The Solitary Rose Part 1

The room had been ransacked. Every piece of furniture was upturned or broken. Picture frames were on the floor, the glass covers cracked like spider-webs. Window panes were broken, curtains ripped apart. It looked like someone had vented their anger and frustration on the contents of the room. Only one glass coffee table sat amid all the devastation, untouched and unharmed. And on the table was one solitary red rose. Her eyes fell on it and immediately she knew. She froze, then fell to her knees, as if she had lost all the strength and resolve she had mustered inside her over the last few months, the most difficult months of her young life so far. She knew she had lost her fight with destiny. Fate had defeated her. And the red rose was all the proof she needed. Tears came down her eyes, first in drops, then in torrents. She wept till she could not cry any more. She lay down on the floor, exhausted, and implored God to give her death. Life would never be the same again.

I died again .... last night

Over the last couple of years, I have had a recurring experience at night after going to bed. It has always been when I have been transitioning from the state of semi-consciousness to the state of slumber. Initially, I refused to acknowledge this as nothing more than a dream, maybe a nightmare at best. But as the frequency of this experience has increased, I have begun to wonder if it is just a dream or a premonition of something in my future, a not so distant future. 

Let me recount the sequence of events from the first time I had this experience. I had gone to bed, looking forward to a bright, sunny tomorrow. I don't know how long I had been sleeping or how deep my slumber was when someone shook me hard, like my kids do to wake me up when I sometimes out-sleep them on Saturday mornings. I woke up with a start and opened my eyes.  I saw that I was lying on my side, with my two hands crossed over my chest. I took in my surroundings, the bed, the furniture, the room, the darkness punctuated by streaks of light from street lamps coming in through the open windows. Everything was in place, exactly as they were when I went to bed. It was when I tried to move my hands to reach out for my phone that I started noticing the difference. I was unable to move. I could see; but I couldn't move my limbs to touch anything. I could speak, but no sound came out. My mind was fully functional; but only I knew that. There was an absolute silence engulfing me like a shroud. I felt like I was trapped in ice, sans the coldness, or in a vacuum-sealed room made of transparent glass. Or a coffin with a see-through top.

An uncanny feeling of desperation and helplessness crept over me. My brain was telling me to scream out for help; it was telling me that if someone gave me a push, I would get out of my frozen state and this nightmare will be over. I started calling my wife with all my might. I called her name and asked her to shake me hard. Over and over again. In different languages that I knew she understood, out of desperation. She didn't respond; she was oblivious to my trauma. After a few attempts, I finally realized that no sound was coming out of my mouth. My wife couldn't hear me. She was right there, but she couldn't hear me!

At that moment, as I was succumbing to despair, as the fight was slowly leaving me, I finally realized that I was dead. That could be the only logical explanation of what was happening. I had died, and I had not been prepared for it. It was over; I was moving on, whether I wanted it or not. I - the real me, the soul - had left my body. Panic started setting in. I tried to struggle in vain. A plethora of uncoordinated thoughts raced through my mind - thoughts of unfinished actions, unspoken words, incomplete amends, and unfulfilled promises. There was sadness, there were regrets, there was fear, and rage brought out by helplessness. There was also an understanding that was seeping in. And then there was this blinding light - very bright, but very soothing, like an ugly deception that was transforming into a welcome reality. 

And then very suddenly, someone reached out and shook me really hard, bringing me out of my reverie. It was over. The noises came back, loud like the climactic crescendo of the Bolero - the chirping of crickets, the humming of cars on the highway, the rhythmic breathing of my sleeping wife. I moved my limbs again and again to confirm that I was able to move; I made a loud, guttural noise to confirm that I could hear myself; I sat up and grinned like a fool, beads of sweat on my forehead, my heart pounding like a drum, relief gushing over me and making me shiver uncontrollably. I was not dead.

That was then, two years ago. Since then I have had this episode several times. But now I am wiser. And more resigned. Now when I get into that state of death, I don't struggle and fight. I just wait to see if this is the end, or something or someone will jolt me back to life. I am convinced now that what I have been experiencing has been a sneak peek into the process of dying - what a person experiences and feels when he is transitioning from the mortal world to the afterlife. It is pretty scary, especially if one is not ready to die when death comes calling. 

Maybe I am getting closer to the end, and this is nature's way of preparing me for death, for the ultimate act of letting go of my most precious material possession - my body. I don't think I am ready yet, but at least now I know what it will be like. Death is like a scary horror movie, and my experience is like a very well-packaged trailer. I hate horror movies. I do.

High school reunion - my worst nightmare

With Whatsapp, the world has suddenly become a smaller place. I would like to thank Brian Acton for coming up with this, and  Mark Zuckerberg for recognizing its potential.

Needless to say, my classmates from high school have come together and formed a group. And the chatter and banter flow as if we were never apart. We are racking up over a thousand messages a day, and I have been contributing significantly to that. However, as soon as the pleasantries were done with, and adequate amazement had been expressed on hearing from each other over a two-decade hiatus, a collective desire was expressed to plan a reunion. And that's where I started getting cold feet.

No, I am not callous, nor am I unsocial or antisocial to any significant degree. I am scared, plain and simple. Scared of meeting old schoolmates, the bosom buddies of childhood and adolescence, the very people who were my life for nearly two decades, and who have definitely shaped up my personality to a large extent, and whom I have remembered every single day of my life after the separation. Yes, scared. Terrified.

Let's recollect our school days. There were friends, the ones that are for life. There was camaraderie, fun and frolic, gaiety, happiness, tears, competition, jealousy, animosity, hostility, make-ups and breakups, even a few affairs. After several years of separation, all that remains is nostalgia, memory of the good times, and the heartbreak of separation. And the realization that they were the best. Nothing can top or replace the bonds formed during school. However, there was something then that everyone has lost after living the conundrum called life for so many years. Innocence. And along with that have been lost, its companions, simplicity and and the adolescent ability to not judge people. And that is the cause of my fear.

