continental staff had no clue about my situation. Speak to the jet staff they said. The jet staff of the jet desks that get manned only for a few hours a day. By this time I had a cruel cold. A cold is the one of the most annoying things in the world that can happen to you. It puts you in a limbo- you aren't truly ill, but neither are you fully well. And when you fly with a
cold your ears get blocked. And i was finding myself doing way more speaking than a nose and ear blocked person ought to. With all the echoing in my own ears I wasn't speaking loud enough for anyone.And when I did speak loud enough, they asked me not to panic. Whether god was by my side, holding my hands, nudging me to be as good a person I can be, I cannot say. But I can vouch for a certain mr murphy seriously considering marrying me for life in sickness and in health(muted whispers), for better(muted whispers) or for worse, till death finally, and thankfully rents us apart.

Then the jet airways at terminal B give me this piece of ancient looking paper that was supposed to be presented in order to obtain a boarding pass at terminal a. And with that boarding pass I had to proceed to terminal c where my flight was scheduled to leave 4 hours later. Back to the present. That 4 hours is now.I just passed security clearance. Another one of those banes of terrorism coming free with air travel. You get to be frisked. You've to take of your shoes and your belt. You are expected to limit cleansing fluids to 6 oz. And finally, sometimes they will
sweetly tell you that you have been selected for "digital screening". They make it sound like its a great treat, almost making you feel like you had to have worked and toiled long and hard in this and previous lives (where I hope to god and hubby dr murphy that I had the sweet fortune of dying a natural death). And after passing digital screening, I sit here waiting for my flight to leave, knowing that when I get to pittsburgh, I'll have to file a baggage claim with continental, who I expect are going to look at me cluelessly as I explain to them what happened. And somehow if my bags don't come they'll offer me compensation. There are many other compensations I would like. Like maybe merging all the continents together into a modern day pangea. Or maybe making hyperspace travel a reality.


There's that age old philosophical question. If you were to replicate someone molecular by molecule, bond angle and bond distance to bond angle to bond distance, with no space for error at all (Heisenberg's uncertainty be damned) will this new person be the exact same as the old person. I believe fervently, that it s/he will be. If there is no error at all, the person, and the emergent behavior will be the same. And of course, there are going to be errors, and I may end up being a slightly different person, and so, they say, is the disadvantage of hyperspace travel. But honey, I'll so take that. Because, this real time travel, its making me a person I don't wanna be. Its called bitter. I live in the hope, that hyperspace travel will not do that.

And as I write this, my parents are traveling rather peacefully from chennai to bangalore. In the irctc (indian railways) everything proceeds like clockwork whether you are making profits or not. And they managed to do this even in the days without the computer. There's clearly a lesson to be learnt in all this. We should simply leave flying to the birds and the penguins of madagaskar animations, and restrict ourselves to foot and sea. The only air travel we should be doing is when our soul finally departs the body as we rest in peace after having lived a comfortable, non-annoying life. Amen!

if they don't have bread, let them eat cake

These past few days have been revealing in terms of what part of the sum total of my life experiences are because I am Indian. And while that has been interesting, it hasn't been strange in that I already expected that US is a different culture from a land half way across the globe. What's been strange is that, amidst these revelations, I occasionally realize that experiences that I thought were true of all Indians, is true only of me. And suddenly the joke's on me.

Let me explain.

So I have my new pair of adidas shoes that I bought with much love and excitement. I use them pretty much all the time. And you walk everywhere in them, through dirt, through mud, through dried up hay and through sudden rain, and they get dirty. What do you do when stuff gets dirty ? When stuff you could swear is white is actually on the blacker side of gray ? Don't you clean them ? No don't answer that! Not yet at least.

I clean them.

I dump it in a bucket of water, with detergent and some liquid bleach, let it soak for a day or two and then clean it and brush it with an old toothbrush and let it dry in the sun. And lo and behold! Clean shoes!

And then I came here.

Here, I am faced with the problem of no washing stone, no backyard to dry stuff in, no proper place to pour away buckets of muddy, soapy water and I have a pair of shoes that I can't bear to look at. I was pretty sure that this country that loves its sports goods must have found a way to clean 'em. And I figured I'd do the brave thing. I'd ask one of them, as stupid as the question might sound.

Enter labmate1

Labmate one doesn't clean his shoes. He buys new ones when its time to throw the old ones away. In fact the last time he realized he had to get new ones was because he was walking on the snow and first his felt cold, then his feet felt wet and both of those feelings were horrible. And it was then that he realized that the sole had a hole and he threw them. Wipe them, he says. I can't wipe 'em. What about the dirt inside those beautifully tailored "meshy" stuff. That won't help.
Throw them in the washer and dryer he says. Won't they shrink, I ask ? There's no answer.

So labmate1 asks labmate2 and labmate3.
It turns out labmate2 buys new ones, never throws away the old ones, and has at least ten pairs of old shoes. Labmate3 has very spiffy shoes that are now black that he vaguely remembers as being white once. Welcome to the capital of capitalism says labmate 1. I nod in despair, not willing to let go of my shoe cleaning, hitherto cumbersome, suddenly very sensible values. Labmate1 is now reassured that he isn't the only with bad shoe cleaning habits but also feels bad about my dilemma. He is sure that there must be someone who cleans shoes he says. I tell him they're probably indians who've tried to adapt to america. The way we heat tortillas and call them rotis. The way we eat yoghurt and call it curd. The way we eat salsa and sometimes think of pickle. And the way pickle can never ever be brined cucumbers!

