Lucknow by Chance

There are two thoughts that catch the fancy of every adult Mallu male at least once in his life. The first is the idea of starting a bar - you even make plans for sourcing some good duty-free liquor through Gafoor ka dost in Dufai. That idea dies its natural death when the hangover wears off. The second is the thought of doing an MBA.

The latter thought is a more dangerous one, because once it catches hold of you it never goes away. Just when you think you've survived it, it comes back in the month of May like prickly heat. A normal Mallu will succumb to it, and 4 years ago, towards the end of 3rd year of engineering, I did too.

In May of 2005 in NIT Nagpur, aided by the searing white heat of Central India, certain changes started occuring in my brain. By the start of the final year in July, the transformation was complete and I started to understand what the others in my class were talking about - CAT, cutoffs, percentiles, etc. It was like the brotherhood of the insane. My vocabulary thus enhanced, it now made sense to me why Vikas was always reading Jeffrey Archer (to improve his English) or why Khoda started subscribing to Economic Times instead of One-Porn-Pic-a-Day Times (to understand bulls, bears and earnings per share).

And so, in November 2008, after many such itches had come and gone, I wrote CAT again. Properly convinced Convincing myself that I was doing the right thing (I now had work experience - 'workex' in b-school aspirant lingo), I had spent many many hours figuring out whether Chunnu or Munnu would reach point B faster and how much Jaikishen owed Ramkishen. Something seems to have clicked, because I got an obscene percentile and an admit in IIM Lucknow.

So for the next 2 years, the city of Nawabs and kebabs and Mayawati statues will be my home as I struggle to join the league of people who caught the itch and lived to see it through. Needless to say, blogging will be intermittent, if at all (ok, less frequent than my current infrequent posting). See you all somewhere along the way.

My New Obsession

I finally did it. Bought the camera that I promised all of you I would buy. Well, not exactly the DSLR I had hoped to buy, but something halfway there. So I have followed my heart, but only after paying heed to Rags' words of good old fashioned wisdom. It's a happy compromise in my opinion. Doesn't pinch my pocket too much and the camera is good enough to take very decent shots.

I bought the Cybershot H10. I can already see the purists go 'yuck'. But when you consider that it costs only half as much as an entry level DSLR, has full manual mode (which admittedly is not very user friendly, but full manual nevertheless), 10x zoom and adapter for lenses, it's not too bad a bargain. In the 2 days since I laid hands on it, I've drained the battery twice doing all sorts of experimentation. It looks pretty good so far and I hope to get some nice outdoor shots soon. The way things are going, I might get an extended break in Kerala around the time monsoon hits - a mouthwatering prospect.
So I thought I'd use my recently learnt skills in photography to take a picture to accompany this post. It's almost full moon outside, so I went up to the terrace and fiddled around with aperture, shutter speed and sensitivity. After 15 minutes of trying, I got a decent shot of the moon, one which showed up the craters and all. I ran down, excited like a kid who was given a birthday gift in advance, and showed the photo to Mono. He looked at it and said, 'OK'. Then he went back to doing what he was doing before I disturbed him. It was just 'OK'. It was just the moon. And the 'craters' were more like dark patches on white marble. So I guess you'll have to wait a bit more to see some respectable shots from my new camera :)

[Picture courtesy cnet]

Sleaze and Wisdom

He was certain that those were pretty much the raunchiest lines he had read in his 9 years of existence. It was confusing, because he had not expected those lines in a book that had been thrust into his hands much to his dislike, to be read and followed in life; and that too by his mother, of all the people.

As Mac, his trusted advisor in matters of sleaze, turned the pages and introduced him to the eroticism of Song of Songs, the confusion gave way to wonder.

“Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies. Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.”

Wow, he thought. Sunday school might not be as boring as he thought it would be. He started doubting the wisdom of having resisted his parents’ attempts to send him to Sunday school for 2 years. Duck Tales on Doordarshan suddenly looked less appealing than ‘breasts like a cluster of grapes’.

‘When are they going to teach us all this stuff?’

Mac gave him a smile of derision, like a man who had seen it all. ‘Never,’ he said. ‘You should explore and find all the stuff yourself.’

‘You mean there is more?’

‘Yeah! Even dirtier stuff.’

