Meticulously Underthought

The End

2006-12-11T18:58:00.000+05:30

Just a final update if you'd missed the devil in the details of the conclusion of the last post, this little five-year-old experiement is over for good. The same fate is applicable for the work blog, you won't see any new material in either place. I do intend to write at the Wordpress blog, though even that's not been updated for close to two months now.

I have made some great friends from this little joint, I'd not list them down because I do talk to them fairly often even without using the blog as a platform and I know almost all of them in real life too by now. Looking back, that's the best part that I get to take away from this. My life's been all about people and I've had the pleasure of knowing some really good people because of the blog.

Otherwise, I don't feel bad about the closure and I can't bear to read most of the older material anyway. Guess I could safely say that I won't miss it much. So this is one big round of thanks for the tiny handful who still bother to keep dropping by and the friends I've made from this place.

Shyam/Codelust

p.s: for the majority of the visitors here these days who are misled by Google, I do not have naked pictures of Deepa Sahi or inside information about prostitutes in Noida.

The Walk

2006-12-02T02:46:00.000+05:30

There is certainly a lot of magic in Delhi’s winters. Of course, it is hard to find and hidden away from the hours that we get to normally see, when we honk and snake our way through the working day, lost in our thoughts, arguments and other worries that plague our mundane daily existence.

And when it turns up, like at two in the morning today, while walking back from a late night movie with only your own shadow, an empty soul and the empty road for company, it is indeed sheer magic. Places filled otherwise with noise and people now welcome you with the most silent of appraisals. There is almost a feeling of mutual acknowledgement, but that’s just my imagination speaking.

Regardless, it is like a slow sigh of relief expelled by the day, now an unburdened soul, dark and widespread, breathing quietly into your being, and gradually resuscitating life back into your near-dead self. It can’t speak, but it does talk back. It can’t feel, but it does touch you. It is meant to be asleep, but it certainly is wide awake.

During the day, there is colour everywhere. The mushrooms are back on the shelves of the roadside shops. Hands dig deep into pockets, mufflers tie gentle knots of warmth into every other body you can see. It is a season I dread and look forward to at the same time, for things inevitably go wrong, in the worst possible manner, around this time, every time.

For most parts I am rediscovering silence. I am rediscovering nothingness and discovering its value for the first time. I have a million memories to let go of and thousands of instances to step aside. Strangely, the story has never been about me; but it is and it is not at the same time now. Does that make sense? I guess not.

It was inevitable that the seasons would change again, like how it is inevitable that I must finally make a move. This is not home for me, even when I’ve called this place home for the past seven years. This is not love for me, even when I have, arguably, been in love for the past four years? But, honestly, I have no complaints, no regrets and not even a fleeting sense of loss. I’ve felt and done all that. This time it is for good.

I see glimpses, of myself and feelings that I’d thought I’d long lost, every now and then. Sometimes it feels like childhood all over again. There is a familiarity I yearn for. There is that elusive smile I wonder if I’ll ever see for real. There is the warmth of an unknown embrace that I know by heart and one that is familiar to every inch of my skin. I know exactly, inch-by-inch, what I am looking for.

Sometimes I think I have a lot to say, that I will write once again those thoughts out here. Then I realize that this is a conversation that I am having with myself. I am explaining, putting into shape and form my feelings that I probably never tell anyone, maybe not even myself. After 27 years, I’ve realized that I’ve never listened to myself with even half the care or concern I’ve always given others.

I do not know what value this blog will ever hold. It is a twisted logbook of my life since 2001, played out as elaborate game of metaphorical hide and seek. But for all practical purposes it is an endless repetition of the themes of loneliness, sadness, desperation and longing. I’ve threatened to quit doing this on numerous occasions, for varying reasons, but as the updates dwindle to the odd missive credited to the force of habit, I think I am finally willing to let this too go, but this time without regret, pain or anger.

One times one

2006-11-17T00:59:00.000+05:30

When your latest resolution in life goes something like “try and not sleep with friends and people who mean a lot to you,” the connotations are staggering since you could not sleep with strangers in the first place anyway. In a way, you can consider this more as your own sanity’s spaceship (the other one – morality – exploded mid-flight long ago) sending mildly panicky messages back to earth.

“Houston, we have a problem.” And a mighty complicated one at that too. It could have been termed as a life so interesting, only if it was not half as funny as it sounds. Seriously, there should be a default number of attempts at solving a problem available to all of humanity, after which, even out of pity, the problem should resolve by itself. I think that’s a fair enough deal, don’t you think so?

