A good day

Today was a good day overall. Good days for me mean two things -
- things falling into place
- being able to realise it
Most of the day was part 1 from above and this blog is a way of cementing part 2.
So what were the things which went right today -

1. Woke up somewhat late, but was able to leave early by getting ready quickly, less traffic on the way to work, was able to sleep during the ride into work and reached office by 10
   
2. Did a lot of work - finished some long pending work, called up potential clients, tackled a few small issues for the team and for one of my clients
   
3. Billable work started for a new client (thanks to a 15 page NDA, I can not tell you which one) - From the time you meet a client, getting to the getting paid bit is a long way. It involves meeting them over and over again, making them understand how we might be able to help them, draft a contract, negotiate over points, get a signoff from them, wait for them to get a signoff from their bosses, start billing, raise an invoice, chase up with accounts and finally opening a letter to see a cheque inside. Start to finish can take anywhere between a few weeks (god bless such clients) and a year! however, once billing starts with a new client (as in, the meter on how much work we do for a client project starts) usually means a lot of pain is over.
   
4. Emails from old colleagues is always nice. I spent almost 4 years of my life at a new place - and a large fraction of the total number of people I knew in London was due to my work place. Now that I am in Delhi again, it is nice to get emails from them.
   
5. Chit chat with friends all day - AR was sending mails at the rate of 5 an hour which is always fun
   
6. At about 6, thanks to facebook, I was part of a plan to go to a nice lounge/bar with two friends. I had been thinking that my social life was testing new lows this week and this plan hit the spot. What I also liked about the plan was that it started early and had the potential to end early and seemed harmless enough. I panicked for a bit at the fact that I had signed up for a singles night, but then realised that this was Delhi and such a plan would mean 15 men and 2 women. Since I was going in with two women, I already was on talking terms with them and my worries of having no one to talk to were put to rest. There was surprisingly less traffic and I was a few minutes early to pick up my friends. Thankfully, they were ready to go and we were at the place on time.
   
7. So the singles night out turned out as expected - 3w + 8m. What was nice was that even the men, except for Pappu (about whom I will soon), were nice people, and they were ok to hang out with. All of them had interesting jobs, interesting lives and were also great for conversation. Soon, the group had managed to locate common friends and acquaintances and the drinks were flowing.
   
8. It is always nice to spend time with YS. I have known her for so long now and she is the same - chilled out, no hangups, great sense of humour, lots of stories to swap and a common list of people about whom I can bitch about to her.
   
9. SS as well is really nice. She can hold her own, no matter the audience. Like she spoke for a bit to Pappu, who had also come for the singles night. He was the kind of guy who gives Delhi a bad name. Rich and showing it, somewhere between little and no class (depends upon how charitable you are feeling), no respect for anyone, loud mouthed. Of course, very rich, with a few acres of prime land in his name with a few factories sitting on them.
   
10. Post-Pappu (he left quite soon) and post-dinner, on the way back, we realised how much we all felt about Pappu (Especially SS, who politely bore the brunt of his attack) and we talked about him for quite a while. Such cut and dried real life caricatures are very useful in making friends and getting to know people - you get to know what the others noticed about him, which gives you an insight into how they think and what they are made of...
    
11. Finally, as I dropped my fabulous company and was driving back alone, I was happy to note that there were no police checks, which can be a pain after three glasses of wine.
    
12. As I came back home and switched on the TV, Forrest Gump was on. It was the part where Gump walks out after getting decorated with the medal of honour and walks in to an anti war demo. he is asked to give a speech at the end of which he says his name and gets to meet his all time love Jenny again. I like this movie a lot.
    

As I write this (late night and then early next morning), I am thankful to the powers to be...
I think that as most of us are busy climbing mountains, it is good to sit back every once in a while to enjoy the view. You might not be at the highest point yet, but you are high enough to get a good view most of the time.

India - Long time, no see

There is a new series called ‘Kahani mahabharat ki” on TV.