He dared not ask Mac to show him the rest of the stuff. Good kids, which he definitely was one, did not go around reading dirty stuff. But his look said it all. Mac felt elated at this elevation of stature – he was one of the big boys now.

‘Ok. But I don’t have much time. Note down the chapters and verses and read it at home,’ said Mac, quickly flicking through the pages to find the sections of interest.

He suddenly felt a deep sense of appreciation for the genius who had introduced numbering of verses in the bible.

While he was furiously jotting down Mac’s lecture notes, the teacher had noticed that 2 kids in the last bench weren’t paying attention.

‘So what gift would you have asked from God if you were given a chance like King Solomon?’ the teacher asked him in an attempt to get their attention back.

All eyes in class were on him. He was thinking furiously to figure out what was being discussed in class before his attention had wandered to more interesting things.

Oh yes, the story of the wise king Solomon and God’s offer to give him anything he wanted. He knew the ‘right’ answer, of course – wisdom. But then the teacher had been specific – what would he have asked from God. Even his 9 year old brain could figure out that what worked for Solomon need not work for him, the requirements were completely different, especially with the demands of the modern world. Besides he figured that he had tonnes of wisdom already.

‘I would ask for a helicopter,’ he replied with a sincere expression on his face.

*****

That evening he started an in-depth study of the Bible which would last several weeks, much to the surprise of his parents. The scholarship he had gained over the weeks made him confident about facing Sunday school exams. To his disappointment though, not a single question was asked from the sections he had meticulously researched. That year, he set a record of sorts in the exams, scoring an unprecedented 2 marks out of 100. He has not yet figured out how he got those 2 marks.

*****

He still maintains that a helicopter is a damn fine choice. Try commuting in Chennai if you are not convinced.

A Conversation With The Man With No Desires

A couple of weeks ago, it was that time of the year. Birthday. And I had this conversation my friend Rags, the Man with No Desires.

Me: So it's my birthday tomorrow, you know. I'm thinking of getting something I've really wanted for a long time.

Rags: What do you want?

M: A nice camera, something semi-DSLRish

R: And you want a camera because...

M: Always wanted one. I think there is a budding photographer in me. Some of the shots I took with Rahul's DSLR were awesome. Imagine what I could be doing with a little practice.

R: 3 things - First, there is something known as beginners luck. Secondly, any random shot with a DSLR looks good to a guy who has seen only point-and-shoot cameras in his life. Thirdly, those were awesome? Don't kid yourself.

M: Hey, that's mean!

R: Ok son, how much are we talking about for this 'little practice' sessions?

M: Around 25k. But it's totally worth it. I mean, you buy a camera like this only once, right? If I don't buy it now, imagine the number of photo ops I will be missing out on. And I'll be missing many years that I could have used to hone my photography skills.

R: So let me break this down - you want to take pictures, hence you want a camera. Good. But why do you want to buy a camera. You know I heard this kind of arguments from Raj before he bought his ultra expensive camera. He disregarded my advice and now it's gathering dust in his cupboard. Why don't you borrow it from him for a week or so? He will be more that willing to lend it to you. Keeps the moving parts in the camera working.

M: Hey, why do you have to be such a damp squib? I didn't ask you for objective analysis of the options available to me. I should have just talked to Badri. He wouldn't have spoiled my enthu with eminently well-reasoned arguments against buying a camera.

R: Son, haven't you heard of the recession sweeping across the globe? Trust me, you need the cash now. Buy whatever you want a year from now. Not now.

M: Hmm. You're right. I won't buy the camera. I think I'll buy an iPod. eBay has some great offers, plus they have given me some good vouchers.

R: Don't you see what's happening here? You've fallen into the consumerist trap prepared for people with disposable income like you. You really don't need anything. You just need to splurge on some gadget to feel good on your birthday. Go watch a good movie, go for a trek, have a good dinner, take a stroll on the beach. There are tonnes of stuff you can treat yourself with on your birthday.

M: Shit! I should have not talked to you at all.

So I ended up not buying anything for myself. Just like all the 24 birthdays before this one. I was seriously beginning to become one of them - people who think spending money on expensive and useless not very useful gadgets is justified just because it's your birthday. So next time you feel the itch to use your credit card at eBay, read this post.

PS: I just realized that if I applied this logic to all my purchases, I'd be living the life of an hermit. And Rags is going to B-school this fall. I wonder how he will encourage consumer spending as a future business leader.

