Moved to eLekhni

I finally moved to my own space.  Some would say I should have done this a long time ago, but given that I invented procrastination…and besides, every time I decided to move, WordPress.com would come out with something new just to tempt me.

So the new place is called http://eLekhni.com.  This is cue for me to tell you how eLekhni means electronic writing (in which language? Hinglish, of course) given that Lekhni means a pen, or writing.  So you’d think this is very appropriate, what?  You don’t? Oh well…

Anyway the new place looks much the same as the old place.  Same old stuff, same theme… I have spent much, much more time trying to select a theme than I have on actually creating the website and having it up and running.  As of now, I have officially given up.

You’d think it would be easy to find a nice, clean theme, right?  I like this one, but it does have its issues, like links on the post don’t show up very clearly.. so I browsed through probably 200 themes and actually installed 4 or 5 and tried them out…I never knew I was so hard to please.

This is like building a house in 5 days and taking 2 weeks to choose the paint color.  Sigh.

I know you are not feeling particularly sympathetic towards me right now anyway. Your Sunday morning (night) to-do list has just increased by one – switching your feeds to the new site…but think of the positives..(whatever they are)

Writing poems from prose

I was going to post on something else today.  I probably will, later today.  But after reading all the comments on my previous post on how poetry is nothing but broken prose (and there’s a lot of truth in that),  I thought it would be fun to see if we can convert any of our recent blog posts into a poem.

The rules are simple:

1. Take any recent blog post of yours (say, not more than a few months old).

2. Hit the Enter key at random intervals.

3. Copy the poem you get into the Comment space on this blog.  You have to add a link to the post it is from.

Or, if you like, you can do this as a tag.

What do you guys think?  I know I had great fun doing mine in the comments section of the previous post. I was doubled over laughing at the results.

Here it is, again:

The first paragraph in my post on tulips.  It’s not a particularly good poem, but it is a poem, what?

It would be even better if you can come up with something really funny

Gray Day. The rain
has been falling
steadily
for the last couple of days,
obliterating my sunny mood,
pouring water over any
weekend plans, and reminding me
of the cold winter days
I thought I had left behind.
But the rain is good
for my tulips.

What is a poem, exactly?

It all started when Amitava Kumar posted a poem on his blog. Called “Man Writes Poem” by Jay Leeming, from Dynamite on a China Plate. © The Backwaters Press.

Reading the poem made me start thinking, what exactly is a poem?
I started answering the question in Space Bar’s comment section. So the first paragraph of this poem was my comment in Space Bar’s blog. But the more I thought about it, the more my poem grew… and I ended up with this:

————
I am more and more confused these days
Not that I wasn’t confused before, just
that I am a little more lost and bewildered
I ask myself, and I ask passersby
the same question every time
No one responds, perhaps no one knows -
What exactly is a poem these days?

How does one write a poem?
Do you start off with eloquent lines
About the red earth and purple coneflowers
Swollen rivers and windy nights
Throw in some flying Chihuahuas
For that magical, dreamlike touch?

Or perhaps you write about emotions
Melancholy sounds a good word to use
Also grief, joy and passion.
Soon your poem will start to take form
The lines on the page even taking on new shapes
Like a saw-toothed blade, or a picket fence
That has fallen down.

But where is the rhyme, you ask
Here is no pentameter, this is just
Broken Prose, where is the rhythm?
But you see, we are not in the dark ages
When poetry was corseted in rhyming words
And metered lines.  We are modern.

Our thoughts are new, our words are new
Spelt differently, compressed,
vowels excised, numbers added
Thumbed rapidly into concise messages
Who has time for verse?
Our music is fast-paced, our life is a race
Our poems stutter to keep pace.

The dictionaries, you insist, define a poem as
Metrical writing. Perhaps the dictionaries
Need updating.
We update our Facebook pages
every fifteen minutes.
A new word forms every minute, yet
Why do we update our dictionaries only
once in several years?

Perhaps you may want to take
A course in Poetry Appreciation, 3 credits
And four thousand dollars.
Or buy the bestselling book,
“Poetry for Dummies”, that may (or may not)
Help you identify poetry.

So what is a poem, then?
I hate to break this to you, but you will find
If it is shorter than a novel, in most cases
(Though there are some that are really long.)
If the lines are short, even if the words are long
It must be a poem, but trust me
The real rule with a poem is
You will know it when you see it.

Sometimes, though, you may find
A beautiful poem, but the author
may have really intended to write prose
In which case you can always say
“The author’s lines are very poetic.”
For really, who knows what a poem is?

All about me. In six words.

Vijay tagged me to do a six word memoir, with an optional photo illustration and tag six others.  His own was “Aiming for accuracy in grayscale images” which is quite a good description of his work as a radiologist.

Isn’t this a great tag?  You don’t have to answer long surveys. You don’t even have to figure out which animal you look most like. You don’t have to write a long post…

I came up with a few options for a six word memoir.  The more I look at them, the more I think that I really should delete this post and forget all about the tag.  But I did agree to do the tag, so I guess I don’t have a choice. So I’d like you to take a look at my attempts and let me know which one you like best..

As for me, I cannot decide.

I blog, therefore I am… opinionated?

I can be quite funny. Maybe.

Describe myself? Sometimes, ignorance is bliss.

I blog. Nobody reads. Not surprising.

I am vegetarian. I veg out.

Celebrities write memoirs. Why not me ?

