Jottings

Allow me to be that guy who for once ignores his emotions and patriotism and just says WTF.

A few weeks back, there was big fanfare orchestrated by a lot of Indian media outlets regarding a homegrown web browser called as Epic. I was a bit skeptical already, but after downloading and using Epic, I outrightly recommend reading those reports as a case study in technology sensationalism. I’m not putting down the Epic packaging, as a one click browser suite it has quite done its job. But what puts me off are the claims that this is India’s answer to Mozilla! But hey, the browser IS Mozilla’s, just that they have packaged a few utilities, plug-ins and wallpapers into one single pack. It is not a new browser, and it definitely is not the hallmark moment marking the maturity of Indian software.

This is not the only example. After this came the $35 palmtop. This time it wasn’t just the Indian media that jumped into the bandwagon, I saw such reports even on foreign news outlets like BBC News and The Guardian. I don’t really know how this $35 laptop is going to work out, especially since we import most of the hardware from China. Haven’t these journalist had the sense to look up the status of some of the other low cost appliances the Indian government announced a few years ago? I’m talking about the Simputer (to be fair, it was atleast insignificantly successful), the under $100 computer and the numerous other projects. They are all paper tigers that didn’t seem to have seen the light of day. I sincerely do hope that I am wrong and our Government actually builds this. But I’ll believe it when I see it.

And does anyone remember Bhuvan? Touted as the Google Earth killer. I haven’t even been able to get it working so far. After all the media hype surrounding this, I don’t even find a mention of that now in any of the newspapers or by the government.

What we need to do is to encourage the REAL projects that came out from India and Indians. Like Zoho or Varamozhi or Quillpad or MashiThantu or Posterous (atleast in part). Why don’t these awesome products never get a mention anywhere in the media? Sad!

6 PM on a Sunday evening, and me and my friend, Hazer are chatting away at our usual hangout – the parking lane in between the museum and Kanakakunnu palace in Trivandrum. Not knowing what to do next, we decide on going for a movie. Now, the best part of Trivandrum city is that there are atleast 15 cinemas that you can browse through during a 2km drive. I have read somewhere that probably Trivandrum has the highest density of movie theatres of all! So we screen movie by movie en route and finally reach the New Theatre which was showing ‘Kites’. Just about managed to get a ticket in the non-balcony section, with 5 minutes to go for the movie.

After so much fanfare the movie ended up being a disappointment. As the movie started I had this feeling (which I seem to get regularly while watching Hindi movies nowadays) that I have seen all this somewhere before. After some hard thinking, it turned out that the starting plot of the movie was eerily similar to Woody Allen’s ‘Match Point’. But somewhere on the way it started deviating from that plot and merged into the plot of Quentin Tarantino’s ‘True Romance’. Bollywood script writers are getting smart these days. Blending and mixing. If only they knew how to do it better! The last 15 minutes were the worst! It was slower than watching paint dry. You knew what was going to happen, and the director seemed to be bent on killing you softly while unveiling his masala melodrama. Ouch!

Outside after the show, it was raining heavily. And that ended up making me totally over the moon with nostalgia. That regular routine we had almost every other evening after college – dropping off my friends at their homes, the lonely 10km drive to my house, the sound of the rain drops and the perfect old mallu songs on the radio. Atleast the movie gave me a chance to do all that once again. The saving grace!

I was lazing around in a nostalgic mood watching an old Malayalam movie on TV and was a bit surprised when my dad interrupted and told me to get ready, ‘We are going to see an astrologer’. Astrologer? Hmm. My parents and astrologers?… something is awry somewhere. The only relationship my parents had with astrology as such is probably celebrating our piranal based on our birth stars. Apart from that, despite my dad being very interested in spirituality, I have never heard him talk or hint about anything related to astrology. I agreed to it anyway, a bit puzzled, but with kind of an idea where this was going considering the discussions I had with my mom the previous day.

So I was greeted on the door by a very serious looking, but by no means intimidating, old man. First thing he asked me was ‘ഈശ്വരനില്‍ വിശ്വാസമുണ്ടോ?’.. ‘Do you believe in God?’. Hmm. Great question. I told him ‘Kind of’. Uh oh! Wrong answer. He went on into a lengthy discussion into that subject. He started off with the exact same argument that I use to convince people about some of my controversial stand points – “I was like you once, I didn’t believe too much in that either. But then…”. That usually works, but not to me . Anyway this got me thinking – where do I exactly stand? Do I really believe in God? Off course I do. I can neither prove God’s existence, nor can anyone prove otherwise. To me there God is something that I probably will not be able to truly understand, but I firmly believe in the existence of a power beyond our thoughts and beyond our science. As an engineer, yes I would have been very happy to find proof or some tangible evidence. But being an engineer also makes it easier for me to understand that not everything can be explained by science.