We will go into that reunion all naive and excited, hoping it will be exactly like the good old days in the school canteen and at the school picnics. But a few hours into the event, we will realize that things are not exactly as we imagined. We will judge our friends with our world-weary minds and hearts and we will discover things that we don't like. And in that one moment, these friends will suddenly look ordinary. They will seem exactly like the people we call friends and acquaintances in our present daily life. The charm will wear off; the special feeling will be replaced by disappointment, and discontent.

And that special place that we fall back upon when we are melancholic or depressed or tired of fighting this disease called life - the memories of our glorious school days in the company of our best friends - that place which helps us recuperate and gives us the strength to stand up and fight some more - that will be lost. Violated for ever. I can draw a parallel here. If you go to your parents house and find your favorite toy in the attic, one that you firmly believed was your best toy ever, it will not seem so special anymore. You will be shocked to realize that this rag doll, or wooden toy car was the center of your universe for a few years, and has been embedded in your memory as something special for so many years.

And just for a few hours of fleeting joy, I am not willing to lose so much. Those memories and their warmth, as implanted in my mind - the source of my strength and the reason for my willingness to carry on - are priceless, and I am not mentally strong enough to let them go. Not at any cost. And so, I dread the day when this inevitable reunion will take place, and I dread the moment when I have to face my past, a past that I like the way I remember it.

iDiseases

I know that I have had  iOCD for a while now. It was tough at first, but I gradually learned to live with it. It was becoming easier each day to handle this ailment, when suddenly I realized I have come down with appOCD.

appOCD is of two kinds.

1. alphappOCD, a milder, not so rare, variety that inflicts a lot of smartphone users, but is too mild to bring about significant changes in lifestyles. This form of appOCD is caused by exposure to/knowledge of new apps being created for iOS and the desire to try them out on one's smartphone. People suffering from this disease download umpteen apps from the Apple Store and then spend umpteen hours trying these apps out and attempting to convince themselves that the app they are fiddling with right now is absolutely necessary for their lives to continue normally. 

2. ultrappOCD, the more rare and intense form of this disease that I am suffering from. This disease is brought about by an aggravated form of the alpha version combined with the desire to keep an app once it has been downloaded, coupled with the need to organize these apps in a single screen on the phone to maximize accessibility and minimize clutter.

Suffering from ultrappOCD is not fun. I have to habitually perform a whole series of actions daily which add nothing of value to my day or my life, and for the time invested in these rituals, I detest myself every night.

1. Every morning, after I wake up, I have to read several different Tech news and Tech gadget sites and skim through several hundred tweets to find the coolest new apps that have sprung up while I was sleeping.

2. Once I have my list of apps for the day, I now have to go to the App store and find and download these apps. Some days there are no new apps to download. These are the worst days because I have to now perform this action several times a day in the hope that a new app will show up for me to download. Some days the amount of money spent in procuring apps is more than the total expense on food for that day.

3. I then have to organize these downloaded apps on my phone into one screen so that I can remember where the app is, and how I can access it. Initially, I was just downloading the apps, without any attempt at classifying and categorizing them. But when my phone became about 15 screens wide, finding any app became increasingly hard. So I had to resort to categorization of apps. I tried several different classification and grouping approaches until I settled down on a process that works for me. Till iOS7 came along, keeping all the apps on one screen was impossible even with the most efficient classification schema because only a dozen apps were allowed per category. with iOS7, this constraint has been relaxed and that has made my disease much more bearable. So now I can have unlimited number of apps in 16 app groups, which is the maximum number of groups that I can fit into one screen.

4. I have to make sure that the app groups are named correctly and consistently - with a one-word noun in sentence case identifying the need for that group of apps, e.g., Productivity, or Movies.

5. then I have to check how much physical memory I still have on the phone, and if need be, delete something else to make room for the apps. On the worst possible days, I either have to delete songs from my iTunes playlist to make way for the new apps which is not good for my iOCD, or have to delete some older apps, which is not good for my ultrappOCD.

6. I have to now try out these apps to gain some proficiency in using them and assessing their merits and demerits.

7. Based on my experience with using each app, I have to now go and review them or critique them and rate them.

8. Finally, I have to write a summary of every new app with its merits and demerits in a journal of reviewed apps using a document-writing app.

With smartphones becoming more and more prevalent and affordable, I forecast that not so far in the future we will have a whole set of idiseases, and a brand new area of medicine will be created in response. There will be iDoctors armed with iMD and iMBBS degrees, with a plethora of iMedicines at their disposal treating iDiseases at iClinics and iHospitals. And my name will be often mentioned in those iesteemed circles with reverence as the first person to contract an idisease named appOCD.

The Elevator Effect

In the first-world, elevators are everywhere. And have been for the past half-century at least. Even 3-year old kids are at ease with them; they don't feel scared of getting into a tiny vault-like box that transports them vertically, sometimes towards gravity, and sometimes against. Even they know what to do when they get inside an elevator. Regardless of such intimate familiarity with this inanimate piece of machinery, something strange happens to most people when they are in the proximity of elevators. It almost feels like an elevator has a mysterious personality of its own, and has the ability to affect seemingly normal human beings in various idiosyncratic ways.

The most obvious effect is a dramatic change in a person's velocity when they are around an elevator. Some people get into a zombie mode. They might have walked at average human walking speeds to an elevator, pressed a button to summon the thing and waited for it. They would have checked the time every second and complained about how slow and inefficient the elevators in this building ar. However, when the elevator finally appears, they will slow down to such an extent that you, standing inside the elevator waiting for them to step in, would be likely to think that they have gone into a trance. They will take short, measured steps at a snail-like speed towards the elevator, step in ever so gingerly as if they were expecting the floor to be at boiling-point temperatures, and then take about 90 seconds to decide where they want to go, and another 270 to press the button to their destination. And, more often than not, you will encounter such people when you are inside the elevator and in a hurry to get to your own destination.