Smell the Movie

One of the things that I keep thinking on and off is how technology that is very familiar to us will be in the future. Consider movies for instance. Conventional thinking suggests that movies of today have all the ingredients in terms of technology that one would want in a cinema experience. But there are certain critical elements that are missing. This is similar to asking cinema viewers in mid 20th century what more they wanted in a movie and they’d have looked askance and wondered what more they’d want. Then came along cinemascope and Technicolor. For a long time, that was the final frontier. There were moving (colour) pictures on screen, there was sound and music. Everything seemed to be great. Until somebody noticed that normal human vision is not 2-D, it’s 3-D.

Most often, technologies in films aim at imitating life as much as possible. The closer one gets to life, the better. Therefore, computer graphics and animation is judged by how close to everyday experiences or ‘realistic’ it is. We’ve had 3-D films for a while now, although it has never really taken off. Everything’s perfect, right? I was thinking so until I realized that one critical element of what a person experiences in life is missing in films – the sense of smell. Imagine smelling gunpowder when the guns go off in period films; imagine smelling roses and lilac while watching mushy romantic scenes; imagine smelling blood and rotting flesh in horror movies and thrillers. The sense of smell will add a new dimension to movies the way sound and later visual effects did. It will give a filmmaker new tools to convey his ideas to the viewer. Very soon, we will have an ‘olfactory effects team’ in addition to the sound and visual effects team in films.

I know that some research has been going into recreating a smell, but I don’t know how successful researchers have been in their efforts to record and play back smells the same way that they are able to do with sight and sound. Essentially there should be
a) a device which produces a chemical or physical change when exposed to the smell,
b) a way of preserving that change in a form that is portable or which can be encoded into specific formats (digital/magnetic, etc.)
c) a way in which these encoded information can be read later on.

Although it sounds uncomplicated enough, I’m sure it’s not that easy – otherwise we’d already have that technology. A quick and lazy search on Google threw up only a couple of useful/working links. Here and here.

Part of the difficulty is that while light and sound have been quantified in terms of frequencies, wavelengths and amplitudes in such a way that it can be reproduced exactly at another location without any loss of information, smell has not yet been completely quantified in terms of two or three variables with which we can completely define it. Once we identify say, the 10 different variables that define what smell is, all one needs to do is to combine x parts of variable 1 with y parts of variable 3 and z parts of variable 8 to generate the smell of the exquisite fish curry that the chef is making on his cookery show.

What made me think about this now? It’s seeing Jamal Malik run towards Amitabh Bachchan covered in shit. How much more effect would it have had if the stench reached the nostrils of people watching in room freshenered Inox?

Kal, Aaj aur Kal

I was tagged by Silverine a long long time ago. This is one of the good tags going around and I'm glad I finally got down to doing it.

The Tag

Two questions from the past, present and future. Answer them and then tag your friends from the blogosphere. Leave a comment on their blog letting them know they have been tagged and you are done.

Yesterday

Your oldest memories...

This is a tough one because of two reasons:

1. Although I have a lot of old memories, I can't place in chronological order my memories before I started school. Once I started school, I always had the girl who I had a crush on as a frame of reference.

2. Many of my early memories have been corrupted by old sepia-tinted photographs in family albums. In many cases, I don't know whether I actually remember those incidents or I just construct those events in my mind from the photos.

Having said that let me write about an incident that must have happened when I was somewhere between 2 and 3 years old which I remember very clearly.

At that time, my family was staying in our tharavad in Ernakulam. As with most Syrian Christian families, church was an integral part of the way of life and the achan in the local idavaka used to drop in fairly regularly. One day, as I woke from my forced afternoon siesta, I happened to notice that appa was in the middle of what looked like an interesting conversation with achan. One look at the two of them standing in the courtyard talking was enough to make me start bawling. To this day I don't know why I did that. I felt something wrong about the whole scene (probably a distrust of religion and men clad in fancy-dress which I felt at that small age?). All I know is that I wanted the conversation to stop immediately. So I kept bawling till appa came and lifted me off the mattress. I could see that appa was pretty irritated, especially because I was exceptionally well-behaved kid normally and never gave any trouble.

What were you doing ten years ago?