Growing plants makes me patient. Outpatient.

My life, in six letters – boring.

I am not tagging anyone.  Really.

Of course, you can always decide to take up the tag, which I strongly recommend. I’d love to read your memoirs, especially since they will not exceed 6 words

Or you can use the comments section to think up six word memoirs for yourself, or me, or anyone else.. just don’t say things like:

“You write nonsense. This is proof!” 

Or.. “Terrible! Surely you can do better?”

Mysterious lawn circles

We had the first sunny weekend of the year. Gloriously sunny, with temperature in the 50s and 60s, even going briefly to the high 60s. All right, I am not converting any of this into Celsius, as it is all below 20 deg Celsius, and you are all going to laugh at me. Twenty degrees is warm? Well, it is for me.

I don’t know what you guys do on sunny weekends. Go to a movie? Stroll around the park? We wanted to do all these things too, but what we really did was dig up our lawn.

All we wanted to do was plant a couple of apple trees we had bought last week. Now, I must clarify what I mean by planting trees. As a kid, I thought there was only one way to plant trees. That way was to get some politician and whisper “twenty point programme” in his ear. The next thing you know, he would be digging a hole and planting a sapling, with twenty photographers following his every move. After that, the sapling would usually be forgotten, and some other politician would plant another sapling in the exact same place next year.

That’s not the way we plant trees now. For one thing, we do not plant saplings, we plant actual trees, 10 and 20 feet tall ones. You see, we don’t have the patience to grow trees from saplings.  So voila! instant trees!  Not that we do anything very different from the politician – like we don’t water our trees much either.  But astonishingly, all the trees we planted last year have actually survived the winter and started to put out leaves.

R and I went into the backyard to take a look at likely spots for the trees.  The backyard is mostly lawn, dotted with a few trees on the sides. This was really the first time we were looking at our lawn in a long time, given that the lawn had, until quite recently, just been a huge pile of snow.  We decided to walk around the lawn looking for good spots to plant the trees.

That’s when we saw them. Strangely shaped random patches across the lawn where the grass had mysteriously died out. There were curves and arcs and meanderings that looked like little rivers had run through the lawn and pooled into tiny lakes. Even more curiously, each patch seemed to have a channel running in the exact center, mimicking every twist and turn of the dead area.

Was it grubs, we wondered? The garden centers in all the big box stores had scared us into buying huge bags of grub control that was supposed to prevent armyworms and cutworms and all kinds of bugs that we had never heard of.  We had dutifully sprayed all this over the lawn, but perhaps it wasn’t enough?

We asked the experts at the garden center. They consulted among themselves and thought deeply about the problem.

“Do you have dogs?” they asked us. “No? Then, well, umm..”, they said with confidence, “we don’t know what it is”.

So we decided to tackle it ourselves. We set about raking all the dead grass. So there I was, looking stylish in my sunglasses while digging in the dirt. (I did say it was very sunny, right?)

The good news was, the dead grass came out easily, and I found new grass shoots underneath. And however hard I looked, I could find not a single worm shaking its fists at me..

Meanwhile, R had taken out the spreader and started to spread fertilizer around the lawn.

The mystery remained though – how did the grass die out? R thought it was perhaps the dead grass clippings from last fall’s mowing. Perhaps they hadn’t decomposed, and had dried out..

“Perhaps we should blow away the grass clippings thoroughly after mowing”, I suggested. No doubt you are wondering why I said “we”, even though I have nothing to do with mowing the lawn. I was trying, you see, to show that I do not completely blame R, or rather that I do, but I am too good to say so..

But R would have none of it. “No, no,” he insisted. “It doesn’t matter. I only need to make sure that the last time I mow the lawn before winter, I should blow away all the clippings.   Just the once.”

Our neighbor saw us working on the lawn. So he grabbed his own spreader and made a few turns around his lawn.  Then he came over to chat.

We compared notes about our mystery patches and he proudly showed us the patches on his lawn.

“We have a mole” he said.

“A mole?” R asked him.  “What mole?” This is what happens when you read too many spy novels.  You can only associate moles with men in dark glasses transmitting military secrets to China.

Since our neighbor is of Chinese origin, this must also rank as the first time in history that the Chinese have admitted that the Indians have a mole.

“No, no, mole, you know”, the neighbor said, waving his arms as if to conjure up a mole, “it burrows under the snow and creates those patches”.

Now my mind was filled with visions of Mole running down my lawn after a red car and shouting Poop! Poop! Poop!  Too many re-reads of “Wind in the Willows” combined with standing in the hot sun can do this to you.

So I came back and researched more about the moles.  It turns out that sadly, we do not have moles after all.

We have voles.  Or, as they are otherwise known – field mice. Those lines in the center – those are called “runways”.  Both moles and voles create runways, running under the snow in the winter, like they are training for the Marathon.  Or the Mole Vole Derby.

I would have preferred to have moles.  Not that I liked Mole much, I actually preferred Ratty (the Water Vole). But moles only eat worms, which could mean I can save on grub control.  Voles eat plants, shrubs and bulbs.  I wonder how many of my tulip bulbs have already made for vole dinners.  Did they have my tulips for Thanksgiving and Christmas?  Is that why I cannot see a single tulip shoot in my backyard, while they are already out in the front?