“Kahani” has a few extra a’s and e’s to use the great power of numerology to make mythological serials popular in India. I was looking forward to seeing this fantastic story again on TV. I have seen the earlier one and quite liked it – the story and the characters makes normal actors look better)

The spellings put me off. The tired look on the actors turned me off. The background music was tiring.

The cameraman is on E, because he is never tired in showing zoom ins from weird angles. Again and again. The script seems to have been written by some panwallahs in their spare time. Overall, this team of unimaginable collective talent seems to have succeeded in converting the Mahabharat into what seems to me like a saas bahu drama in costumes. Maybe that is what they intended.

There is a show on radio called “Tu sabki Baja” on a radio channel which encourages people to “Bajate raho”. I remember getting slapped for much milder language while in school.

Looking around, I think I grew up in a different country.

I grew up in the 80s. (Some people tell me that the process is not over yet).
I grew up in an India where an evening out did not mean drinking. It meant going out for a “picture” with parents, then having south Indian or Chinese food and coming back home with a kulfi. Even into college, it meant a movie, dinner, conversation and a walk. Maybe I was just very uncool and did not know about it.

Entertainment was one channel and a VCR. Mahabharat and Ramayan meant finishing everything before 9 on a Sunday, which happened on its own as you woke up at 7
Actually, a TV producer today needs all the help getting Mahabharat to work on TV (hence the extra a’s and e’s).

I wonder if my kids will not understand me. I don’t think they will like me too much. On a positive note, I think I understand my parents a bit better with every passing day. I think I am still growing up.

Field Marshals and something else...

Field Marshal Sam Maneckshaw passed away a few days ago. I read about it in the TOI (see below) and also was pleased to note that the economist wrote an endearing eulogy for him. I had read a bit about his temperament and was not too surprised to read about his retorts to Madam Gandhi (about whom I have a lot to say, but will not, given the recent case of Gandhi versus Vaid, I will keep my opinions to myself)

It also gave me the opportunity to read a bit more about him and about the only other Field Marshall the Indian army has had - Field Marshall Cariappa - who was at the helm of the armed forces during 1947. Reading about him, I felt that he was quite important in the mindset with which the Indian army was born with (in 1947) and developed it. The army prides itself (again very little data) for its secular credentials and a little part of it flows down directly from Cariappa.

Cariappa, after retiring from the Army, was made the Indian high commissioner to Australia. He was not very keen about this, but Nehruji insisted. As a result, he found his way into Canberra's high society. I do not think anyone could really handle him - a war veteran who had fought for the British and had been instrumental in stalling the Japanese (Which in turn helped keep Australia safe), highly learned and well versed in poetry and philosophy, while at the same time, with a tendency to speak his mind (a somewhat unnecessary skill for a diplomat). He travelled all over Australia and soon knew a lot more about Australia than many native(?) Australians. Australia had a white only immigration policy at that time (which is quite a laugh now, given that the Aussie government now is prepared to spend Australian tax payer dollars into attracting indians into settling there - highly skilled ofcourse). What angered him as a soldier was that with a white only policy, Italians and Germans (countries which Australia fought against in WWII) were welcome to settle in Australia, while Indians, who had fought on the same side as the Australians were not.
I am not sure why I am talking about him - have meandered from Maneckshaw but reading about this time and some stories about Maneckshaw and Cariappa were fascinating.
I dream of a day when the demand for Indian work permits outstrips its supply.
Or you could just walk in into the country via Bangladesh!
Topic change.
Dramatic topic change.
I noted some very interesting things on Google analytics.
I will observe it for a while before sharing it here, or probably I never will. It made me deliriously happy.
Because of that, I need to bring this up as well - I might have talked about this earlier on this blog - that for me, a large part of companionship is about having a witness to my life and for me to bear witness to someone else's. It is about knowing that what I face in is known to one other person, and that person sees all that I feel and go through and think and so on...
So, yes, I think I have found a rather long-range witness. I think I have always had one.
(no romantic angles need to be explored here please)