It is not the easiest thing to step back or stand aside from the only meaning, be it transient or misplaced, that you have to cling on to interpret your actions in life. Thankfully, robust and important players, like objectivity and purpose, have returned to the stage. Anger, in the meantime, has played its important part and what a stellar performance that was too. I guess the drama is indeed quite a spectacle; only that it is anything but that when the stage is your mind and the players are elements that constitute your self.

On the other hand, withdrawal need not always be a spectacle, nor should it always be noticed. You can slink away in a million different ways and still be around in the same twenty different ways. And it is not like it has not been done before, but this time it is different. Bridges left uncrossed till recently are now a faded vision in the past. This, in all probability, is territory that we shall never cover again. I guess some equations were changed; a few victories were won and some were lost. The sum of all that maneuvering though remains unchanged. Is that not strange? Maybe it is not.

Meanwhile, the weather is brilliant and the rooms bask in a mildly golden glow of a new, cheap lamp that I’ve grown very fond of. But I don’t like being home much these days, even when most of life is as perfect as it could ever get to be. Sometimes I do feel like a part of me has left me, leaving this shell for someone else who is not me to live in for the rest its assigned life. There is moderation in most things and controlled excesses in others. Life is a fine balance. Life is a walk on the razor’s edge. Life is the fear of a fall on to insanity and irrelevance either side.

Reflect

2006-11-07T23:58:00.000+05:30

I think it would be a lie if I said I was tempted on more than one occasion in the recent weeks to update this blog. It is not like I have lost the urge to communicate; it is more like I have not much to communicate that is new or interesting enough. Life has pretty much settled down into a downright predictable rhythm, even accomplishments and disappointments are factored in according to preset levels. It is not exactly sterile like a sickly green hospital gown, but it not a chaotic celebration of desired excitement either. The truth, as usual, is somewhere in the middle.

You walk straight ahead and the road goes around in circles. Actually, there has never been a definite goal in your life. All your goals keep changing as time passes and as locations change, and in the end the goals no longer exist. When you think about it, life in fact doesn't have what may be called ultimate goals. It’s just like this hornet’s nest. It’s a pity to abandon it, yet if one tries to remove it one will encounter a stinging attack. Best to leave it just hanging there so that it can be admired. At this point in your thinking, your feet become lighter, it is fine wherever your feet take you, as long as there are sights to see. Gao Xingjian in Soul Mountain

Sometime towards the end of last month six of us headed out towards the deserts. It was meant to be my break in Goa in November, but circumstances and planning over much alcohol deemed that it be done in October, right after the folks and relatives had left after their latest visit. The picture you see posted alongside is from the same trip, shot with a camera phone atop a very young and feisty camel. It was good fun. Fun enough to have almost compelled me to do a volt face in my car while driving back to work on the Monday morning when we returned and head out on a full tank wherever the road would take me to. Only if life was that easy and simple. Maybe it is, maybe it is not. The only thing that counts is that I did not turn around and dutifully went back to my regular life.

Truth be said, I am completing this entry a handful of hours after I’d started writing it. In those few hours the hues that colour my perspective have changed yet again and I come face-to-face with my favourite rhetorical question: It does not have to be this difficult. Will it always be like this? Will it always be this hard? As much as the realization alarms me, I know that it is very much possible. Is this what I wanted life to be? Having sworn to stay away from feeling grateful for the pieces of pity thrown my way, why do I find myself back here, in the same familiar wretched situation? I can’t imagine that I ask for it each and every time. Something has to go right somewhere, does it not?

At the same time I guess I know most of this is vain posturing. The world is nice. The world is good. Everything happens for a good reason. Everyone loves you, you love everyone and the world is a place that loves each other. I have ratified the findings as much, I know. Then again, if your core being argues against it when it matters the most, do you think it is fake, it is selfish and easily discountable? I don’t know, I think I am rambling on. And I seriously think you have better things to do in life than to read this crap. Really.

Cold Love

2006-10-18T21:33:00.000+05:30

It is that time of the year again when the shadows creep in pleasantly, much earlier than normal during the afternoons. The days have an almost-golden glow to them, it is a bit too warm now, but in another couple of weeks the chill should blunt it considerably and with that would come out the first of the winter clothes. Winter in Delhi is a heady romantic drink that affects all the senses. Veils of fog adorn the day in differing denseness, there is always a riot of colours on street and late evenings bring out the roadside fires and leftover embers that glow milder every time into their eventual demise.