Other people become spasmodic and jittery. First they slow down to the above-mentioned zombie mode, and then suddenly snap out of it almost when the elevator doors are about to close. Then they will thrust a body-part through the closing doors, usually an arm or a leg, half-expecting the doors to open up again, half-expecting the door to close shut and entrap the body-part they put at risk. The doors obviously have been built by engineers who expect such reactions from people, and they invariably open up to let the person with the endangered body part in, but it costs you, the one inside and in a hurry, a precious 3 extra minutes, and causes most elevators to blurt out some ridiculous warning in the most annoying, high-pitched feminine voice that can permanently hurt your ear-drums.

Other effects on people are less pronounced but equally frequent and annoying. If more than five people get into an elevator at the same time, one or more of the following things are bound to happen - 

1. Someone will be doused with the strongest-smelling perfume you can imagine, and your nostrils will curl up in protest;

2. Someone will have strong BO (and if you are particularly unlucky, the above two things will sometimes happen together and leave you nauseated and giddy);

3. Someone will hold the door open for people who are still about half-a-mile away and have no inclination of getting in;

4. Someone will have a large object to carry with them, most commonly bicycles, and they will cramp you up for room;

5. Someone will stand so close to you that you can see the pores in their skin;

6. Someone will press the wrong button and make you stop at one extra floor;

7. Someone hale and hearty might be going only one floor up or down but would take the elevator instead of the stairs; and

8. The elevator will stop at least one floor where someone had summoned the elevator and then realized that they were not ready to step in yet.

And then, of course, there is elevator talk. Some people tend to become increasingly chatty when they get into an elevator, and the more the people in the elevator, the more is their desire to talk over their heads in loud voices, and mostly about some inane and insignificant topic. And if you are transporting yourself more than three floors in either direction, you will bump into at least one person who would be narrating a harrowing experience about how they once got stuck in an elevator. 

If only we had no elevators, people would be more physically fit, and you wouldn't have had to read this blog!

Pill-popping - An Art

One of the most common daily activities that first-world homo-sapiens indulge in is pill-popping. Some need to; some just have to; and most just like to. Whatever be the cause - medication, recreation, or precaution - there is no denying the fact that pill-popping is an art. It is also a precise exercise that consists of a finite number of sequential operations which have to be performed more or less in the same sequence.

How do you take a pill out of its bottle? Some people carelessly shake the bottle expecting one to fall onto their palms. Usually more than one hurtle along, and then all the others except the 'chosen one' are poured back into the bottle. Others do the same thing, but instead of the palm, they pour onto the cap of the bottle, carefully pick one up while trying not to touch the others, and put the rest back; and some others use another receptacle like a small container. Some hygiene-conscious folks use tiny forceps to pull one pill out of the bottle; and some hygiene-obsessed people use sterilized gloves along with the forceps. 

How do you swallow the pill? This is actually a composite step which includes putting the pill into the mouth, putting in a liquid, and swallowing the pill. This is the step where one sees the most variations, ranging from clumsy to classical. Some people first put the pill in their mouth and then wash it up with a liquid. These people usually swing their arms in a classical arc and send the pill hurtling into the mouth as close to the throat as possible, then grimace as the bitter taste of the pill starts filling their mouth, and then frantically reach for the water and take a large gulp to minimize the amount of time the pill has to sit on their tongues. After swallowing the pill, they also slosh around another gulp of water in their mouth making the most obnoxious sounds, in an effort to wash out the bitter taste from their mouth. There are several aspects of this process which need precision and perfection. The velocity with which the pill is ushered into the mouth has to be precise; a little slower and it lands on the front of the tongue, and the bitter taste overwhelms you; a little faster and you run the risk of shoving the pill half-way down your throat where it sticks like a lump and hurts you like tonsils. The angle of the arm swing also needs to be carefully controlled; a little sideways and the pill misses your mouth altogether; a little higher and the pill hits the roof of the mouth and is most unpleasant. Also, the amount of water you gulp in while grimacing needs to be measured; a little more and you can choke and cough and spit the pill out; a little less, and the obstinate pill sticks to your tongue even after you swallow. In the latter case, you have to grimace some more and repeat the last step till the pill budges and slides down your food-pipe.

Other people first fill their mouth up with liquid and then place the pill in. These people, with the daintiness of a potter or bead-worker, lift their hand till it is parallel to their water-filled mouth, holding the pill between the thumb and forefinger, and very delicately place it on top of the water. They let the pill sink for a moment, and then swallow in one smooth motion nanoseconds before the pill actually hits the tongue. When done correctly, in this process one doesn’t need to taste the pill at all. Needless to say, here the timing of the swallowing motion is of essence. You also have to be precise about the amount of water you have in your mouth and the speed with which you swallow. Too much water and/or a rather rapid swallowing motion can cause you to spray out water on unsuspecting targets, or at the very least cause a very unsightly trickle of water down the chin.

The third group of people comprises of those who can just pop a pill without any liquid to aid the swallowing. People who can do this are either lucky to have a larger opening to their food-pipe which enables them to just slide the pill in, or are very lazy. The lazy ones just accumulate enough saliva in their mouth to form a large spitball, and then use that as a substitute for water.

So what kind of pill-popper are you? Or are you the one who uses a mortar and pestle to first grind the pill into powder, stir it in liquid and then drink it? Please share with me if you want.

Why I Write - Version 1

I don't write that often. There are a million excuses that I can put out there for not being more diligent and consistent about it. But in spite of all those reasons, I keep coming back, to write some more. Why do I write? I write because I love to put my thoughts into words. I feel contented by putting out a few words that can potentially immortalize the modus operandi of my quirky, idiosyncratic, cantankerous brain.