Traffic management

option 1: Option 2:
Option 3:
I think that the government here is trying hard with number 1 (massive infrastructure investment), but what is really needed is number 3. That is all I have to say about that.
I have not been able to come up with something very interesting to write about for the past few weeks, may be that is just a reflection of life these days. Staid, plain, mundane, routine are the words which come to mind.
Workwise, things are ok. A few clients and a few potential clients. The gathering inflation rain clouds have managed to take the joy away from the early showers / timely monsoons. Things will get worse from a business point of view as the government takes steps to dampen demand. However, since we are a tactical marketing arm and not really into branding, we should be hit at the end. When tactical spend is getting hit, things are going to be so bad anyway that it wont matter.
Personal life wise, things are just about ok. Things are moving and not moving and all I want to do is to do the right thing. Doing the right thing implies taking a decision. Decision making, by my definition, is 1)selecting option out of many, 2)based on a predetermined set of criteria, 3)using the best possible information.
The information can only be best possible, because perfect information would mean that there is an equation which has to be solved, not a decision to be made.
I guess the reader and author both by now have realised that the author is in a rut!

Monsoon Beddings

Delhi has been a refreshing surprise early in the summer. After a couple of weeks of ever increasing heat, there were almost two weeks of rains. Even though the rains meant a complete breakdown in traffic, I was still happier because of the drop in temperature...

I added Google analytics tracking on this blog. I wanted to note some of the interesting facts it revealed:
- I have had visitors searching for "ecommerce authors in india" as well as "Personal yoga teacher vasant kunj" visit this blog. Google might have a hand to play in this, see this.
- They an average of 2 pages on this blog.
- About 1 in 5 are regular visitors, while the rest are searching for yoga teachers and the like (see above)

I wonder how dangerous is it to have data like this with Google. But then I guess, if the big G really wanted this data, they could just buy a few of these companies to have a look-see.

Do no evil, as they used to say ... wonder if they really stick to it now.
What about automatic matching on keywords in adwords? Or the content network with only a button to control it for a few years!

A Noteworthy Journey

Thanks to the Virgin Atlantic online checkin and also because a colleague who was supposed to get me upgraded had a baby daughter, I ended up on a window seat and in economy on my way back from London. After dinner and a few hours of sleep, I woke up and looked out of the window.
I like looking out of train windows - this habit started early with a lot of 2nd sleeper journeys while travelling around Bihar, Assam and Delhi. There was a brief interlude when my parents started booking the 3-tier AC sleeper and staring out of the air conditioned windows is no fun, even in the day. I was back at the looking out of windows in college , which was 40 hours away by train from Delhi and had some of the most interesting landscapes on the way with tunnels, bridges, valleys, mountains, creeks and even a stretch of sandy beach. I will dig around for pictures and post some, but the best way of seeing this stretch of rail is by traveling by 2nd sleeper in a non-rainy month (which are only a few and the best months are just after the rains!) from Kurla down till Mangalore. My father likes to say that nature comes in four varieties - hills and hills, hills and forests, forests and hills, forests and forests - and this route has each of the four in plenty. However, the best sight I have seen was even before the Konkan started and going to Mangalore from Delhi used to take 53 hours, as the train used to take a gigantic U turn and works its way back up through Kerala. I remember one morning, when we were passing through Kerala and were in the middle of the mid morning bathing. All the men had left and gone to work, while all the women were washing their clothes and bathing. It was quite a sight for the young testosterone being transported right through the middle of god's very own country! Amen. I want to add another variable into the natural beauty equation - women.
Cutting back to the journey at hand, I saw a huge city to the north next to some water. It was Teheran, which is to the south of the Caspian Sea. It was very peaceful - the time probably being around 5AM local time, the time when a city is usually most asleep than others. (In any case, I was too high to notice any movement). For a passing moment, I thought about Ahmadinejad and some of the things he has written or said, but the view tore me away from such things. I went back to just taking in the view of the city, albeit from 10 miles up, which has been habitated for the past 8000 years.
Gradually, the scenery became more interesting. We crossed the Zagros mountains as the sun rose and the scenery only improved with the Hindukush ranges coming into view. It was a goegraphy class in fast forward - glaciers, ravines, valleys and rivers - all in quick succession. What was interesting was how some rivers seemed to cut right through a mountain range - as if they had existed all along and the mountains rose afterwards. This is what plate tectonics also suggests - that the earlier continents were very differently shaped and located and they have drifted away from and into each other leading to the current continents. In the process, they created the Himalayas. The Hindukush is located approximately where the western edges of the Indian island would have rubbed against the Asian landmass and would have led to the mountains slowly rising out of coastal plains. Hence, the rivers.
May be.
This was also the age old route to India over which I was flying. Iranians/Aryans/Persians/Greeks, Scythians, Mongols and then the Arabs all have had their go at my precious and till very recently, a predominantly benign (read lazy and fat) country. I could see all the hell they were willing to go through to reach the pot of gold which was India. Every father west of the Hindukush who had a particularly headstrong son would rear him with his head towards the east and his mind full of a tales of gold in India. On the plane, the entire horizon was filled with lethal looking mountains and passes - and while I was flying over them, all kinds of adventurers had made a highway across this landscape for India.
Faith can move mountains. Greed can get you across.
The tremendous sense of calm is worth a mention. On sea level or thereabouts, every problem seems bigger than it really is. Religions (all of them), countries, economies, commodities or the lack of it have all been invented by humans over the past thousand years or so. The mountains and the planet have been changing, but have moved by a few inches in the past 10000 years. They are all that matter when you are ten miles up. They are all that you can see.
Maybe all of us should just chill a bit more and takes ourselves a bit less seriously.
Just for a bit.

Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

Travel ... These days!

We are going to be launching a travel blog - the idea being that people working here travel a lot and research their travel well and also go to unusual places, ,or go to the usual places but do unusual things, usually - so why not let our dear customers read about it and maybe even teach us a thing or two.
Getting blogs was easy enough and so was the design and development, however, this is the first time that my team is making something which is on the website and IS customer facing. Therefore the butterflies.
I caught a really cool movie over the weekend - Life... in a Metro. According to the movie, the following are true:

• The world is very small - everything is interrelated
• Almost all married men have affairs
• Married women are less likely to have one, , compared to men, but for the right man, why not
• Men are not emotionally involved in an affair, all the involvement is to ensure the woman does not bale out on them
• Women are always emotionally involved in relationships, whether they realise it or not
• Kangana Ranaut is hot, though she can not speak English very well. (Who cares - reminds me of "Talk!!!! who wants to talk!?!"

The music works wonders - Pritam (composer) and Syed Qadri (lyrics) reinforce their comfort and command over this genre of music which has been the domain of Pakistani bands. The songs take place in the movie, with the performers visible, but not part of the story with the characters going on with their lives.
I love Hindi movies!!!!
PS - So when you listen to "In Dino", remember where you first heard about it

My Life

I wonder if I have a life which is particularly interesting or that every one else has one like this. This trip to India had (note the past tense) suddenly opened up a lot of possibilities. There was a particularly intoxicating smell of possibilities in the air. I had to look away from the past and look towards the present for a fresh start and I managed to pull it off, only by focussing on what could lie ahead (
Alas (and apologies for the simile), what lay beneath blew up in my face, or rather, on the phone.
If there was a square one, I passed it so fast in reverse gear that I am not even sure how far back I am in the scheme of things to be.
(I know I am speaking in riddles, but this blog, apart from entertaining millions of readers all over the world and filling them with hope and contentment, also serves as a diary, and I need to jot things of importance down in some way)
What do to I now - this very moment, today, tomorrow and for this month?
Where will I end up?

The Heat is On

I saw the trailer of "an inconvenient truth" a few weeks ago and it has been nagging me. I will watch it as soon as I can get the time... In the meantime, there are a few questions which I wanted to put to paper .

1. How bad is Global warming? Is it really happening or is it periodic/episodic?
2. Can normal people like you and me make a difference?

I guess that short answers to the questions above would be:
1. Very. Yes it is happening. Does not matter if there is something periodic. We are definitely hastening it.
2. YES.