My only source of comfort at this point is labmate4's report that she too used to clean her shoes back in Korea. We recounted how our parents would make us wash our shoes as a way of inculcating discipline, how school captains would inspect ur shoes and make you run around the field if you presented yourself with dirty shoes. This we did while getting very scared looks from the other labmates. Labmate2 concluded that shoes were a big deal in that part of the world. Labmate1 wonders if we would expect our kids to clean shoes. We insisted we would, except if they were going to be raised in this country, it was likely that those expectation would never be met. In any case, labmate1 decides to raise the question at tea time. During tea, of course everyone insists that they throw their shoes away. A couple of people say they sometimes hose it down or use the same detergent that they use to wash the car. They wonder how I washed them back in India and get very excited about the washing stone.

Is this a special stone? Asks labmate3. No. Its just huge, I say. We have huge stones here, he says, apparently offended. Someone brings up the existence of mount rushmore. I describe to them with much enthusiasm, the sloped stone, the soaking, the scrubbing, the bashing and the wringing of the clothes and the sun's role in drying them. It seems like much effort to wash those clothes they say. Why don't we just get a washing machine. It is then that I realize how pitifully little they know about a world where not every house has a washing machine. Where even the houses that do have a washing machine, use them sparingly because of power failure and water shortage. Back home, there was a huge bridge to cross:- from having clothes to being able to afford a washing machine to clean 'em in, from buying shoes to not having to worry about throwing them away. LAte Mary Antoinette must've felt the same way. If they don't have bread, let them eat cake. Mary Antoinette probably went to the pantry in the middle of the night with a hungry stomach. On opening the larder, when she failed to find the bread, she munched on cake. One cannot blame her. In a country where the alternate to dirty shoes were new shoes, I found myself rather dumbfolded.

Labmate n ( I have lost count by now, how many people were telling me that they all bought new ones) suggested I buy a shoe dryer. I'd rather throw my shoes away, I say and in that one sentence we all became kindred *soles*.

They also say in unison that my shoes weren't even that dirty. I wondered if they were walking around with such dirty shoes, why bother about clean socks. Its coz our shoes are dirty that we need clean socks they say. I admit I hadn't thought about it that way.

There was a member of the staff that cleaned her shoes though. She did it pretty much the same way I did. At least, where and when shoe cleaning happened, the method seemed to be the same :)

I came back to my computer thinking that this would be a good story to tell all my indian friends.
Here came the real surprise. Several of them were saying that never cleaned their shoes either. I exclaimed that there was shoe shampoo and bleach and everything. We had affordable tools for clean shoes. They didn't clean them, they said. I was baffled. I did not want to be this person that does strange things anymore. I found myself grappling with a sense of loss, a sense of indian identity. There must be someone who found it funny that ppl didn;t clean their shoes. I briefly wondered if I should move to Korea even. And I went on an "asking marathon". I asked anyone who came online if they cleaned their shoes. And when enough of them had said yes ( count = 5 and counting), I felt that perhaps I wasn't the only one.

Mary Antoinette's legacy on the other hand, clearly survives.
The queen is dead.
Long live the queen!

its that simple!

I have very simple advice to all the ministers and prime ministers and presidents battling it out, trying to do good for their nation (and for the world) and having to battle with those situations where doing good for a nation necessitates something bad for some other nation.

When in doubt, go ask a sweet minded child. Admittedly, there are kids who have genetic predisposition to be devious. Ministers of the world, please do not go to one of these kids. Go to a park. Look out for a bunch of kids playing "ring-a-ring-a-roses". Identify a kid that helps another kid stand up when "they all fall down". Or look for a child who shares cotton candy. That is the sweet minded child I am referring to. Go ask him/her what you should do. And then blindly follow it. Blindly. Don't ask questions. Submit to the pure innocence of the child and do what you're told to do. For heaven's sake, let's not argue.

I had a very interesting conversation with an undergrad the other day.
x : You're not voting ?
I (coz it rhymes with y): no
x : why not ?
I : I ain't a US a citizen.
x : so, get a greencard
I: a) getting a greencard is different from citizenship, and I haven't been here long enough to become a citizen anyway.
x: but ur here for the next 6 years right ?
I: I guess
x: So the president's decision will affect ur life during the next 6 years right ?
I: I suppose so
x: Then you should vote. Go vote.

Its interesting that he looked at it that way. If ur staying here, and we've let u stay here, then u should have a say in what is happening.

Of course, they're not going to let me vote. Presumably because I may decide to go back home in less than 4 years. Presumably because the president makes decisions more long term than 4 years. Presumably, because I havent been in this country long enough to know what is good for the country and what is not. And if I haven't said it yet, I do not want to vote. This isn't a blog pleading for voting privileges or any such thing.

Its just to show that sometimes there are simple minded solutions that we refuse to think about precisely coz they seem too simple a solution to the problem. But who wants complex statistics when innocent thoughts can get the job done.

Who wants to spend a billlion dollars on a huge nuclear weapon which is our only hope to making sure that another country wont detonate its nuclear baby.

Why all this, when we can live happily by passing around cotton candy and helping others stand up. Ministers, while you're on ur way to making sure cotton candy gets passed, can you initiate a motion to put all chocolate making factories on that list that makes it illegal for countries to bomb it. Like those world heritage sites that one cannot drop a bomb on. I've always found that list very funny. Who even thinks of making a list that says "oh should you go to war with my country, u can drop bombs there but not here". What is that ? A piece meal approach to making sure no place gets bombed ?

All of you, who are reading this and are thinking in your mind "not everything in the world is thar simple", shut up already!

Its that simple.