Thus, it is no wonder that winter always brings with it the memories of all my past relationships - both cold and warm - drifting back into my mind. While watching Closer recently, it struck me that people who have loved me the most have also pretty much hated me the most too at some point or the other in their lives. I never thought that was actually possible till the pattern was way too obvious to ignore and too commonplace to miss after all these years. But the good part is that I don't feel burdened by them. In fact I feel quite free and it is the best I've felt probably all my life.

But what exactly is love between two people? Does "I love you" signify more the fact that I love you for loving me or that I love you just like that? And what exactly is love expressed in terms of percentages of caring and concern? And no, it is not like I don't believe in love anymore, it is just that I think a lot of people misplace it for a lot of other things.

Revenge

2006-10-15T02:57:00.000+05:30

Call it an epiphany or call it whatever you would want to, but when you are up late in the night, largely unwillingly, in a strange room full of snoring people, aided by the laptop that beams out today's Orkut's fortune as "Our first and last love is.. self-love" you'd have to admit that life has a stellar sense of irony or something like that. It all harks back to a time long gone and situations that I just don't fancy ever being a part of, if I could have my way. But life does extract its two penny worth of revenge every now and then by making sure you that don't have it all your way, at least not all the time.

If it can't be irony, then it has to be the proclivity for life's events to repeat itself that must be commended with a royal gesture like the Nobel Prize. It was about a similar set of circumstances, after being in the same building, that I'd written rather bitterly about on this blog a couple of years ago. But this time, there is no déjà vu. I am not about throw in the towel, sport a major sulk, half a pout and despair endlessly about how it is just not worth it and how things will always suck. Thankfully, things have changed at my end, but I can't help but wonder how much change is actually good, right or even justified.

As things stand, I have very little in common with my roots anyway. Not that I care much about it, since I do enjoy most of what I do these days without any regrets, but it does have a funny angle to it when the dear mother mentions on more than one occasion that 'back then' you never used to be this way, which is again a sentiment echoed by acquaintances/friends who have run into me after a very long time. Though I can't exactly say that I am unmoved by the derision I've felt way too often in the past couple of days, I've honestly been intrigued more this unrelenting progress of the self into the unknown without any particular reason behind it.

In a weird way, I am getting to know myself - the real me - in all its good and awful glory for the first time in my life. It feels like fresh, warm blood flowing into veins that have remained dry for a lifetime. It is a journey of discovering the most basic and tiniest of things that most would have taken for granted for most of their lives, even at the risk of sounding like an imbecile most times these days. But for now I think I should get some sleep. It is past 2:30 in the morning and the snoring has subsided in line with the gradual demise of my questions regarding what the hell am I doing in such a cramped set up when I could comfortably be sleeping in my bed at home.

Then again, remember the part about revenge. Yes, that is what this is all about.

All things remaining the same..

2006-10-02T10:35:00.000+05:30

To the lovely folk at Jhanki.com (no linky love for the naughty peeps), blindly pimping your own product in comments on other blogs is not the most brilliant marketing idea that anyone had ever come up with. For prior art, refer to to Sulekha vs the Indian bloggers, ruling 100101. Since I am commenting on it, I would also suggest that it is also not the best idea to run a website that aggregates content related to India on pages with the ISO encoding, switch to UTF-8 and be happy me hearties. You know, everything that RubyOnRails or the next coolest framework with scaffolding and the works suggests to you is not exactly the gospel.

Meanwhile, Shashikant (he's been my favourite blogger for a while now, he really _should_ write more often than he does) tears into the latest broadside on bloggers by someone who I guess is a veteran deskie. The points mentioned there are not worth responding to. Really, everyone deserves to have their monthly, quarterly, annual episodes of outrage a la Oprah Winfrey. Let the man have his in peace. Though, some, like Shivam, seems to have taken it rather personally and as I ~~speak~~ write, is said to be on his way to stage a sit-in outside the Times House at ITO. The man is also said to have hidden a few Google bombs too his jhola to spray the MD with. Ouch.

Life merrily moves on otherwise. It is day three of an unintended mini-break from work today. Since it is that time of the year in north India when painters and construction workers become more sought after than film stars or politicians, the same fate has befallen my humble pigeon hole and it's been a case of mini migrations within the house, from one room to another, for the past three days. I think it is a nice thing to work from home. I should try this more often, but the speeds allowed by GPRS is just one degree short of being truly unusable. Time to get MTNL on the line and make my little Linksys WRT45G visible to the outside world.