I think saving power, water, gas, fuel, food all add up in a big way. I wish I had numbers to show this, but this is the example which I can think up of -

Imagine the water that flows from the tap while you brush.

It has been sucked out of the ground, filtered, treated, pumped into the mains and then onto the supply and then to the overhead tank to the tap. And I let it flow. It then heads back through sewage, pumped again to be filtered and treated on its way to the river/sea.
Each of these verbs - sucked, filtered, treated, pumped has a carbon footprint because of energy needed to do them. The energy required per litre of water might be quite small in absolute terms, and CO2 produced might sound even smaller.
However, multiply that number by 3 times day, a lifetime of 25000 days and 3bn people, who live in urban areas and the factor is not ignorable any more.

The above example is something which people fail to realise. Given the number of people and the innumerable conveniences of modern living, there is a lot of energy being used up. By being careful and smart and just a little more responsible, it all adds up.

1. Saving water (look at above) by using the sun to dry clothes, using the dishwasher only when it is completely full (or better, cleaning them in the sink). My score - 4/10.
2. Saving electricity by not keeping gadgets on standby, tubelights or LEDs instead of bulbs, climb stairs instead of a lift, motion sensitive lighting in offices. My score - 2/10
3. Eliminate waste and recycle (this is something I do not do at all and need to work at). My score 0/10.

(By the way, whats with keeping shops and offices lighted long after business hours. Have a look at here and here. This is something we as consumers should make businesses realise - that a dark carbon neutral store would shine out more. always. I am proud to work for a firm which encourages recycling at the workplace and the lights are switched off at night, I would be proud to shop at a shop which does the same.
In Delhi, long long ago, they started charging for shopping bags at the cooperative stores. That made people reuse polythene bags. The trick was to price the bags high enough for it to matter to people.)

Update - Read another post about the same, hits closer to home- about developing countries and climate change here

Unrelated comment - Life continues to be more like some light with a tunnel fast approaching!

Dreamsailing - contd.

As I had referred to before , lucid dreaming could be quite fun. The one from this morning I will narrate - There was something I really wanted a few years ago but could not get it at all. I think I came close but then things went very wrong and have not really been set right since.

So, I get this dream last night with characters related to the theme above. About five minutes into the dream, I realise whats going on . Instead of being greedy and quickly tweaking things to the way I would like it to be, I went on to have a conversation. I really wanted to understand what was going on the heads of the others involved, and this was just about the easiest way of doing so. It was good while it lasted but I had to get up as my friends (visiting from India) were ringing the door bell to let them in - they just got back from Amsterdam (a 12 hour bus ride).
I went back to sleep immediately after that but the dream did not come back.
I was analysing the conversation and realised that the other characters in the dream were saying things which I would have wanted them to say. In fact, it is not so cut and dried. They said things which made sense to me. Actually, they said things which did not make sense to me. But, knowing them, in a way it did. In yet another set of words, if I were to imagine myself in their place, I would have probably said the same thing.
This means that a lucid dream is the psychological equivalent of a closed system (as it should be).
I could NOT have come up with something from outside. The source of information, no matter how fantastic they seem, are coming from somewhere inside my brain itself.
Ho hum.
Good while it lasted.