I have always loved words, ever since I can remember. My earliest recollection of remembering words is from a news article called - 'The Rape of Lebanon'. The only two words from that title whose meanings I knew were 'the' and 'of'. I was 4. I have always admired the miracle that can be created by stringing words together, how a bunch of seemingly unrelated strings of letters, in the hands of a canny raconteur, can paint a picture as vivid as a photograph, or create an indelible memory. 

Needless to say, I have always loved to read, mostly fiction. Facts, no matter how poignant, relevant, or exhilarating, have never appealed to me much, maybe because, in my mind they are analogous to taking the Mona Lisa and trying to paint it a little differently, or even a little better. No matter how well it turns out, you still started with a master piece. Fiction, on the other hand, is analogous to creation. You start with a germ of a plot, you nourish it and nurture it in your brain, feed it with tidbits of information, marinade it with nuggets of your own experience and personality, fortify it with additional sub-plots, embellish it with fictional characters that you have created yourself, and then put it on paper using your limited vocabulary. (I say limited, because no matter how many words you know, you still know only a very small percent of all the words that exist!). Then you rewrite it over and over again, to make it more succinct and coherent, to smooth the rough edges. And finally, if you are lucky, you have a story, an original piece of work, something that hasn't been told before and will never be told again in the exact same way. 

This is how Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot and Howard Roark were created, characters that have withstood the test of time and become immortal, without ever being real. It would have been no different if these people had really lived and done the things their fictional equivalents did and the rest of the world had read about them from newspapers articles. Such is the power of good fiction. I too fantasize about someday having such a character of my own, a fictional character who will become real in the minds of millions of young, impressionable minds, a character well-defined enough to become the role model at least one human being, and heroic enough to inspire several others. I want to feel, for a fleeting moment, like God did when he created people like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi or Martin Luther King or Farrokh Balsara. 

That's why I write!

First World Vs. Third World - Bananas

We all know that First world and Third world are different in almost all aspects, except geography maybe. Here is an example. Let’s discuss the uses of bananas and banana plants in the two worlds.

In the First world, bananas are used for two things –

1. Eating; and

2. Playing juvenile pranks on people who walk with their heads 'held high' - literally.

And banana plants are used for nothing.

In the Third world, bananas are also used for exactly the same reasons that they are used for in the First world. However, that is where the similarity ends. The differences in use of the banana plants can be used to demonstrate the difference between the two worlds.

Some uses of banana plants exclusive to the Third world are:

1. Bananas, when they are still raw, are used for making curries and soups;

2. The banana flower and the inside of the trunk are used to make curries; and

3. The banana leaves are used by the poor as plates for serving their everyday meals, and by the rich as plates on outdoor picnics.

Obviously, differences like these can help us see why first world and third world problems are different. First world problem - I am out of bananas. My breakfast smoothie will not be as tasty as always, because it will now have only strawberries, blueberries, milk, nuts, and 37 other things. Third world problem - I am out of banana trees. How will I serve food?

Million Dollar Eggplants

This year, I wanted to do a simple cost analysis - what I end up paying for each eggplant that grows in my backyard as opposed to how much it costs in the average supermarket (like Ralph's or Trader Joe's). Organic eggplants are about 2$ a pound in the supermarket. One pound of eggplants, on the average, means two big eggplants. So the price one pays to buy one organic eggplant is one dollar.

To calculate the cost I incur in growing one eggplant in my backyard, let's first quantify the yield. The eggplant saplings are planted in March. They take about 30 days to grow up and become ready to bear eggplants, and bear fruit till about mid-September. On an average, each eggplant plant bears between 15 - 25 edible eggplants. Let's set an average of 20 eggplants per eggplant plant. I planted eight plants, so we are looking at a total of 160 eggplants – i.e., 160$ at a supermarket.

Now let's consider all the parameters that add to the cost of growing eggplants in the backyard.

1.     Water for 4 months;

2.     Plants;

3.     Organic Fertilizer;

4.     Labor;

5.     Miscellaneous.

Labor consists of two components - the hired gardener's labor, and my labor. For simplicity, let's consider my charges for my back-breaking labor to be 0$ per hour. It is actually priceless, but if I apply the mathematical equivalent of that rate - which is infinity, the cost per eggplant will be infinity.

The plants themselves cost 2$ per plant, so that's 16$. Fertilizers cost about 15$, and the gardener's labor cost about 20$. Water, on the other hand, is a different beast altogether. Every month for these four months, my water bill goes up on the average by about 100$, but that includes watering my entire backyard. By a very rough estimate, the water required to keep these eight plants hale and hearty would be about 20$ a month. So that's another 80$. So to grow 160 eggplants, my net cost ends up being $131, or 0.82$ per eggplant. One other aspect of this is that the eggplants that grow in my backyard are at best half the size of the ones available in the supermarket. So about 4 of them would make a pound. So, going by this estimate, the cost of eggplants in my backyard is about 3.28$ a pound. 

And this number excludes

1.     My priceless labor,

2.     Miscellaneous expenses,

2.1  Gas (at exorbitant LA prices) for trips to the nursery,

2.2  Bribes to get my kids to help me,

2.3  Insecticides, and

2.4  The cost of the land itself, which could have been used otherwise for other priceless things like barbecues, Frisbee and throw downs.

So the reality is - it is much cheaper and simpler to buy organic eggplants from a high-end grocery store like Bristol Farms than it is to grow them in your backyard.

Successful backyard gardening rules

Every year in Spring, I plant a few vegetables in my backyard - brinjals, tomatoes, green peppers, and occasionally pumpkins. For the uninitiated - a brinjal is the British name for an eggplant. Funny name - eggplant - indicates a plant on which eggs grow. But this is not a plant, it is a vegetable which looks like an egg only if you get completely stoned and then let your imagination go wild and purple.

As you can probably imagine, gardening is hard work and plants need constant attention. So the whole business needs careful planning and time allocation. 