I spent all afternoon clearing up the vole runways.  They will have to train for the Marathon elsewhere now. Then R sprinkled in some grass seed and fertilizers on the patches.  In two weeks time, with any luck, the patches will recover.

But it’s not the moles and voles I dread.  As I surveyed the results of my labor, I remembered the flyers I had been getting in the mail the last few weeks.  Flyers from “lawn care professionals” who promised to revitalize my lawn with “dethatching” and “tine raking”, all for the low, low sum of $150.

What I had just finished must surely be dethatching on steroids, I thought to myself, given that I had filled two huge yard bags with the thatch.   You’d think this is all we would need to do, right?

But I can see exactly what is going to happen next.  R is going to call in one of those professionals, and they are going to charge $150 just for swishing the rake around, and bringing a fancy machine that they will run up and down my lawn.  They will dethatch and tine rake and aerate and whatnot, and my lawn will look no different from what it is right now.  Maybe it will look more beautiful from the inside.  You know, inner beauty and all that?

So what did I do all afternoon?  I probably just spent an entire weekend afternoon making it easy for someone else to earn $150 without doing anything much…

A question for my readers

Someone I know has developed cataract.  That is a little weird – I had always thought of cataract as something that strikes people who are 65 and above.  Certainly not a young person’s disease.  I had also thought of cataract as something that strikes people who cooked in smoke-filled kitchens over charcoal burning stoves, not researchers toiling in labs.

Certainly this person has none of the risk factors associated with cataract.  He does not even qualify for “excessive exposure to sunlight” (now, who would think sitting indoors all day is actually good for you?)

But anyway, he has cataract. Indisputably.  Two doctors have told him so, and his eye tells him the same thing daily.  So now he is wondering whether to have the surgery in India or in the US.

My question is – is cataract surgery in India better than in the US?

Two reasons for asking this question:

-  Something like cataract is commonplace in India, and Indian surgeons would have performed hundreds, if not thousands, of surgeries, so I imagine Indian surgeons are, if anything, more experienced at cataract surgery than their US counterparts.

- Research on the Internet tells me that in the US, post-cataract, there is a 20%  to 30% chance of developing scar tissue after the lens implantation.  This is what the New England Eye Center says about cataract surgery:

Cataracts are removed with sound waves not laser light. In 20-30% of patients undergoing cataract surgery, a thin film of scar tissue will form behind the implant lens and cause the vision to be blurred. Often patients will feel that their cataract has “grown back.” In these cases, an opening can be made in the scar tissue with a laser, and the vision will usually be restored.

I have never heard about such scar tissue formation in cataract surgeries in India.  Certainly not that 20% to 30% of people need laser treatment after cataract surgery.

So dear blog readers – I am sure many of you are doctors, or medical students.  Tell me, is the rate of scar tissue formation as high as 20% even in India?  Am I just mistaken that it does not happen in India, or not as much?

Or is there any difference in the way cataract is treated in India and in the US?

Even if you are not in medicine, you may still have anecdotal knowledge of someone you know who had cataract surgery.  Have you heard of this happen in India – scar tissue formation, I mean?

I would love all your opinions, and any anecdotal examples you know.

This Daft Draft

It’s NFL Draft weekend.  In other words, it’s a televised gabfest spread over two days.

The NFL Draft, for all you lucky guys who have never seen one, is the annual “swayamvara” session when NFL teams choose college football players to join their team.  Each team gets to select one player in each round. There are seven rounds of this, and the first two rounds alone took close to 6 hours (and that, believe it or not, is on the shorter side!)

I am not sure why they televise this live.  I am even less sure why people watch it.  But half the country does, and if you have a spouse who belongs to that half…..you turn to your blog for solace, of course.  So here is a sample of the stuff I have been trying not to watch on television this weekend:

Each draft pick consists of three Steps.  Only one of those steps is the actual pick, and it is also the shortest.

Step 1: The “experts” sit and analyze what this team needs and which player they should pick.  You would think they analyze in-depth each team’s weaknesses and need for players.  No doubt, you think, complex algorithms and linear equations are involved.  Conditional probability comes into play – whom should Kansas pick if Chicago grabs the QuarterBack?

But actually, beyond the first round, the teams’ choices are not very predictable.  So what do the “experts” do?  They do need to talk, after all.  So they throw up random names, they interview every coach and player they can get, but mostly they fantasize.  Will this shy kid be the next superstar, the next Messiah who will lead his team to a Super Bowl win?

And then, they reminisce – about games and players they have watched, played or met.  “When I watched the Miami Dolphins in 1970″, they begin, making you look longingly at the remote (which of course, your spouse grips tighter).

Step 2: The team announces their pick.  This is the shortest part of the Draft Game, even though this is what it is supposed to be all about.

Step 3: The “experts” take over again to chatter.  They gloat if they are correct, and move on to tell us salient details about the pick – like his height, weight and age. Strength of arm, width of thigh and ability to run, push and grab are all analyzed.

How fast can he run a 40 yard dash?  How many yards can he throw a ball? How many pounds can he bench press?  How many yards can he jump?   These are all important questions that the viewers apparently need to know in exact detail.

Next, the player’s character is minutely examined – did he beat his girlfriend, or did he use marijuana? How many times did he drink and drive?

Will he get injured, they wonder next.  Past medical history of injuries and hospital stays is brought up.  I have not heard the vaccination details for each player yet, but I am sure it’s just because the experts ran out of time..