f.r.i.e.n.d.s

The title is the only place which refers to the tv show. This is about my friends, I hope this one is fun.
(For me, thinking of something to write about is quite a task. I try to be spontaneous, but since most of my waking time is spent in office, I can not do much about it there. The other problem with personal bursts of spontaneity is that many of these thoughts, are exactly that. Just one interesting thought. Blogging has generated quite a bit of respect in me for writers....)
I could describe my friends, but that will be a long winded post and I am feeling super lazy, today being a Friday.
For me, friends are a storehouse of memories as well as a preview of the future. Each one of them has a box full of common times from the past - the fun and the games, but also the heartbreak and the agony; long hours of debating right and wrong and black and white but also innumerable moments of unquestioned support and understanding. There are times when we ruled the world together in our own little corner, but also times when we felt that everyone was against us... the times we learnt the good and the bad and also the times when we discovered the madness in each other and in our own selves. Some of the oldest memories I have are of time spent by my oldest friend in my house in Jamshedpur - breaking toys, running after one another and just being happy. Playing football and Khokho (yes!) in front of Carmel School, hours spent talking on the terrace on top of second wing at DPS, discussing the country and everything that is happening every day after playing football in front of the main road in Sarita Vihar, playing "बीस साल बाद" on the final block terrace, sitting in side the fountain in front of the main block at Suratkal, long walks in the staff area at Ahmedabad, listening to music and watching movies just talking and not moving while everyone else was running "very hard to stay at the same place" at Ahmedabad, staying awake the whole night to try and attend the first lecture and falling asleep just after breakfast, chasing waterfalls and scaring in Scotland, partying hard all over London, shivering on the top of the Eiffel Tower, driving a car through the mustard fields near Neemrana, playing cards in Florence or getting drunk on Californian wine on the terrace at Dock street on my birthday, questioning life and laughing at nothing at Maresfield Gardens - so many millions of things and if I did not have friends, I would have missed out on each of them.

Unconditional happiness and an unhurried sense of time - that is what I am trying to put across here.

The future... well I see how each one of them is and I can also steal glimpses of their future, and in some way, of my future. I see hardwork and success, and I also see wasted opportunity. I see mindblowing brilliance and I see mediocrity.
What I like to see is contentment and resilience. I like to see strength of purpose and character.
These are the things that I need for the future. I know where to find them.

Soppy eh?
Sorry. Blame it on the song in the post below?

Singing in Hindi

इन दिनों, दिल मेरा, मुझ से है कह रहा ,
तू ख़्वाब सजा, तू जीले ज़रा...

है तुझे भी इजाज़त
करले तू भी मोहब्बत
है तुझे भी इजाज़त
करले तू भी मोहब्बत

बेरंग सी है बड़ी ज़िंदगी , कुछ रंग तो भरो
मै अपनी तन्हाई के वास्ते, अब कुछ तो करो ..... (२)

जब मिलें थोड़ी फुरसत (2)
खुद से कर ले मोहब्बत
है तुझे भी इजाज़त,
करले तू भी मोहब्बत

The hindi keyboard is painful for some words, but overall an 8 on 10*.

These days, my heart keeps telling me
to Dream a little,
to Live a little...

That I too am allowed,
To fall in Love...
That I too am allowed,
To fall in Love...

The Namesake

I had read the book about two years ago. Even then, the part of the story which had hit home was not the bit about the young Phd student and his wife in a strange land, but the bit about the son and what he feels about the father.

About the movie - I think it was very well made. Though I am not Bengali, the characters seemed very real to me. I also do not remember the book very well, but I think that the movie did an ok job in giving it life. The story reminded me of a simpler time, back in India and also here. It reminded of me as a person who had just come here - quite a fool I was then (No claims to the contrary for now!).

I wish I could write a better review which would do justice to how good I think the movie is, but some of the things I felt are intensely personal and I would rather let you find your own joys and sorrows while watching this one.

On an unrelated issue, the rank is #8 now, on google.com. I think that regular posts should help take this up a bit more. I would like to make a point about quality of rankings there as well - rank#1 is a dead link and has been a dead link for the past 6 months. WTF is going on!?!?!