House Shopping

2006-09-23T16:09:00.000+05:30

Oh, I have a blog that I used to write frequently on? Good that you reminded me, because I'd almost forgotten that I had one or what it looked like. You can blame the sad state of affairs here on life getting incredibly busy of late, the rediscovery of Orkut by most people I know (and also by people I'd not known in a while) and not having much to complain about in general. It is hectic at the best and sedate at the worst, but in all honesty, it is quite good.

Now that most people that I know have stumbled down the aisle (it happens in some cases after they've reached a fair distance down that lane), the latest fascination in town is to now 'invest' in a shack of their own. It was not for me, but for someone else, that we went house-shopping last Sunday and it was quite an experience. Some of the places we had seen were like a sneeze away from the back of beyond, bordering bona fide villages (with authentic buffalos too thrown in for good measure) and even thick woods in some cases.

If you want to buy a two bedroom apartment (known as 2BHK in Delhi parlance) in South Delhi, chances are that you'd end up spending anywhere between Rs 16 lakh and Rs 50 lakh, depending on the locality. And yes, I am one of those much-derided South Delhi snobs, so sue me. But the sweetest one I had seen was in a place called Freedom Fighters Enclave - a three bedroom beauty that was way too well built to belong anywhere in the land of butter chicken and bhangra, where quality construction is as much an urban legend as good caramel custard is in Delhi.

Only problem was, as you could have guessed, the price. At over Rs 45 lakh the place was a steal, but it was considerably over budget for the couple who were looking at it from the point of view of a second house. For myself, I have decided to keep off any purchase options for at least another year, which should probably convince me that I am more or less settling down here. Right after which, as luck would deem it, would follow the unexpected uprooting of the self. You know, life's like that most times.

Updates

2006-09-15T18:21:00.000+05:30

To think that at some point in life (not too long back, probably five years at the most) I used to write emails with "dat" and "coz" sprayed all over it strikes as nothing short of, well, extreme silliness for me. It is amusing at the best and embarrassing at the worst; the things we have done and the things we continue to do! Ah well, probably the only good thing about life in all of it is that it continues to be unpredictable. Wonder what else would I look back and laugh at some more years down the line? Not that there's been much time to sit and introspect, but that's another story altogether.

The past weeks have been very hectic, in fact dizzyingly so. It is not fun to serve the cricket crazy fans in the country on a high traffic website on a day when Murphy's Law works much better than any service that runs on your servers. That apart, I managed to go for a crazy gig last Sunday (grainy, awful videos here and here), bought two new books (Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana and Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain) and a bunch of new music (INXS, Billy Joel, Talvin Singh and Beautiful South). Ergo, I have been doing quite well other than for missing out on 'My-Time', which mostly denotes spending time by yourself precisely in the way you want to spend it.

Eco, as usual (okay, I never liked Baudolino much), is an absolute pleasure to read and you can always sell me any book which is about trying to figure out who you really are, so it is all the more sweeter when it is written by one of my favourite authors. I have sampled only a couple of pages of Soul Mountain since I am not too fond of reading more than one book, time constraints notwithstanding, at the same time, but the tiny nibble I got was stunningly delicious. Of the music acquisition, INXS, Billy Joel and Beautiful South are typical 'best of' compilations, while Talvin's HA is refreshingly different from his normal work and I've been listening to 'The Beat Goes On' almost non-stop ever since.

It is hard to believe that I've done over a year in the new job. The work is not exactly risk-free and doing well is rewarded with even higher targets to achieve, which I actually do enjoy. I think the dreams of doing something on my own is now firmly in the back burner and I do wonder if it will ever be back on top of the priority list. The idea right now is to work really hard for another four years and take a call whether I can slow things down or not. The four year plan depends a lot on optimising resources and generally living better, which I have been able to do little by little, but I still have a long way to go.

p.s: If you have not seen DailyLit by now and if you are one of us lazy readers, you really should. All they are missing is a PDF link.

Notch

2006-09-06T19:33:00.000+05:30

Personal management is an art that is as highly specialised and complicated as personnel management. While the latter involves finding common grounds and meeting targets within a group of people, the former involves finding common grounds and meeting targets within your own group of necessities and limitations. A post today by Jace on 'Moving up in life' pretty much summed up the way I have been feeling for close to the past year now.

As you might have guessed by now, this post has nothing to with the personnel part of it. It just made for a nice compare and contrast situation and nothing more. And coming back to the topic, I can't agree more with the fact that finally, when it all becomes a bit easier and achievable, you can't help but wonder if it was you or the target that ended up being too ordinary, that now keeps you wondering constantly about the next impossible that you should chase after.