Let me describe how a good and successful backyard gardener, like yours truly, operates.

1.  My wife goes to the nursery and buys the plants.

2.  She writes a note for the gardener.

3.  The gardener comes and then does the heavy lifting - digging, preparing the beds, applying the organic fertilizer, and putting the plants into their beds.

4.  My son waters those plants 3-4 days a week.

5.  Every alternate Sunday, my son and daughter do the weeding, with guidance and moral support from me.

Phew! This is hard work indeed.

Updates - 08/18/2012 - Attempted Crime and Grey Hairs

There are 135 more days left in 2012. Today Roanoke Island celebrates Virginia Dare's birthday, and Australia celebrates Vietnam Veterans' day. None of these affect my life.
I discovered a solitary grey hair on my upper torso, a promise of many more to come, and a harbinger of old, shriveled, wrinkled skin and teeth in a cup of water. For the first time in my life I was happy that I was short and fat with need for no maintenance.
I cannot for my life understand the concept of attempted crime. A person convicted of attempted murder gets a reasonably short jail sentence with hope of parole; a person convicted of murder get life in prison or death by execution. Isn't that backwards? Attempted murder is simply a murder that didn't succeed. The perpetrator failed to accomplish what he set out to do. It is not as if halfway through his murdering process he had a pang of conscience, and dropped his weapon and walked away. So why is he being rewarded for failure? I think attempted crime should carry a harsher sentence than a successful one; a sentence for the actual crime plus an extra sentence for failing. After all, if you study 16 hours a day and fail in your test, you don't get an A+ for attempting to pass; you get an F for failing. Shouldn't the same argument apply here?
Everything is getting harder and tougher. Getting a job, keeping a job, making ends meet, playing competitive sports, everything. I had set my eyes on becoming a writer someday, and publishing a novel to make some extra bucks. Just one novel, because somewhere someone had said that there is one good story inside every human being. Today I realized that this is not going to work. I might have one good story inside me. But that is not enough to become a published author any more. The bar has been raised three-fold. Now, to be a published author, you not only have to have a story, you should be able to stretch that to extend three books. If you cannot write a trilogy, no agent is going to touch you.
I keep hearing about the first world and the third world? What happened to the second world? Did the people who formulated these concepts not know about the existence of silver? I have a set of problems which don't qualify as first world problems or third world problems. I cannot tweet about them because the second world doesn't exist. I blame these people for my low Klout score.
And lastly, I heard a nursery rhyme that was just wrong. One of the lines in the rhyme was – ‘This little pig ate roast beef, this little pig had none’.

What happened last night?

Last night I went to a party, one of the best parties I have attended in a long time. It was a sort of high-school reunion. I was surprised at all the people who had showed up. Some of them I hadn't spoken to in ages. It was amazing. I remember thinking that it is funny how things happen. We had yearned for such a gathering for years now, and planned in vain umpteen times. And suddenly, almost with minimal planning, it just happened. Like it was destined to be, at that place, at that time.

I must have been mostly in disbelief because less that twenty-four hours have gone by and it still seems like a dream. I am already starting to forget a lot of details about the material aspects of the party. I can barely remember what food was served, how the hall was decorated, what kind of lights were there. These are things that I would usually remember in vivid detail for years from the parties that I am occasionally coerced into attending for myriad social-economical reasons. I cannot even remember the details of how the event was planned and how so any people were able to attend. Friends from different parts of the globe were there. There were people from England, people from India, people from different states of the country. It was such a pleasure to be among them and relive our teenage years, to remember the awkwardness of growing up, the perils of examinations and grades, the angst and the joyous moments. Everyone seemed to be talking nineteen to the dozen, and not a single face had a frown. What I vividly remember is the chirpy atmosphere, the bright and shiny dresses, and a haze of bright albeit soothing yellow light that had seemed to engulf me all the time. I had felt relaxed, blessed and almost in a trance. It was almost like I was in heaven. Maybe I was. I also distinctly remember the conversations, and above all, the uninhibited and amazing comfort level and chemistry between the people present. For some time, I had no longer been a fat, grumpy 37 year old man conflicted between responsibilities and unaccomplished ambitions. I had been fifteen, naive, and still under the impression that great things were about to happen to me. 

But, like all good things, the party had to end. I have no recollection of the drive back home, or what I was thinking during that drive. I do remember that I was remorseful and despondent when I got back home. My wife and my two kids were already asleep. It has been unusually hot the last few days, and my wife had left all the windows open, instead of turning on the air-conditioner. We both like that. We prefer the cool, fragrant night air over the air-conditioner. My little daughter, taking advantage of my absence, has sneaked into our bed, leaving me two choices - the couch in the living room, or the floor. I chose the latter. I like sleeping on the floor. My body, spoiled by the softness of the mattress, sometimes relishes an opportunity to sleep on a hard surface that does not make any false claims - like remembering my posture, adjusting to my tossing and turning, nurturing my backbone, etc. However, I was too sad to sleep alone. I was craving for human company. I took my pillow and lay down on the floor in my son's room, near his bunk bed where he lay fast asleep, tired out by his field trip and the oppressive heat. But sleep evaded me. 

I lay there, eyes closed, reflecting on the events of the evening, and trying to relive the happiness. Suddenly there was a flutter in the window. My view of the window was partially obstructed by my son's study table, but I could distinctly smell a strange perfume, and could see what seemed like the raven tresses of a woman - long, brilliant black and shiny hair. I did not dare to move. I pretended to be asleep. In fact, I was so stunned by what was going on that I did not even dare to open my eyes, lest the flutter of my eyelids would cause the intruder to react drastically. I lay there pondering about a few things. Firstly, even though I could sense movement and smell a perfume, I had not been able to see a face or any other body parts. Everything seemed to be covered by that mesmerizing enormity of long, black, shiny hair. The second and equally disturbing thought in my mind was that I was in no position to get to my phone without moving across the floor to the wall charger. The third thing that crossed my mind was how much cooler and breezier the room suddenly felt. I attributed this to the fact that the intruder had removed the window net, thereby causing the mild night breeze to have easier access into the room.