What positions will the new picks play in?  Should they play the same position as in college?  Should the teams place them in new positions based on their strengths?  The experts weigh in on this too.  I guess they use those height, weight and 40 yard runs to decide, but sometimes they use innovative techniques.

“Where should Reggie Corner play?”  the experts try to decide.

“Of course he is a Corner”, the other opines, “he was a Corner from day one, from the time his Mama picked him up.”   It is decided then, Reggie Corner should remain a corner(back).

And so it goes, 32 times in each round, seven rounds in the Draft…

Each regional newspaper follows this up with even more exhaustive coverage.  Mothers, grandmothers and former classmates are interviewed.  Jerseys with the new players’ numbers are sold.  The new pick himself is interviewed on television, and every word he says is dissected.

Newspapers publish front-page articles on topics such as “Why did the Colts pick a Center?” or “Why do the Patriots need a Quarterback?”  Hundreds of readers weigh in  with their comments, and animated discussions happen in the blogosphere (and inside American homes).

As if all this were not enough drama, the teams add some more spice by horse-trading.  They swap positions in the draft, they trade players in complex deals, and they come up with elaborate Draft strategies that add a lot of suspense and intrigue.

All this is what happens just during the live coverage of the Draft.  Over the next few days, we will have the post-Draft analysis where the experts will talk about which teams were the winners, who got the picks they wanted, how much the new picks are getting paid..

This will go on for a few weeks.  Then, the networks will think of something else…

The fottball season begins only in September.  How else do you keep football fans entertained until then?

Tulips in the rain

Gray Day.  The rain has been falling steadily for the last couple of days, obliterating my sunny mood, pouring water over any weekend plans, and reminding me of the cold winter days I thought I had left behind.

But the rain is good for my tulips.   I can already see the shoots springing up from the grass; the leaves are slowly turning from velvety brown to green.  I wonder when they will put out their buds, I can’t wait to see the flowers.

Last month, I visited the famous Keukenhof Gardens in the Netherlands.  The gardens are beautiful with millions of lovely flowers – hyacinths and dandelions, irises and orchids.  But of course, one goes there for the tulips.  The 4.5 million tulips they have – in orange, pink and violet, two-toned, with serrated edges, saucer-sized, every combination you can think of.   If you are a flower lover, this is one place you should definitely visit.

On the other hand, if you are not an avid flower lover, you should probably think twice about going. There is a lot of walking involved – it’s a large garden spanning 32 hectares. It is not really a picnic spot because the lawns are all off-limits, and there’s not much else you can do apart from looking at flowers.  You can pet the resident donkey if you like, but that seems to be all in terms of entertainment.

I would think I am an avid flower lover, but after a few hours in the gardens, I was perfectly happy to not see another tulip for a long time.

But I can’t wait for my own tulips to grow – one reason being that this is the first time I am watching a plant grow from seed.  At least in this country, since I usually buy plants in pots and then transplant them onto the soil.   Isn’t that the ultimate test of one’s green thumb – getting a seed, or a cutting, to grow into a full scale plant and watch it flower?

This is also a novel method of planting – you do not water the plant. All I did last August was dig a few holes along the driveway and around the maple trees, shallow holes that were just a few inches deep.  I stuck the bulbs in and covered them up.  Then, I proceeded to forget all about them.  I did not water the bulbs, either then or later.   This suits my style of lazy gardening, I told myself.

Fall came and the maples turned red and gold, and finally bare.  Winter came, and with it the first snows.  The snow carpeted the driveway and was shoveled off regularly, resulting in tall piles on the sides, over the tulips.  At one point, the tulips along the driveway were buried under three feet of snow.

Now it’s spring,  and the snows have melted away.  The grass is green again, though the trees are still bare. Only the crabapple still had its red berries that tenaciously clung to it through fall and winter.

I had “naturalized” my tulips – instead of planting them in separate flower beds of their own,  I had planted them in clumps on the grass, around the trees and between other flowers.  This is a good idea because the tulips are not going to flower for too long.  Once spring is over, they will stop flowering, and slowly even the leaves will drop off.

But all that is some time away.  Right now, they have put out their first shoots and their first few leaves.  I know my flowers will be quite sedate by Keukenhof standards – they will not have serrated edges, and though some of them may be two-toned, they are not in exotic shades.  But for some reason, I think I will like them more than the ones in Keukenhof.

But much as I love my tulips, it’s a somewhat lazy love.  The snow melted away some weeks ago.  As I watched the warm sun beat down on the tender shoots, I idly wondered whether they needed watering.  But, continuing my unique style of gardening, I did not seriously consider taking a sprinkler to the plants.

This rain is the first water the tulips are getting, apart from the melted snow that watered them last month. For that reason alone, I think I will welcome the showers.

Sometime next week, the in-ground sprinklers will get turned on, and the tulips will start to get watered.  I can continue my style of lazy gardening.  Meanwhile, I will spend this weekend inspecting each flower bed.  Over the next few weeks, I will watch for the magical first flower to appear, the indisputable proof of my green thumb, a triumph of my gardening efforts at turning a seed into a flower.

Did I say gardening efforts?

..and not a single one for me

I landed in India and gingerly switched on my cellphone. The last time I switched on my phone in India, 3 years ago, my phone had scanned the universe for a long time before giving up. No signal. One would think it was looking for signs of extra terrestrial life rather than a mere mobile signal. This time, after just a few minutes, it lit up and said “Vodafone”.