But it sure does feel to be taken seriously when you say something, mostly shorn of the 'too-young' cliche and to have things to worry beyond where and what to eat any given day and also not have to keep a constant eye on the expenses just because you splurged a bit on yourself on the odd day. Somewhere along the way you start to believe that you can actually get things done and that good things eventually do happen, even when you are going through a really bad patch.

Net Vibes

2006-09-04T00:57:00.000+05:30

Help! Both The Hindustan Times (in the delicious Brunch) and The Times of India have declared that the Internet is the new happening social scene in India. While HT takes a look at it from the point of view that it has not done a great deal of good to the singles (welcome to my world, thank you) in the city, ToI does a 'what-the-hell-is-it-all-about?' story on the same, with a new mental health therapist (Samir Parekh is on vacation?) also thrown in for good measure. And to add to the mix, we have K's post on the struggle within traditional print houses on how to deal with the whole internet juggernaut, which I could not respond to because of a lack of time and the office firewall barfing on the infamous media blog he'd linked to from his pages.

Internet and social networking is hardly anything new in India. Just because Fropper spends a great deal of money on advertising, it does not mean that social networking, blogging and other 'community' oriented stuff has taken off in India. One of the best kept secrets of the online industry is that you don't necessarily diversify into other areas because there is essentially a market available for your wares, or even that you can do it better than anyone else out there. You often do it out a sheer lack of advertising inventory to pitch new clients with.

For most online properties, organic growth flattens out after a point (with the notable exceptions of Youtube and Myspace) and with that comes stagnation in your numbers related to your most visible property - the hallowed homepage. Almost every top website in India struggles with overbooked homepage advertising slots that are not available for any rates or for anyone for months to come. Thus you end up doing the predatory act, of moving into areas that really do not belong to your core set of competencies - like email, social networking - just for the sake of beefing up your stock of inventory. It often helps, when you get into such forays, if you are a Rediff or an Indiatimes, whose presence in the average Indian internet user's psyche is mind boggling.

Even with a 10% conversion ratio, for such major internet players, the numbers can turn out to be quite beneficial. Let us assume that of the half million unique visitors that an Indiatimes or a Rediff would get on a daily basis, the 10% conversion would translate into 50,000 users from the word go, which is an awesome number for any new service. In such set ups, they are not limited by infrastructure or development costs that constrain smaller start ups. And if you can convert even half of that 50,000 into regular users, you end up with 25,000 users who could comfortably be generating upwards of 8 to 10 page views per user. That's at least 200,000 page views worth of ads you can now now serve on a daily basis. Not bad, huh?

In all of this, the odd man out is Orkut, which is yet another of Google's much ignored services. For some weird reason India has fallen in love with Orkut all over again. The phenomenon is nothing short of an alternative lifestyle, where you have to be a wizard to follow conversation threads in forms of 'scraps' with everyone's replies stacked on different pages. And really, what is it with high traffic websites and awful user interfaces? Myspace, Hi5 and Orkut are nothing short of third degree torture to use. When did they change the rule book that you need to be completely unusable and slow like hell to be successful? And here we are breaking a sweat in trying to brand even our second newborns as a 'two point ohs' and pouring DHTML and Ajax goodness all over it.

Coming to K's post, what I can say for sure is that credibility is not a major factor anymore. One of the good and bad things about recent developments in media is that we are gradually throwing out the 'unbiased' label. Media was never unbiased. Hell, no human is. So how can something that is created by the same humans ever be unbiased? The difference between print and online right now is that they represent different activities. Online can't do a print. Most people don't log on to news websites to read stories in excess of 1000 words. They want it in a jiffy, scan and run back to whatever they were doing earlier. At the same time, print can't do an online. It can't really 'break' news anymore, that's a competency it has long forfeited to internet and television.

What has changed recently is reach. More people are on the internet these days, while you've probably reached everyone you'd want to reach with print as the medium. And even then our penetration is so pitifully low that the potential numbers are worth bucket loads of marketing and ad sales drool. Print also has a problem in terms of inflexibility with target demographics. I can advertise in a publication knowing the target audience, but my message would still be lost on a small percentage, who are the minority within the publication's readers, because they don't fit the profile I want to advertise to. The beauty of online ad delivery is that I can specify by region, by platform, by time and by frequency, who and where I deliver the ads to, even without forcing them to register on the website.