Feb 2009, I was in 9th standard. Feb-March was a good time of the year, in spite of the final exams lurking around the corner. School annual day function, lengthening days (which meant more time to play in the evenings), birthday - so many things to look forward to. 9th standard was probably the last year of my life when I didn't have to think about 'future' and 'career'. And Valentine's Day figured nowhere in my calender (some things never change).


Today

Went turtle egg hunting through the night. Almost the whole of Chennai was there when we started. 8 kilometres and 152 eggs later, only the craziest people were left. Slept on Elliot's Beach after the walk. Highly recommended, because it will remove all romantic notions associated with sleeping under the open sky on the beach sands - it was so friggin' cold. The mean land breeze made it impossible to sleep and by 5 O'clock I was shivering. In Chennai. In spite of my windcheater.

If you build a time capsule what would it contain?

My laptop, old photographs and a letter to future generations from The Phlip Side.


Tomorrow

I'm off for some serious trekking (not the picnicy kind). If I make it through, I'll try posting some pics.

What do you see yourself doing 14 years from now?

Lots of meditation, I guess. I'm going to need all the peace and tranquility to survive in an even madder and crazier world.

How I Went to Goa

How did Philip manage to go to Goa when the rest of the team had to undergo The Review and that too barely 15 days after he got back from a 2 week vacation to Kerala?

a) He lied about the death of an imaginary uncle
b) He had the sweetest of bosses
c) His boss wanted to get some work done and getting rid of him was the only way to do it.
d) It was written

7pm. 38 hours to go for The Review. 3 hours left for me to catch my bus to Goa. I'm wondering - how did I get into this mess? It was never meant to be this messy. I'd planned the vacation to start a good 10 days after the review. But, as luck would have it, the review got postponed. Twice. Hence the mess.

The project team is tense in anticipation. 38 hours to go for the biggest review our project has had. The powerpoint presentations are done and we are brainstorming on what could go wrong during the review. Many disastrous scenarios are being contemplated (which only leads to further worry) and escape routes being finalized. My mind is in turmoil. I'm waiting for a lull in the discussion or a coffee break or a blackout - anything to get 2 minutes to 'pop the question' to Boss in private. How do I ask with so many of my teammates around?

If ever there was a wrong time to ask for a vacation in Goa, this was it. It meant ditching your team in its greatest hour of need.But not asking meant cancelling air tickets and hotel reservations. I had never been to Goa in my 24 years of existence, because of which I've had to endure much ridicule from friends who believed that you've never had a real vacation until you go to Goa. What if I don't get the opportunity to go to Goa again for a another couple of years? What if I never get to go to Goa as a bachelor?


7.15 pm. I've been carrying the burden of this question for the whole day. Now there seems to be no hope. What I couldn't do in 9 hours won't happen now. I sigh resignedly and message Badri and Mono to go ahead. I will not be able to make it.

They message me back - Dude, stop being an asshole and ask him. We are tired of waiting here. Remember we agreed to go to Goa only because you'd never been there. Otherwise we're all cancelling.

Oh shit. Now I have to carry the burden of having screwed my friends' plans too.

"Ok. I think we can wind up for today. Since most of the work is done, you guys are free to decide what to do tomorrow. Just be available on the phone to give some clarification if I require it," says Boss.

A relieved team mumbles an OK in unison as they reach for their bags to pack up.

"Philip, where are you planning to go tomorrow? Corporate or Tech Centre? I suggest you come to Corp tomorrow. We need to refine some cost and BOM slides".

*Gulp*. It is now or never.

"V, I think we need to have a chat about that," I reply.

"Oh. You want to take the day off tomorrow?"

"I think we need to have a really long chat." My heart is pounding in my chest.

"Hmm...why do I get the feeling that you want to bunk The Review and go home for 4 days?"

Damn. Bosses and their sixth sense.

"Actually, yes." I didn't want to correct him and tell him I was planning to go to Goa, not home. Wrong time to correct boss.

The whole team turns to me. My audacity has elicited emotions ranging from admiration to anger.

"OK. No problem. Since you are not actually presenting anything I think we can manage."

And that was it. I did it. It was so easy!

I run out of the conference room we're sitting. I high-five a couple of guys on the way. I call Badri while running and yell, "Dude, turns out we are going to Goa after all."

d) It was written.