Oneironaut-ing

The first time I could manipulate my dream, when I realised I was dreaming and that this realisation had not woken me up, I was quite happy the next morning. I was unsure that it had actually happened. For all such lucid dreams before that day, I had assumed somewhere in the back of my head that I had been dreaming about controlling my dreams and was not actually doing so.
There was no such thing as Google* then, so such information was not easy to find. In fact, I did not know what to look for to search for such information. Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was quite a common thing (I used to think I was like the superman of dreams), that there is aterm for it - Lucid Dreaming, and sure enough, there is a lot of research and investigation done in this field.
Interestingly enough, there were common themes to such research (the wiki page linked above has a good summary of some of that research) and my investigations. I was broadly concerned about three things - How to have only such dreams, how to restart a dream in case you got too involved and it was no longer a dream and more of a day dream and if such dreams could be used to look into the future (yes, I am like this only!).
My way of trying to have only such dreams was to try not to dream dreams in which I was not aware. However, therein lies a contradiction - if you are not aware that you are dreaming, how do you control/reduce such dreams? The other way of approximating this was to ensure that any lucid dreams, once identified, were strongly encouraged. And that is whatpoint two was about. My way of lengthening such dreams was to go back to sleep to try and continue the dream. However, I read very recently about how rubbing hands in a dream would help lengthen such dreams. The side effect of rubbing hands together is that particular areas of the brain which helps such dreams.
A lucid dream is a cool place to be. But it is a delicate balance - one has to be cautious enough not to stop dreaming and aware enough not to forget that one is dreaming. If ever you also are a fellowlucid dreamer, try looking in a mirror or a watch and funny things happen. Another fun thing to do is to try and read a newspaper. This is something I have been doing and have not yet been able to make sense of what I read... I blame it on the intense media messaging which hits us in this day and age.


And by the way, the title of this post, literally means Dream Sailor-ing.

* There I go about Google again. By the way, this blog got a page rank update and am now on the first page for the search phrase Saurabh Kumar. Yay!

The Speed of Time

I am currently going through a phase where there is absolutely nothing happening in my life other than work. The sad thing is that this is not because there is too much work. There is work, but it is a very 9 to 7 variety.

Should my managers be happy? Yes and No I guess. They should be because there is nothing to distract me and that I can only but work. No because not having a distraction can soon become the biggest distraction of all.

Hence this post. How quickly does time pass? A perfectly correct but completely useless answer could be "At the rate of one second every second." It does, but that is just a definition, a measurement of something we feel and count. Even if we did not have a definition, it would still pass. The answer I am looking for has more to do with how does a person register time and its passage. Is it the same for every one? It does seem to pass faster and slower depending on all kinds of things - but does it pass or feel to pass at the same speed, ceteris paribus? Also, if humans could not sense the passage of time, would it matter if time passed? And, do humans sense the passage of time only because we are mortal? In other words, if humans were immortal, would the passage of time be immaterial?

I have realised that I think about strange things when I am not happy. I am not happy. In fact, I want to share exactly why I am not happy, but can not. So I try to think up of other things to write about – and strange things are pulled out from the attic upstairs.

I was watching a documentary about the last days of Birtish rule in India. I realised how I had been neglecting my reading and have been devoting time and energy to the Playstation! Anyway, more on my playstation prowess (or the lack of it) later.

PS: I dont even know if ever anyone reads any of my blogs, simply because there are no comments. Please leave some if you can, just so I know whether I need to shift all this to my hard drive instead of blogger.

The Maths of loneliness

1. On an average, how many times do you reminisce about past events in a day?

a. Less than once a day
b. Once to twice a day
c. Very often
d. Almost all the time

I just got back from a short holiday with my friends. All through the trip, there were inane number of things which kept reminding me of things in my past....
Got me thinking about whether things were reminding me of stuff or that stuff was always there in the back of my head and things happening now just attached themselves to something or the other in the past.

Saurabh's blog

With a name like Saurabh, searching in Google has always been a not very exciting experience. The earliest I show up with is rank #41 with "saurabh kumar". Apologies for the blatant ego-surfing, but this is a way to experiment to see how various terms do on search engines, which by the way, is a semi-professional, semi-personal interest of mine.

Anyway, the website got a page rank sometime last week :)

Yay!

August and everything after

Every now and then, I feel that life has reached a turning point. Like right now.
However, when I look back, I know for sure that I have felt like this before, but I can not really put a finger on any such turns in the past, which means that there weren't really turning points.
Such turning points are like looking at very large map, and seeing jagged edges and craggy lines all over the place. But when you step back and look at it from a distance (like when you look back at life in hindsight), things almost always look and undulating.

What spurred me into action today was an old friend praising my last post - nothing cuts through the haze of inertia like motivation. Now that I have a confirmed audience (albeit of a single individual), I will strive not to disappoint it.