I was trying to assimilate these thoughts and figure out what my next move would be when there were two cold, sickly white hands pressing on my neck, and an enormous pressure on the side of my head. I could not understand that pressure - the weight was almost like someone was sitting on my head, but I could not feel anything material touching me. And then I heard the voice, a hoarse eerie whisper of a very angry woman. It sent a chill down my spine and suddenly I felt like I was inside a refrigerator. I could not move. Whatever held me was only holding my head and neck. I still could not see anything other than the shiny, black hair. And the bony hands. But my entire body was frozen and immobile. I could not decipher what she was saying - not a single word made any sense to me. It was like a slow intonation of mambo-jumbo. But the pressure on my head was beginning to increase. I felt like something was getting sucked out from inside my head - the pressure and the feeling was like putting your hand on the nozzle of a suction pump. I felt intense pain and slowly spreading numbness - first my eyes, then my ears, then my body. 

That is when I decided that I had to scream for help. I was not in a position to help myself. But my tongue was already affected by the paralysis spreading across my body. My words came out slurred and barely intelligible. I seemed to be reciting a Sanskrit prayer that I had learned as a kid and never chanted in at least two decades, ever since I had decided that God does not exist and being an atheist is very cool. Then I stopped doing that and started calling my wife. I was surprised and confused at the words that came out of my mouth - I was screaming - 'I am having a bad dream. But I cannot come out of it. Come and shake me hard so that I wake up. Please, wake me up. Make the dream go away.' And I was worrying that if she could not hear me and do what I was asking her to, I will be consumed by this sinister apparition sitting on my head and will never wake up. My wife came over and shook me hard, I woke up, and everything was back to normal again. The window had not been tampered with, It was still sultry and hot. 'You were dreaming. It is all right. Go back to sleep.' - she said in her soft, sleepy voice, and before I could say or do anything else, she was gone. I didn't even see her properly, everything happened so fast. But soon I could her deep breathing from the bedroom. I fiddled with my phone till the pounding of my heart and throbbing of my head stopped. Then I went back to sleep again, and slept dreamless for the rest of the night.

This morning I woke up and remembered last night's drama. There had been no party. There had been no ghosts. It had just been a dream. Well, had it? I don't know. It had felt extremely real. They say dreams are black-and-white. But why do I remember the bright, green dress one of the girls at the party was wearing? And the bright, yellow light that had engulfed me? And why does my neck hurt so much? And why do I have scratches on my neck? Did I have a itch and scratched myself too hard in my sleep? But then I looked at my fingers and realized - I have never been able to rid myself of the bad habit of chewing nails. My fingers are gnawed to the quick. I am simply too scared to ask my wife if she woke me up from a dream last night. I won't know what to do if she said no.

From Twitter to Ice Ice Baby

I lost a precious two hours of my life,without even realizing it. My total recollection of that period, on coming back to reality was - I had gone to twitter to check my timeline, and now I am on youtube watching a ridiculous video with hideous lyrics called 'Ice Ice Baby'. My cellphone said that two hours had gone by. Now I know that as long as I am conscious, drug-free and sane, I would never have anything to do with 'Ice Ice baby'. So how did this happen?


1. I started on twitter. I checked my twitter timeline, and read a news tweet about 2 members of the state assembly of a prominent Indian state - Karnataka - allegedly photographed watching porn on a smartphone while the assembly was in session.
2. I visited the Times Of India website by expanding the link on the tweet and read the news item - the assemblymen explained that they were trying to figure out what a rave party is. My brain immediately wondered why.
3. So I googled 'Karnataka rave party'.
4. I went to another Indian news website from the search results and learned about how a state sponsored international music festival - Spring Zouk Island Festival 2012 - had veered into becoming an XXX-rated episode of Miami Grind. I also watched a censored version of a news sting video from that rave party that was creating havoc in Karnataka politics.
5. I then searched youtube to see if I could find the uncensored video, just out of curiosity, seriously, and was surprised to not find any.
6. That done, I went back to twitter to read the next tweet, which was a link about staff and readers of the A.V. Club picking their favorite comedy bits by stand-up comedy legends. So obviously I went to that link.
7. I watched embedded youtube videos of Louis C.K talking to Conan O'Brien, George Carlin doing his 'baseball or football' routine, and Bill Hicks talking about drugs, quite fondly I might add. Also mentioned in the link was Richard Pryor's imitation of white people. But there was no video.
8. So now I had to go back to youtube to find Richard Pryor's imitation of white people, and didn't find it. However, I found and watched a couple of other Richard Pryor videos - saving white people from the Titanic, and Richard Pryor as the president.
9. I was lured into watching a related youtube video about Eddie Murphy talking about the first Black President, and from there on to Eddie Murphy doing his Michael Jackson impression, his James Brown impression, and his Elvis Presley impression.
10. Not liking Eddie Murphy's Elvis too much, I went to a related video of Jim Carrey imitating Elvis, then Jim Carrey imitating Seinfeld in the ghetto, and finally Jim Carrey imitating Vanilla Ice.
11. I couldn't remember the real name for Vanilla Ice, so I went via google onto wikipedia to refresh my memory of Robert Matthew Van Winkle and the article mentioned his signature dance move - the Ice.
12. Curious now about what 'the Ice' might be, I had to go back to youtube to watch 'Ice Ice Baby', and when Van Winkle said 'Ice Ice baby' for the umpteenth time, that's when I realized that I had lost a good two hours, learned nothing, and was now watching absolute drivel called 'Ice Ice Baby'.


