Another year has gone by and as usual it went pretty fast. I guess as you get older, time flies faster than before. One more year deposited to your nostalgia bank and one more year worth of events to memorize. 2010, though, unlike some of those nasty years before it, hasn’t been a up and down sine graph for me – instead my joys and sorrows have kept the curve generally flat, with the ups dominating the downs. Ok, I will not indulge in further geeky analogies from science, you have my word :)

This year was an year of changes. I have relocated to a new place, a new home, a new job and even a new career to an extent. And I am happy that I made all those switches. I have a job that I love, I am doing stuff that matters more. That’s upside #1, and somehow that has floated this year really high in terms of endearment. I miss a lot of things too though. I miss Bangalore, I miss Bosch, I miss the evenings with friends there. But to gain you have to loose some. And eventually I guess the balance tips in favour of the new life. So not a bad decision in the end. Pat on the back.

2010 was also seems like a season for weddings. Two of my dear cousins, umpteen number of close friends – everybody seems to have chosen this year to get married. And as the year ends, the bachelor count in my friend circle is being heavily battered. I am wondering if I’ll end up being the last man standing, the next year I write the post. Watch this space.

Travel wise too the year was good. I finally got to see a lot more of India. Mumbai, Gurgaon, Delhi, Kolkata, Sikkim, Bihar, UP – all first time visits, all happened this year. So yeah, I traveled to my hearts content.

Material gain was also quite high. I’m obviously getting paid more, and with that spending a lot more too! I bought a new car, my new house is nearing completion and I got a new camera. So some of my dreams are finally coming through. Life’s become more extravagant, but I don’t mind that. Whatever the philosophers say, materialism is still important to some degree, atleast for me. Thanks to 2010 for that.

On the flip side, I bid goodbye to a few close friends, whom I might never see again. Having a life built around friends, that needs some adjustments from my side too. But yeah, things won’t remain the same forever can it? I’ll consider that a small blemish amidst all the positives. And yeah, atleast there’s Facebook – which is why I don’t care about the privacy stuff.

All in all – 2010, you were a super-duper-awesome year for me. And I can quite safely say that it was definitely one of the best years in my life so far. 2011′s peeping by the door – welcome, but you do have a tough act to follow!

Auto-rickshaws for me, were cheap, convenient (though uncomfortable usually) means of transportation in any Indian city. Despite having to haggle, bargain and sometimes (most of the time?) pay extra, it has been a saviour for me on numerous occasions. OK, I used to love.. naa.. atleast like auto-rickshaws. But all that was before coming down here to Kochi.

Photo by Deepak Gupta

Catching an auto for a ride in Kochi, compares well to buying a ticket for a block-buster movie on its opening day. Its a major circus act. The supposed auto-stands here rarely have an auto on stand-by. And by chance if there is one parked, the usual conversation goes like this – “ചേട്ടാ, സൌത്ത് റെയില്‍വേ സ്റ്റേഷനില്‍ പോകുവോ?” (Brother, can you give me a ride to the railway station?). The guy gives you a blank stare as if I have abused his ancestors. No other response, so I ask again. He grunts rudely – ‘ഇല്ല!’ (No!). And that’s it. No reason. He just doesn’t want to go. I doubt if I have seen any city with auto drivers like this. Compare that to the multitude of drivers, jumping at you when you get out of Volvo in Bangalore. I hated paying exorbitant amounts there, but this is much much worse. Atleast you got home quicker!

And then there is competition. No the participants are not the autos, but the poor wannabe passengers. 10 different people located at strategic spots on either side of the road, hoping to be the first to wave down an auto that’ll privilege them with a ride. I could almost spot a smirky grin on the lucky winner – ‘You losers!’. Oh then there is a thing, all autos here have electronic meters. But well, of the hundreds of rides I’ve already taken in this city, I haven’t yet had the privilege of seeing one of them turned on. Its just a fancy item attached to the vehicle, with no apparent purpose at all. I wonder how many rickshaw-wallahs here actually know how to operate one!

Yes, I have had a few good experiences with auto drivers even in the small time I have been in the city. But the other side of the coin heavily outweighs those good deeds.

Maybe they are actually doing me a favor without them knowing. Those long walks… definitely healthier. Ha! I win!

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 :)