Aha! I thought. My cellphone works here! As if in response, my phone beeped and showed me that I had one new message.

It was then that I started to panic. What if I open the message, or talk on the phone? Would I get slammed with some huge roaming bill? I remembered horror stories of people who had unknowingly racked up huge bills, and realized sadly that I actually had only a brick after all.

It’s a very shocking sensation – being without a cellphone. You feel somewhat lost, and the withdrawal symptoms are acute. I had gone just a few minutes without a phone, and was starting to feel quite lost already.

“You can always change the SIM card”, V told me helpfully. “I have an extra SIM card lying around that I can give you.”

“You don’t understand”, I said in the plaintive tone of someone who does not understand too well herself. “I cannot change the SIM card. My phone is locked!”

“Well, unlock it then. Or have you forgotten the password?” V asked me.

“No, no, only my cellphone provider can unlock it”, I wailed.

“I am sure there are stores here that will unlock it for you, “ V added more helpfully. “They can do anything here.”

“Yeah, but they might do something to my phone.”

“Okay, don’t use the phone then. But what is this ringtone? Sounds great, can you send it to me on Bluetooth?”

“No, no”, I panicked. “They might ding me on data charges. See? It wants me to specify a network even for Bluetooth transfers.”

V paused, amazed. “You guys are completely at the mercy of your cellphone providers”, he said.

Then he took pity on me, and handed me a cellphone for my use while in India. This was an old phone, but you would never know, looking at it – small, sleek and much better looking than mine. Then he texted (or SMSed) somebody, and soon I had international calling activated too. My withdrawal symptoms magically disappeared.

I hid my brick in my handbag. I was not going to need it for the next few weeks.

But the whole experience made me wonder – why are we in the US so tied to our cellphone providers? It’s true that we get phones at a fraction of the price, but we pay much more in the expensive monthly payments on the one or two-year contracts that we get locked into.

We cannot switch providers if we don’t like the service, or unlock our phones without the provider’s “approval”. We cannot buy just any phone – because phone models are “customized” by the providers, so all phones will not work with all providers. So if you want an iPhone, for instance, you are stuck with AT&T. You also won’t see all the features of the phone, just those that your provider shows you. For more ringtones, or wallpapers, you have to pay up.

If we wanted to a switch to a plan with more minutes, or switch to a different phone, we would have to contact the provider, who would usually draw up a new, extended contract. What’s worse, some companies like Sprint were even extending contracts without the consumer’s knowledge. Doesn’t it remind you of the Hotel California – you can check out any time but you can never leave?

In contrast, anyone in India can upgrade their phone simply by buying a new one and switching SIM cards. They can switch providers whenever they want – imagine the bargaining power that gives the customer. I believe that mobile number portability is also not too far off, which should remove the last hesitation anyone would have in switching providers.

Isn’t that how free markets are supposed to work? Why are we in the US making do with an oligopolistic model?

As for the service plans themselves – in the US you are charged for every minute you speak – whether you make the call or receive it. The number of “free minutes” change by plan, (basic plans are usually 450 free minutes per month). On the other hand, nights and weekends are free. But “nights” are usually defined as after 9 p.m., and if your friends are in a different time zone, one of you may end up consuming minutes. Oh, and you will get billed for all the wrong numbers you receive. If you haven’t signed up for the “Do Not Call” registry (and for the first few weeks after you sign up), you will get telemarketers’ calls, and you will get billed for those as well.

I loved the notion of “free incoming calls” that you have in India. As if that were not enough, Virgin Mobile now has this offer of paying for incoming calls – apparently, they’ll pay you 10 paisa for each minute you are on an incoming call.

Nokia’s phones are so sleek and beautiful too. As I mentioned, my own phone lay hidden in my handbag, and I never used it.  I was very glad about it too.  I love my phone, a Sony Ericsson W810i, and I had always thought it was a cute small phone.  But until I saw those Nokias, I had no idea that my 2 cm thick phone is – let’s face it, fat! Here I have this little tubby thing, and everyone else has these svelte Nokias with waistlines that were a quarter of my phone’s.  The American concept of supersizing extends, no doubt, to cellphones too.

So perhaps, even if my phone had been unlocked, I would never have dared to use it anyway.  I used a little Nokia all the time I was in India.  It was only after I was safely back in JFK, in supersized phone territory, that I took out my phone again.

No one would laugh at my phone here.

 

Mobiles, mobiles everywhere..

I had been away from India for only three years. Agreed, this is probably longer than the annual pilgrimage most NRIs make. But three years is not that long. You don’t expect drastic changes in three years. Heck, you don’t even expect significant changes in the storyline of most TV soaps. What happened during the last three years in a TV soap opera can usually be summed up in three lines.

But outside the soap operas, I was prepared for many changes. The landscape will not look the same, I told myself. Many new buildings would have come up, new flyovers, new shopping malls. At an anecdotal level, I had heard a lot about call centers, disposable income and the changes they have wrought.

Still, there were many big surprises. One of them was cellphone usage. I found that everybody in India now has a cellphone – paan shop owners, cab drivers, autorickshaw drivers, day-wage laborers, everyone. Senior citizens are getting up to speed on text messages or SMS, and some eight year olds already have their first cellphone.

Perhaps it is not so surprising. India is apparently now the second largest market in the world in mobile subscribers (after China). India has more than 250 million subscribers, growing at the rate of 8 to 9 million subscribers a month. Eight million new subscribers a month. Imagine. That’s roughly twice the population of Singapore being added each month.