But none of this what is going to create the maximum amount of trouble for the traditional forms, print and television. What is giving them trouble are costs, of production and distribution. In print it is not good enough that you can create a lovely newspaper in QuarkXpress every night. You still need someone to dirty feet, hands and risk other parts of their anatomy in the awful world of print distribution. Costs of newsprint are awfully high and from what I remember it is a process that is still strictly regulated. Most of the publications can afford to sell their wares for an 'invitation price' because it is underwritten by the advertising, the rate for which is hiked every time the new circulation numbers come in, provided you've held your ground or even improved on it. Effectively, the reader gets an increasingly smaller piece of the pie because, well, he does not really figure in the picture.

Television pretty much follows a similar pattern, though production costs are considerably higher there (unless you are one of those fancy nuts in print who still own a printing press of their own), which shows up in exceptionally high advertising rates. Again, distribution is the nasty piece to bite on here. Ever wondered why some godforsaken channel that nobody wants to watch still shows up in your prime band? It is not because your cable guy has a soft spot for the channel, it is because he's been paid a nice sum of money to do it. That guarantees the channel a minimum degree of viewership, which in turn brings more than enough cheers to the ad sales teams.

That leaves us with the question that was asked, how do you monetize your internet audience? For starters, start up costs are minimal on this side of the town. A cheap dedicated server with truckloads of bandwidth will only set you back less than Rs 6000 these days. The average internet set up does not need more than a designer, a technology person and two for the editorial. Even with page views in the thousands in a day, an optimized website will generate enough cash by means of AdSense to cover the costs of at least half of the set up. That, of course, is doing things on the cheap.

When you have the moolah to throw around, you profile your audience like your life and your entire family tree's depended on it (a certain company based in Mountain View is very good at doing this, raking it billions every month) and keep your costs under control (not in the maha kanjoos way, but in terms of spending in places where you can actually recover your cost or acquire a new bunch of visitors). Marketing and advertising yourself does get you new visitors, but if you don't have a good product to flog, they'd never stick around. So, it is generally a good idea to be at least excellent at what you intend to in the first place. Rest is to incentivize every damn thing. How do you do that? Well, that's worth a lengthy post in itself.

But, to answer the core question, yes, people do make money publishing on the internet and some of them make a lot more than what you or I would give them credit for. The industry still suffers from the age-old ailments of inflated numbers and other artful misrepresentations, but the clients are wizening up and it is a practice that's very much on the decline. The numbers are still nowhere in the region of what print or television can boast of, but, like I said earlier, the production and marketing costs are lower in this side of town too, thus making my margins much more healthier. All you need is a bit of patience, a good product and oodles of respect for the user.

tags: india, internet, online advertising, social networking

Identity

2006-09-02T00:12:00.000+05:30

The air too, like the skies, always turns a dull shade of grey when it is overcast and rainy here. Much before I finally started for home, sometime past eight in the evening, what was left of the late evening sunlight was already being given a tough time in finding its way to the ground by the millions of tiny, needlelike drops of rain.

It is a very strange kind of rain, for even when it rains hard, it is more like a shower of micro-sized pins, than the usual mid-sized splotch that we are normally used to. Surprisingly, it was all fine at the first flyover and quite okay at the second one; but it all came to naught after passing under the third one, when I was caught in another of those infamous traffic jams in the rain.

Logically, it has to be an unsavory situation. The windscreen fogs up, the lighting is always lax, traffic crawls along in four unruly lanes and you can hardly see anything, nor can anyone see you. But I adore such situations. I’ve always loved strange, dark places filled with strange dark people, where there are no set rules and everything from your ancestry to your professional status are of no import.

Chasing down such thoughts, I end up with the essential irritant of a question: who am I? I am afraid I don’t have any answers for that. I represent varied things like a decent professional, a wayward and quasi-estranged son, a good friend who is no longer that to so many and a former lover to some others. But, what do I mean for myself? I don’t even know.

I’ve always lived with ideas of what I should represent, but I’ve never known what I actually am. I could almost never identify with the way I look (helped in no smart part by the fact that I don’t look good from any angle), though I could not figure out which look I could have identified with. And I could never believe, even without any indoctrination, in things I was supposed to have believed in when I was growing up.

Flash-forward to now and having been in this city for seven years now, I can hardly identify myself with where I came from or with anything here. Apparently, my accent has gone a bit wonky in my mother tongue, I speak the language here with shades of my mother tongue and my English represents the places I’ve been, the things that I have read and the things that I’ve seen. In a sense, I can belong only to a feeling of being perpetually lost.

But when it all works out fine, there is this most amazing sense of calm and lucidity; for you are moored to nothing and there is nothing to fight against, because you are for and against everything at the same time, thus amounting to a sweet nothingness. When it does not work, well, it is a mess. You struggle to clasp on to foundations, even virtual or non-existent ones, while searching for even a single smell, a familiar feeling or verifiable memory to hold you together.