I would still like to thank Vanilla Ice for saying uncorrelated nonsensical gibberish like 'brand new invention' and 'collaborate and listen' because that brought me back to my senses. If that had not happened, it would have been MC Hammer next, and from there who knows where I would have gone and how much time I would have further wasted.

Rising up Bright and Early: Why did I +1 a Google Plus post?

The brain is akin to, if not the same as, a sophisticated multi-threaded, multi-processed learning-based neural network. So like any software system, it does several computations in response to an input and produces an output. Most of the time, we just don't ponder about all the computations the brain must have performed in response to a stimulus. However, once in a while, when a response from our brain is challenged or questioned, we are compelled to sit back and look at the application logs for our brain in order to understand how it produced that particular output. This process is called introspection, and can sometimes the intricacies of how your brain works can amaze you.

This morning I +1ed a post that read "Must wake up bright and early tmr. Must report to jury duty. :(". I obviously did not stop to think why my brain asked me to +1 it. I just did it. And that would have the end of story, had the author of the post not commented, "Why did +Somo Banerjee +1 ? Lol".  And so I had to go back and figure out why my brain prompted me to +1 this post. Here I present to you a summarized analysis of what went on in my brain (in a matter of mere milliseconds) to spur that reaction.

Firstly, to my brain, a +1 or a Facebook Like means that the last piece of information received from the optical nerves has triggered an emotion (a smile, a frown, a raised eyebrow, elation, disapproval, origin of a long series of thought computations, etc., etc.) but the emotion was either not strong enough or not well-defined enough to stimulate a verbal response.

Coming back to the post, 

1. The first thing that my brain identified was that fact that the author was not accustomed to and was not looking forward to rising early, hence the emoticon. 

2. Secondly, it figured out that the commonly used phrase 'bright and early' is not valid without making a few dubious assumptions. On top of that, these assumptions are subject to significant changes depending on person and geographical location. As an example, consider my case. I wake up, if my Blackberry doesn't run out of battery, at 4:45 AM. That is 'early' to me. It is far from ‘bright’ at that time, even during the summer months. At best, there is enough light outside to see 20 feet, and at worst, it is still night. By the time it is bright, it is definitely not early for me anymore. 

And if one were to argue that 'bright' indicated a state of mind rather than a measure of available illumination, then the phrase becomes even more murky and subjective. It is not easy to be 'bright' when you have to get out of bed at an ungodly hour of day, especially if you are not used to it. Moreover, 'brightness' might depend on the reason for waking up early. Rising up early to attend a funeral (or in this case jury duty) is almost certain not going to induce 'brightness' of mind. On the other hand, rising up early to meet your brand-new girlfriend at a scenic vista point for breakfast or rising up early to test your brand-new Corvette on the empty freeways can definitely brighten you up.

3. That brings me to the last, and most striking part of the post that caused my brain to determine that this post was +1 worthy. I have heard of people rising up early for a myriad of reasons. Some do it out of habit, some due to lack of time, some to wind up unfinished business, some to start the day early so that there would be enough time to finish up a particularly time-consuming task at hand, to read for exams, to answer a call of nature, to go to the morgue as part of probation requirements, etc etc. But never before have I heard of anyone rising up early to attend jury duty. Jury duty being the cause of an early morning wake-up call was not something I had come up against before. 

That, and only that caused my brain to deduce that this post was +1 worthy. It is as simple as that. And everything you read before that, and either nodded in agreement with, or raised your eyebrows in disapproval to, or scratched your head in confusion to, was just a figment of my imagination, and had nothing to do with how my brain works. 

In fact, I don't even know, nor have any inkling of how it works. 

Nor am I smart enough or interested enough to figure that out. 

Nor am I even going to try.

Have a bright day, whether or not you rose early to read this article.

Room-Bore-Rhythm - Roomba's traversal algorithm

We have had Miss Roomba as our cleaner for over 2 years now, and she has played an important role in my life. Her availability and ability has been partly responsible for my obesity. I have been obsessed with trying to understand her algorithm for floor coverage and have spent hours on the couch fascinatingly watching her in action. I am enamored and at the same time intrigued by this sexy little cleaner.

As far as getting the job done is concerned, she is very adept and efficient. If you wanted a number to quantify her performance, I would say she is about 95% efficient. To put that number in perspective, a human being with good eyes using an average vacuum cleaner is about 90% efficient, which is same as a human being with OCD and bad eyes. An human being with OCD and good eyes is about 80% efficient, because at some point they forget all about the actual purpose of the exercise and become obsessed with organizing the collected dirt in a desired pattern. In short, Miss Roomba is an efficient cleaning machine.

Most vacuum cleaners have to be grabbed by the neck and subjugated into cleaning a room, which they then proceed to do with great reluctance and greater noise. Miss Roomba operates unassisted once a few appropriate buttons on her head have been pressed correctly. You can also give her a cleaning routine for the week and she will remember that and execute it correctly unless there is a bug in her clock which makes her go faster or slower than the rest of the world. In one sentence, Ms Roomba is awesome. She is the best gift you can give to a lazy person who wants his room clean.

But lets consider a different metric - area covered in sq. ft/time taken in seconds. By this criteria, the Roomba will qualify as arguably the slowest vacuum cleaner ever made, even if one were to include the earliest model built by the cavemen in Peru - body made from the skin of a bear wrapped around the rib-cage of a goat, the bag made from the stomach of a pig and the handle from the tusk of an elephant, and operated by wind-power.

Here is the simplified version of Roomba's floor traversal algorithm (with edge cases, error handling and boundary conditions left out for brevity):
1. Select a random integer between 1 and 10 (let's call it x).
2. Select a random integer between 0 and 155 (let's call it y).
3. Select a random integer between 30 and 60 (let's call it t).
3. Turn around y degrees clockwise and travel x feet.
    3.1 If the path being traversed has dirt, clean it.
    3.2 If you encounter obstacles or bump into walls, stop and go to Step 1.
4. If the time elapsed is greater than t minutes, stop and declare success, else go to Step 1.