The other thing I noticed was that everyone’s cellphones seem to have been made by Nokia. No, I am not being paid by Nokia to say this. Although, if you are reading this, dear Nokia representative, I’d like a free phone too

This should not have been such a surprise, for India is Nokia’s second largest market. But forget BlackBerrys and iPhones, does no one like Motorola, or LG, or Sony Ericsson? Especially Sony Ericsson, given that Ericsson was one of the first mobile phones in India? Remember that terrific “One Black Coffee” ad?

Twelve years ago, when I first saw that Ericsson ad, cellphones were so expensive. I could never have imagined that one day, construction workers in India would have a smaller, sleeker phone with more features than the “small” phone in that ad.

I walked into a Nokia store and checked out the models there. You have models starting from the basic, no-frills versions (priced at around Rs 2000 or $50) to high end ones like one sleek beauty I saw which was around Rs 13,000 or $300. But even the basic models are quite sleek, not like the chunky, ugly free phones you get in the US.

No wonder everyone had cellphones, if they are so affordable (more on that later). Perhaps that’s why so many tiny stores have sprung up, all selling cellphones and cellphone plans. You will find them in every narrow, winding lane, sometimes several adjacent to each other, yet they are all crowded, all the time.

Then there is the whole issue of choice, of being able to switch from one provider to another whenever I want to. No contracts like we have in the US. That’s how one would think the free market should function..

But more thoughts on all that, and all my cellphone escapades, in my next post..

Post-trip recovery

I am back!  This turned out to be a really long India visit.  Part of the vacation turned into a working trip, long nights included.  Then there was the offer of extra vacation days, happily accepted.

Then there was the four day jaunt through Belgium and the Netherlands.

Then the long flight back home.

Sigh. It all seems so long ago.

The rude reality is – I am back now.  The house seems to be filled with my bags.  Also, accumulated mail and magazines that USPS has kindly dropped off at our front door in a huge plastic carton,  laundry from before the trip,  and lots of dust.

Why does every vacation have to be preceded and followed with tons of work?   I suddenly realize that vacations are never really the break they are supposed to be.  They are just a postponement of work to the post vacation period.

Yes, I know, this must be obvious to all of you. It happens at work too, when you come back from a trip smiling and then find that there is a mountain of work that has been especially kept aside because “only you can do this best”.  That’s what they always say.

But I wonder why I keep forgetting this fact in all the euphoria before the vacation.

Brittle walls

Night wandered in through the drapes. She swept around the house, bringing a coldness to everything she touched. She spread herself around the house and settled into the corners.

In the living room, a lone lamp shone an arc of light. Saaya sat reading in a chair, silent, composed, watchful. She was waiting for Ravi. Waiting for his return, waiting for dinner.

Outside, the battle was still raging. The humid air was still with a watchful silence that was broken only by the cawing of crows and the fluttering of pigeons. And then, occasionally, there was a sudden sharp report of a gun. Sometimes, just a single shot, sometimes a barrage of shots. And then, silence again.

Yesterday, Saaya had looked out of her front window at the public tap on the other side of the street. She had wanted to check if water was flowing. These days, the public taps were mostly dry, and the water was irregular and scanty. She had to keep checking to catch the first sight of water in the taps.

She saw him then – a man, dark and thin. He had his back turned to her, which was fortunate. He was washing a long, curved sword in the public tap. A red river of blood flowed off the sword, coloring the ground, as if someone had carelessly thrown away the waters of an aarti. The steel blade glinted evilly in the sunlight.

Saaya hastily withdrew from the window. She did not want him to catch her watching. But she wondered, with a shudder, whose blood it was.

For now, this house was a fortress – it kept out the violence, it protected her from the evil blades that were preying outside. It spared her from harm – as long as she remained indoors. This house was also a prison, for she could not step out in safety.

But this house was built with brittle brick walls, not the strong walls of stone. The walls could not protect her if she was in real danger. All they could do was offer her a false sense of security. She clutched at it, eager to hold on to anything that lulled her feverish anxiety. She wanted to deceive herself, for that was the only way she could remain sane.

There were other walls that had broken down. The wall of trust had breached, releasing a flood of passions – hurt, anger, hate. Walls of propriety had come down, and every man believed he was his own law. The thin wall of decency that covers the beast of lawlessness had been scraped away. Now, only beasts prowled the streets.

Ravi went out every morning to work in this charged atmosphere, and every day she waited anxiously for him until he returned at night. With each day the fear grew on her that one day, he too would vanish. One day, the mobs would devour him, just as they had devoured so many others. What can one man do against an irrational mob?

She often wondered if they should move away. But move where? Every part of the city, and every city in the country was unsafe. Her story was playing out in millions of homes across the country, with just the names changed.

She had hurt her finger today, while cutting vegetables. A deep cut, not much blood, but the wound would take time to heal. She sat reading, the wound throbbing, her heart pounding as it grew late with no sign of Ravi.

The doorbell rang. Anxiety rose to fever pitch, as it did each evening, as she wondered if it was someone from the mob. Cold relief poured in, just as it did everyday, when she realized it was Ravi.

Saaya served his dinner and listened to him describe his day. She listened, eager to clutch at the few minutes of the day when she could forget her fears and relax. Eager to drown out her thoughts in the sound of his outwardly calm voice.