Meanwhile, the deadlock disintegrates, and after another traffic light, trees, vehicles and blurry lights fly past me. It is quite unsafe, for I can’t see half the things, including vehicles, potholes and people crossing the roads, out there. But I have grown to like uncertainty to the point of it even being quite a flirty relationship. We don’t quite ‘get’ each other, but we certainly do seem to thrive in each other’s company.

Percentages

2006-08-29T18:17:00.000+05:30

When do you know for sure that enough is enough? It is applicable in both cases - good and bad. If you go by a purely numerical definition, good or bad enough could probably be defined as anything that is 'x' units above the halfway point. That way, if you spend even 49% of your time in a particular situation in a good way (and 51% of the time in a bad way), you would still end up with two additional units of bad. Would that mean it would be a good idea to cut your losses, ditch the situation and move on ahead? Of course not.

The problem with people and relationships is that you can't ever really quantify either. A fair number of people exist in situations where 90% of the time spent is practically living hell for them; but the other 10% is, according to them, absolute heaven, which redeems the otherwise lousy situation. Naturally, in such circumstances, the good is given a higher weightage than the bad. Is that a smart idea? Well, I don't know. Whatever that rocks your boat, as they say, even if I may not agree with it. Moreover, factors such as practical considerations, only serve to muddy the waters further.

The question actually covers a whole lot of things other than just relationships. For example, you know you are putting on weight, but you are not overweight yet. So you get a particular weight in mind that would quantify the state of being overweight or a state of lurching rapidly towards it. But where exactly is that point? Is that point somewhere you can easily climb down from, like a minor flirtation over the lower limit or is it the minimum possible gap towards the upper limit, from where the climb down is a long way off, but not quite over the upper limit?

These are interesting questions to ponder, but very real ones too. People face it every day and deal with it using different methods. Some morbidly overweigh the little good and sign up for a lifetime of unbearable suffering, others make well-judged and sensible decisions that hover around the 50-50 level, which is more or less failsafe, while other idiots like me look for the 90% good and 10% bad to make the call that it is actually enough. Strangely, it is probably the 90% good rule that is the most prejudicial, especially if the other party has the lousy fortune to present the bad 10% up front first.

Reasons

2006-08-27T03:10:00.000+05:30

I think it is about time I gave up on the ‘have no time for this’ excuse and wade out into the open with the possible real reasons as to why I have been blogging lesser and lesser these days. First on the list would be the fact that my blog is awfully boring. I mean, there are only so many ways in which you can put forth the same crap again and again, and when you yourself have trouble reading all that you’ve written, it is a fairly good indication that it has become somewhat more than unbearable.

The second reason is, no matter how much I would want to deny it, that the loss of anonymity has taken a bit of a toll. In the early days, only a couple of close friends knew about the blog, which later grew to include a lot of friends. These days almost everyone knows - including a lot of people at work – about the who, the what and the where. By nature, I am a bit of a private person and these days I don’t get any time to be that. If I have to pretend to be nice and write about how lovely the weather is when it is not exactly beating down with niceness out there, then there really would be no point to this.

Then there is also the fact that I am a bit bored and disappointed with the entire blogging circus, especially in the Indian context. There are a couple of reasons I could come up with as to why it is so, but I can’t put my finger on the real big issue that could be the reason. Quite a bit of it is the inflated participation numbers. There are un-conferences and whatnot going on these days about it, but it does lack the personal touch of the early days. There is just no warmth, but a lot of vain posturing and turf wars over almost everything. Maybe it is also the fact that I find the other side – of facilitating conversations and making the business case for it – more exciting than the conversations themselves now.

These days, every time I sit down to write, my mind just blocks the thoughts out. As an old habit and as something I used to like doing, I do want to write; but, as something that involves going out into the open with what I feel and think, I don’t feel like doing it anymore. At a personal level too I’ve become more guarded, a lot less expectant and generally a whole lot less willing to put a lot on the line. It is not the most brilliant state of mind to be in, but it is not all that bad either.

In general, I think the truth is that I’ve been yearning better company, better conversations and better ways to spend my time. It is true that I have very little of it with me these days and I can’t honestly complain much about it because I quite like it this way and I am treated quite well too. But that does encroach on my personal time. As a person who used to lavish a lot of that on friends and close ones, it is a bit of a struggle now to do that any day or even as infrequently as once a week. That said, the realizations it has led to has been quite intriguing.