The closest analogy to Roomba's path traversal is how my one year old baby girl walks. She just gets up and goes, in an assumed angle for an assumed distance, bumping into every obstacle in her way, and bouncing off of every wall she encounters. When she does that, she falls down, stares at me to see my reaction. If my face registers shock or fear or concern, she starts bawling her eyes out. If not, she gets up, picks two more random numbers and off she goes again.

Now that Neato has finally designed a Robotic vacuum cleaner with a laser guidance system which makes a map of the room before it starts cleaning, iRobot might have to try and upgrade Roomba's algorithm to at least match the walking patterns of my four year old boy. I think just doing that will decrease the time taken by the Roomba to traverse a room by a factor of 10.

But if that happens, the novelty and charm of watching Miss Roomba in all her fumbling, bumbling glory will be lost.

Are you fat?

So you thought that if an Android app did not exist for a problem, then that problem is either a) not a problem at all; or b) does not deserve a solution. Well, that's not true. I will give you an example (although there might be an Android app to solve this problem, in which case just pretend that there isn't. I am a dinosaur, I still use a Blackberry, so I wouldn't know if such an Android app existed.)

Problem: Fellow males of the human species (and females who like to wear apparel traditionally designed for men), when and how do you know that you are fat?

Explanation: I have talked to women weighing 95 pounds who would suddenly go on an oatmeal-only diet because they thought they were gaining weight. I also know skinny women who suddenly start starving before the imminent advent of summer because they have to get into their bikinis and look good. But that is not what I mean. I mean F.A.T, like you look like a huge lump of shapeless flesh and adipose tissue that has suddenly sprouted human features.

Solution: There will be several answers at this point, involving one or more of the following:
a) machinery and gadgets, e.g., bathroom scales, sophisticated weighing machines that can measure fat content;
b) smart-phone apps and numerous  metrics, e.g., BMI, weight-to-height ratio, body structure;
c) plethora of subjective data points, e.g., broken furniture, creaking beds, tying shoelaces, ruptured or tight apparel;
d) imbibed behavioral jargon, e.g., lack of mobility, lack of alacrity,
etc.

While none of them would necessarily be incorrect, none of them are the most accurate, or the simplest. Clothes can shrink, apps and machines can be faulty, and subjective data is exactly that - subjective. The most accurate assessment of the direction in which your girth is going is provided by the insignificant little thing you wear around your waist - your belt. If you are shifting between holes on your belt in a counter-clockwise direction, and the angle of the buckle from the ground is beginning to reduce from the desired right-angle, then you know for sure that you are fattening up. This is an indicator that cannot go wrong; it is fault-proof. And it is not an Android app.

If you don't agree, you can ask Siri - she can tell you anything once she understands what you are saying to her. Now that Paul is dead. Unless Paul has been reincarnated as an Android app.

Bid Adieu While Protecting Your BEEP

One of our 'superstar' developers is leaving the company to seek an alternative career. Yesterday the bosses of his project had arranged a farewell company-sponsored lunch and I was one of the invitees in lieu of being associated with the same project. One of the requirements for this lunch gathering was that everyone had to say something nice or funny about the beneficiary of this farewell.

Now, speaking about a co-worker at his farewell lunch gathering is tricky as well as risky. There are several implicit restrictions.

First, the person is alive and kicking as opposed to being in a blue box covered with floral wreaths. So you have to be chronologically and factually accurate in your statements.

Secondly, you have to be subtle - both with your praise so that you don't embarrass him, and also with your criticism so that you don't end up with a broken nose. So you cannot go down on your knees and say something like, 'Jacob, you are the God of coding and the most adorable human being I have ever met and I love you.' Also, you cannot stick up a particular finger of your right hand and scream, 'Jacob, you are a BEEP BEEP, a thick-BEEPed and BEEP BEEP-BEEPer and I am here only for the food.

Thirdly, you are usually in mixed company - subordinates, peers and superiors. So you have to ascertain that what you say in this gathering does not change your professional and personal dynamics with the rest of the group in a detrimental way. So you cannot say things like 'Jacob, if you had not pointed out that I am a lazy, mediocre and unprofessional employee, I would never have realized that my pretending skills suck. I am working harder on that.'

So after a lot of mental data-mining on the 'Jacob data' in my head, and strict application of the above-mentioned suppression rules, I was ready. But, at the last moment, just as I about to leave, one of my best friends (emergency production issue) showed up and kept me behind.

Regardless, here are a few tips for software developers that can be used while eulogizing a colleague at a farewell lunch. I have accounted for some boundary conditions to prevent the speaker from making a BEEP of himself. I am making the assumption that you do have something to say. You are not there just for free food.

1.       If you don't like him, don't attend.

2.       If you 'more than' just like him, don't attend.

3.       Be brief, concise and factual when you speak.

4.       Partially reveal an inter-personal incident involving this colleague that was beneficial to you. Just reveal enough details so that the group understands your gratitude to the colleague. Don’t narrate the whole story.

5.       Try to deliver the meat in three sentences:

a.       One about some lighter moments that your colleague may have facilitated.

b.      One about your interactions in a professional capacity that stand out in your mind.

c.       One about point 4 (or replace it with a sentence of praise for his professional skills).

6.       Try to end with a final sentence which says good-bye and wishes him luck. A simple and safe example is - 'It has been a pleasure, (slightly tip your head downwards at this pause) and (pause) good luck’ (throw your hands in a resigned manner to demonstrate a tinge of sadness and slowly sit down). If this colleague speaks a different first-language or is going away to a non-English speaking country, use your favorite language translation method to say good luck in that language. Rehearse it before you speak.

7.       Try to make this speech appear to be an impromptu one (take random pauses, say ‘hmmm’ or ‘aaaa’ a few times) but definitely go prepared.