She wondered whether she should tell him about the finger. But it was unimportant, like the rest of her day.

Night settled in, creeping out from the corners and taking over the whole house. Tomorrow, a new day would dawn, and the cycle of violence, and hate and fear would begin again. But in these few hours until dawn, everyone could sleep and dream their own dreams.

For even their worst nightmares could not match the dangers that came with dawn.

Relatively speaking

Blog posts may be infrequent in the near future. I am in India now, and as with all India visits, the schedule tends to get filled up. Over the next few weeks, I will meet quite a few aunts and uncles, and wonder what they are actually thinking about my appearance.

You see, when I was much younger, they were very open about how I looked. “My, you’ve grown four inches taller since I last saw you”, they’d say. I would beam with pride and think that I must actually be growing then, even if it looked like I would never make it to being four feet tall.

Obviously, the focus was all on my height then. Now that my height has not changed for many, many years now, it would be quite safe to assume that I have, umm, reached my full potential. So obviously, the focus has shifted to other dimensions – specifically, my width.

But there is only so much my relatives can tell me about my width. “My, you’ve expanded by four inches since I saw you last” is not something they can say. We humans tend to be rather touchy about our width. But I know that’s what they are thinking. Secretly, I would very much like to know, though, what that number is. Is it two inches, or three? Or is it more like five??

This is perhaps a good reason to visit relatives much more frequently. All measurements by relatives are, you see, relative. Since they always measure only from the last visit, and not from, say, 1982, the more often you see them, the less the incremental change in width. I mean, you can never expand four inches in three months, can you? Or can you?

Anyway, I can predict with great accuracy what my relatives will tell me about my appearance. They will tell me how my face has become five shades fairer. I will refrain from pointing out that they can’t really see any skin on my face, so perhaps they mean the fly repellant cream. Or my face powder that seems to cake up faster than any actual cakes.

Meanwhile, they will measure me mentally and note the magic number in their minds. The magic number that I will never get to know…

I can’t bear the suspense. It is giving me sleepless nights. It must be. Or why else would I writing blog posts about relatives at 4 am?

Desi movies and masala popcorn

 

Popcorn smells of movie theaters.  It smells of excitement and joy and simple pleasure.

These days I seem to prefer watching movies at home.   Especially the desi movies.  For all the desi movies I have watched seem to follow a few unwritten rules:

(i)  The movie should only be aired on the one weekend when it is really difficult to watch it;

(ii) All desi movies should be aired in theaters which are in the seediest part of town.  You should double-check whether you have locked your car, and worry through the movie whether it will remain there when you return.  Unless, you have a Japanese car.  Then, you don’t need to worry.  This just shows why all desis should buy Japanese cars.

(iii)  The theater may be half-empty, but irrespective of where you sit, the seat behind you will always get filled.  If you are in the last row, someone will sit right next to you even if the rest of the theater is empty.

(iv) Movies are not supposed to be watched in silence.   You should always do one of the following things while watching a movie -

(a)  Ask your neighbor loudly what the actor just said.

(b)  Give your companion a running translation of the movie, or your critique of every scene.

(c) Bring your children and have them construct alternate screenplays.  You can have wide ranging discussions with your children on matters ranging from Bollywood to philosophy,  and how things are not what they seem.  But you should not talk loudly, you should whisper.  Your stage whispers will carry right across the theater, but you are, you see, whispering.

(d)  If your children are too young to talk, that’s fine – as long as they can bawl.  Why spend good money on babysitters when you are going to be among desis,bring your bawling baby by all means.  Bring them in when they are really hungry, so they can start bawling as soon as the screen darkens and the movie starts.   Try shushing them (in really loud tones) so everyone knows you are trying their best.  But don’t feed them, or they might quieten down.

(e)  Wear copious quantities of some awful perfume, or hair oil.  Eat garlic just before you step out of the house.  Preferably don’t wash for a few days before the movie.

All these efforts on the part of my fellow movie-goers brings in a certain ambience.   I am not sure what it reminds them of,  but it reminds me of my couch and why I should never have left it.  So are you surprised that I have decided not to watch Indian movies in theaters any more?

When I watch a movie at home, the screen is much smaller, the sound effects may just not be the same, and the audience will certainly not jeer or make catcalls.  But the seats are much more comfortable, and I am in control – I can pause the movie to look again at a particular scene, or I can decrease the volume when it gets too loud.  And no one behind me is going to tell me how it all ends.

But there’s something missing – the popcorn.  I know there is always microwave popcorn, but you know it is not the real thing.  It never pops perfectly, there are too many kernels, and the taste is just not the same as fresh popcorn.

Worse, microwave popcorn, it turns out, is not even good for you because of all the diacetyl in it (the chemical that gives you that buttery popcorn smell) and you can get lung disorders if you inhale too much of it.  So what are they telling me, I can eat popcorn, but I should not smell it?  Perhaps I should hold my nose then, as if I am walking along the Cooum/Musi/Ulsoor Lake?

Then there are the popcorn bags you get in stores.  One look at these bags and I know they are clearly meant as offerings for Bhima or Ghatothkacha.   The next time your friendly neighborhood demon (or Chambal dacoit) demands offerings of food, don’t bother sending in cartloads of rice.  Just buy him a dozen of these popcorn bags, they should keep him fed for two weeks atleast.