Having said that my God is not really the same as your God or the astrologers God. What the old guy told me was that God is someone to be feared. Feared? Why? Respected – yes. Feared – no. I see God as a friend, like those imaginary friends that all kids in Hollywood movies seem to have. Someone I can talk to in my mind, someone I can talk to anytime, anywhere, anyplace. I don’t believe you need to go to a temple, a church, a mosque or a synagogue to see God. So what does that make me? I’m sure I’m not an atheist, neither am I am agnostic, but as I once replied to my ex-roommate Bachu – maybe I am a non-religious devotee. And ironically that still makes me a Hindu – even an atheist is a Hindu and I am at least one degree above that, I do believe in God. In that sense I am proud to be a Hindu then. I don’t see the need for religion in my life, but I can understand why it makes sense for a lot of people. And maybe it is needed, a blueprint for life, maybe. But I just fail to understand why religion makes some people fanatic.

Coming back to the astrologer, the main purpose my parents took this unusual step was probably to give hints to me that I’m slowly getting into the ‘wedding years’ bracket. But ironically that didn’t help, because the astrologer told us that it’s best that I get married only after 28. I suddenly love astrology

PS: Disconnected thoughts, but I just felt like writing this

I was speaking to my friend Manju the other day, and she was asking about my new life in a new city. She asked me to blog about my thoughts on Ernakulam. Being one of the few people I have found more fanatical than me about my hometown, Trivandrum, her demand was that I do some match fixing and say that Trivandrum is way better . Well I’ll try my best to be neutral, so here it goes.. My thoughts on Ernakulam compared with the other cities I have stayed in for some length.

What I like most about the city is that it is really close to the sea. That scores a big plus in my books. There are plenty of places were you can stroll along the sea-shore or enjoy the sea breeze or just sit there – I can watch the sea for endless eternity. These are things I really missed in Bangalore and Plochingen. This doesn’t score a point above Trivandrum though – plenty of places there too to do the same things.

Plus there are plenty of shopping areas around here. That’s not high on my list of priorities, but it does help. It presents itself as a very bubbly city, which is great for me. It may not be a Bangalore in this respect, but definitely good enough. Both Trivandrum and Plochingen are laid back cities, which also works, but at this point of my life.. hmm.. I prefer ‘bubbly’ over ‘laid-back’ .

What I really don’t like is the traffic here. Horrible. I survived Bangalore and I thought that was worst I would see. Ernakulam beats all that – with 1/5th of the vehicles of Bangalore – now that’s an achievement! And the driving culture here is even worse. I don’t think I’ve seen it this bad in any other place I’ve been to. I am now even more scared crossing roads – nobody ever stops here!

Another bad thing is that I find a lot of people here imitating cosmopolitanism (if there’s a word like that); despite the city not really being what you would describe as cosmopolitan. It all ends up looking very artificial. I don’t know – KFC-s, Baristas and multiplexes seem like a mismatch here. Maybe that’s just a feeling that’ll go away.

Overall I think the city will grow on me, just like the other new places did. It’s just as good as the other places I’ve stayed in. What makes a city unforgettable are the number of friends you have there and I had a few in all those special places I’ve stayed in before. I guess I’ve already started that process here. So maybe, it’s just a matter of time, before I fall in love with this place too!.

Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods – The Strange Rise of Modern India, is a brutally neutral perspective about India from an outsider’s point of view. It is not another fanboy account of India and its spirituality, neither does it make a punching bag out of my country. But despite my inner self telling me that most of what he said was true, the patriot (fanboy if you may) in me wanted to refuse to believe some of the stuff in the book. I was half way through the book as my train pulled into Trivandrum Central…

It had rained non-stop for 4 hours; that was ample time for the entire area around the railway station to get flooded, again. There wasn’t a way out with water everywhere. My dad had come to pick me, but there was no way that he could drive up to the station, unless our Maruthi could instantly transform itself into a hovercraft. So he parked up 1 km away on higher ground and waited. I was getting restless so I decided to wade through the water and walk to the place. So laptop on one hand and a heavy bag of clothes in the other, I started the painful journey. I soon realized that it was such a stupid thing to do, but by then I had already passed the point of no-return. One broken slab somewhere, and I would have atleast fractured a leg. Thankfully nothing happened and I found our car after half an hour of swimming in the city center.

Driving back, I now had no doubt about what Mr. Luce had said about our government. It really is a mystery how our country runs. The ‘water’ problem of Thampanoor (the railway station and surrounding areas) is legendary. I’ve been hearing about this since I learnt to put 2 and 2 together. With all this technology around and Trivandrum even trying to be twinned up with Barcelona (ha!) its just amazing that our administration is not able to solve this pre-historic problem. I have read about many a project trying to fix this problem, spending millions of rupees, but to what end? 15 minutes of rain (no, I am not exaggerating) and Thampanoor becomes a lake.

I’ve always been of the opinion that its not right to keep blaming the system for every flaw and doing nothing ourselves as citizens. But there are somethings that the system has to work out by itself. This is just a prime example. It’s so sad, so much public money went to the drain (pun intended) for no use. Maybe its true, as Luce implies and as one of my colleagues quipped, if the problem is solved, how will the government ’servants’ fill their pockets? No more flooding = no more projects = no more money to steal.

For the love of my city, someone with power please do something. I feel powerless, except to shout.

Not my original idea.. but this is cool …

… and I can show off only while it lasts

Try it yourself; if you lack the trust :p