My parents and sister are here on holiday and I think I have spent more time with them in the past week than ever before in the last nine years, since I left school. I had done something which had disappointed them a lot just a month back, and I was worried about how things were going to be. However, things are just fine. I guess it is easiest to seek forgiveness from ones parents. It does increase the chances of hurting them again, which is not good. I hope that I will be able to be a similar parent when my turn comes.

Letters versus otherwise

Whatever happened to the good old long letter?
a.k.a
Emails have ceased to excite. (In fact, there is little in life that still does. Or maybe it is just me. Anyway, that is a whole new post for sure).

How I remember when checking email was a daily ritual... Sitting in front of a mono 14" monitor, loggin on into the linux student account, checking email on PINE was almost as exciting as anything else. (PINE stands for Program for Internet News and Email aka Pine Is Not ELM - I miss recursive abbreviations! This also begs the question – WTF is ELM? ELectronic Mail?)

Even though emails directed my way were less than one day, the login screen still filled the heart with a sense of anticipation. It was the screen at the end of a carefully planned journey – the expected number of people versus the number of computers working at any point of time in the computer centre and so on. Anyway, the struggle was ok as the emails made it worth my while.

They were nice. They were not mindless. Not all of them. They were for a purpose. They were not conversation snippets. They were letters.

I remember a few of them from then* even now- Letters from a friend telling me about her breakup and the days after and long replies peppered with attempts at humour. Letters narrating first experiences in all kinds of things. Letters from foreign cousins who were thrilled that they could keep a finger on the latest in families back home through this cost effective source and much faster. Well, people were not too choosy back then. Email was a happy compromise between letters and telephone calls – almost live like a phone call and cheaper than a letter.

This was when I had this particular friend I used to write to almost every day. She was my pen friend, in an email sense. I had not met her and I am not sure how we got in touch. She was from a large city and had lots of friends – I wonder how she got the time to write to me. It went on for just under two years – we exchanged pics and treated each other to “letters” also – back in those days, if blogs existed, I am sure I would have written a similar entry cursing emails and praising letters (Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis – Latin for times change and we change with them). Hmm… wonder what she is up to these days? We grew out of it – actually she did and she let me know and I had no option. :-] I was not willing to invest that much time into it again, and overall, I had a check against the pen-pal row… She used to write wonderful letters. In fact, in the beginning, I had a sneaking suspicion that she did not exist and was a creation of my friends in college as she used to sound too similar to me. Gradually, I ruled out all my friends and then we used to talk on the phone and it was definitely not one of my friends.

Then, there was a time when everyone I know who was not studying engineering was taking post grad tests and writing SOPs and mapping their life out. Every week marked yet another twist in the long road of tests and more tests, and all such turns were duly relayed by email. Soon, we were taking our own placement tests and interviews.

I guess the mobile phone killed the email which had killed the letter. In the beginning, it was the SMS. Text messages became longer and emails became shorter. Later, talk rates crashed for both national and international dialing. It was easier to call or text than email. I guess with emails, one wrote only when one had a few things to say. With the mobile, such things were relayed as and when they were formed. There is little or no time for any kind of a 'thought' inventory to form – which might be a good or a bad thing. I think it is a bad thing – but that’s only me.

I guess this was all part of the big changes in technology and media which we have seen over the years. The audience has shrunk and is now an active part of creating the content also. Blogs for example. In fact, take a look at this, which is like a newspaper operating entirely with no paid reporter.

The other thing – we grew up and suddenly had less time to do anything – even though all we do now is one job, which is also something which sucks.

[* This was the time India was taking its first steps in public internet access. Student access was cheap but anyone who had seen the normal internet craved for that. Corporate internet ids were shared and used - it was the Wild West as far the internet was concerned. Passwords were hacked and accounts were bankrupted of their access. I can think up of many people who did not pay for years and years of internet access – all TCP/IP of course. TCP/IP was the name given to the browser based internet access, which was for Rs. 15000 for 500 hours]

Then there was the 24th of November 2000 thingie :) but that is not for this blog.