These bags also seem to contain too much salt and other unpronounceable chemicals that I really don’t need.  I love getting things for free, but I am not too sure my love extends to these chemicals.

Then there are popcorn poppers – made rather infamous by a certain Presidential candidate who shall remain nameless.   I can never think of popcorn poppers the same way again.  In any case, do I really need another appliance to add to the already crowded countertop?

So this weekend, I decided to make my own microwave popcorn.  I did not start with growing my own corn, though I would have really liked to.   But after detailed calculations, I realized that the amount of corn I needed could not be grown in flowerpots.

Here is how I went about doing it – I bought popcorn kernels that you can get in any supermarket.  You even have a choice of white and yellow popcorn kernels, depending on how you like your popcorn to look.

Then I bought brown paper bags – lunch bags.

Two small steps for me, one giant leap for my waistline.

Microwave Popcorn Recipe

Take the popcorn kernels in a bowl and add a spoon (or less) of butter or any vegetable oil of your choice to the kernels.  Add salt to taste.  If you like,  add chilli powder or any curry powder of your choice.   Mix it all up so every kernel is coated.

Pour the mixture into the brown paper bag.  When I searched online, everyone assured me that I could staple the bag and it would be quite safe in the microwave.  Apparently, since a staple is a really small piece of metal, it does not spark in the microwave.

But I played it safe and used a wooden toothpick to close the bag.  I folded the edge of the bag once and then stuck the toothpick into it.

Now microwave this bag on high power for 3 to 5 minutes.   You will know it’s done when the pops start getting really infrequent, say 5 seconds between pops.

Take the bag out and open it up away from your face (so you don’t get all the steam). Let it rest for a minute and once the steam has escaped, you can peer into the bag.

I am not, repeat not, responsible for any injuries that may result from whooping with joy, dancing around the kitchen, or trying to gobble down three mouthfuls of popcorn at a time.

I forgot to mention one other purchase you need to make – jeans two sizes too large.  Believe me, once you have tried out this recipe, you will need them!

Anonymous abuse, real damage?

I read two articles recently which made me start thinking about the nature of anonymity and how it brings out the worst in some of us.

The New York Times had an interesting article about anonymous insults on blogs and the question of how to deal with them.  The article talks about an ad agency executive, Paul Tilley, who committed suicide last month.  Some people wonder whether his suicide was a result of comments made by a blogger called Agency Spy, who is an anonymous advertising industry employee.

No one knows who Agency Spy is, and what his motives are for his abusive comments.  For all you know, he could be a competitor, or a junior or mid-level executive who could have been working with Paul, but never had the courage to criticize Paul in person.  His blog, on the other hand, gives him a platform to speak freely because of his very anonymity.  He has exercised this freedom, without considering any of the responsibilities that come with it.

The second article I read was a Washington Post article about a website called Juicy Campus, where anonymous posters share campus gossip.  This is invariably salacious gossip slandering classmates, mostly women.  The anonymous commenters name specific classmates and question their character and morals.  The website itself disclaims any responsibility for the comments posted on it, though it does encourage people to “give us the juice”.

In both these cases, the people who made these remarks are anonymous, but the people they are targeting are not.  So the targets have no way of calling the attackers out.  We do not know what the motives of the attackers are, and we have no idea about their credibility.

But the mud they fling remains.  If you fling enough mud on anyone, and if you keep flinging it repeatedly, people think some of it will stick.  The charges themselves may be completely untrue, but at least some readers will believe them.  We always tend to believe that there is a kernel of truth in gossip.  “There is no smoke without fire”, we think, but what if there were never any fire, just a smokescreen?

This could become a serious problem if the wrong people read these allegations and believe them.  Think of a scenario in which, in the first case, a client of Paul Tilley believes Agency Spy, or in the second case, a recruiter who is googling a college graduate’s name as part of employment verification comes across the campus gossip.

I don’t have an issue with Agency Spy or anyone else choosing to remain anonymous.  We all have our reasons, and in fact, I blog anonymously too, so my issue is not with the cloak of anonymity that some of us wear.

But behind the cloak of anonymity, most of us still remain the same person we are in real life.  We are still responsible for all our actions online.

But some people think differently.  To them, the cloak of anonymity is more like The Mask, except in this case it brings out their inner troll.  They use anonymity to post blog posts and comments that range from the stupid to the abusive to the depraved.  They do this because they do not have to face the consequences of their actions.   They would prefer to do a drive-by-insult rather than a stand-and-fight.

Obviously, none of these people would ever have the courage to say any of these things if their identity were revealed.

The very fact that they would prefer to insult people anonymously also shows that somewhere in the far reaches of their minds, they know that this is not the way to argue or behave.  They are embarrassed to have their real-life identity linked to their behavior.

I think of these guys in the same way I do the middle-aged, avuncular looking guys in the bus, who find that crowded buses (or trains) are the perfect opportunity to grope women.  They know they are anonymous, because it is difficult to pinpoint the perpetrator in the crowd.

Such people are disgusting.   But sometimes, apart from disgust, I feel another emotion – pity.  Why do these people have such twisted minds, I wonder.  Why do they have so much hate, anger and cynicism bottled up inside them?   Why do they make their days miserable by spewing negative emotions, when they could be thinking happier thoughts?

In the end, there is nothing much we can do about such people.  Perhaps we don’t even need to.  They are punishing themselves much more than we would ever have the heart to.