The thing is, a lot of the interactions you have on a daily basis arise out of necessities. In regular, mundane life, that could be having polite conversations with people from the milkman to the cabbie, not because it is absolutely necessary (you won’t exactly stop getting any milk or be left unable to hire a cab if you don’t do all those), but because it makes things easier for a variety of reasons; some of which makes things easier for you, while the others make it easier for the other party.

In personal life too, things tend to be the same. It is not that you’d exactly stop being alive if you were to suddenly stop being nice and caring on a superficial level. Most of the people you know and interact with often, would gladly give up stopping by you if you were to guarantee them safe passage in terms of what they desire from you. It is quite the same if the roles are reversed too. How often do you say “that’s so awful” to someone else almost out of an impulse than because you actually feel that is awful? By the same turn, how often do you count on hearing the same from others? Of course, you can accuse me of extreme cynicism, but I don’t think you can accuse me of being not right.

But what’s blogging got to do with any of this? Beats me. But the strange thing is that after what I guess must be a couple of hundred words, I still have not mentioned important things that have happened to me recently, like developments at work, an excellent trip to Bombay and even the fact that I went to work and back on a bike after almost a year and how overwhelming an experience it was. Instead, I am putting up a smokescreen to pretend that I am saying something useful or important, while all that I am doing is to try and bore you to death to see if you ‘really’ want to hear what I want to say?

So, what if a voice stands up and say ‘yes’? That would be quite an interesting turn of events, for I have no clue what I would do in that case. See, I guess what I am getting at is that I am quite a boring person who pretends to be more interesting or intriguing than what I really am. Of course, none of the older imagery regarding myself has been accidental. I’ve played, more than willingly, to the gallery and contributed to the situation in huge parts. I guess I am asking to be left alone, but it is hugely interesting that anyone should ask for precisely that on a blog.

Bloggitus Interruptus

2006-08-26T15:07:00.000+05:30

Honestly, I can't pick between Bombay and Delhi, both seem awfully bad at the same time, though the familiarity of Delhi is always something to look forward to, while the eateries (they almost always do good food in the seaside town as a rule and the decor does not smack of cheapness under the covers) are a pleasure in Bombay.

To cut a long story short, it was three days of not much else but a lot a lot hard work, heavy eating and heavy drinking in Bombay. Now that I am back here, it is time for the follow up, I guess blogging would be one of the parties to suffer immediately as a result, if it has not already. And I've finally gotten an invite at Vox, and it rocks too.

Inconsequential

2006-08-18T00:15:00.000+05:30

I do not know what is more scary, that you have settled into a risk-free rhythm with yourself without any effort or that with each passing day more of the frivolous aims and targets disappear one-by-one? Maybe these are the essential rites of passage, before you take the final steps into the hallowed portals of definite adulthood, that the lack of any real expectations fail to do much more than amuse you, when you can spare the time for it.

There are places where things used to be kept, which now gawk back empty at me and I am baffled once again, for I can't remember what used to be kept there. There are faint echoes of familiar laughter and memories that streak away like shadows flying from light. To strike up a marginal flame, to aid the vision and warmth, I feign curiosity. I feign a genuine inclination towards learning. But I already know how the story goes and all the lessons that are to come. I am such a fake and an excellent one at that.

I could almost say I am married. To predictability and a lack of surprise. The crimes I accuse others of, are the crimes that I too specialise in. I look into your blindness with my darkened soul and float in and out like the tide, soaking up everything, yet retaining nothing and stay un-retained in everything. It is fearful to contemplate that this sentence might be for a lifetime, for a singular count of the ghastly crime of being born.

I look into the eyes of complete strangers, wondering, hoping, that you are one of them, but they never look back, so would you. If your lips were to break, even into the hint of a smile, I could genuinely laugh back, even at the risk of being mocked again, but they never smile, so would you. I plan and I plot, as I walk and I drive around that curve, of the things I could say and the things we could do. But you were never where I was and will never be where I could be.

Sail

2006-08-15T18:16:00.000+05:30

It so happens once probably in everyone's life that you tug really hard at the rudder and hoist the sails in a direction much removed from the one where the usual winds happen to pass by. I have gradually been spending lesser and lesser time under the temporary shelter lent by the awning of youthful exuberance. I am not sure if it was intentional or if it all happened by chance, but the days of endless revelry, reckless love and pining over all things strange have all but disappeared. For better, than for worse, it is finally a good time to chart a new course and look for destinations new, without actually going anywhere.

The Upgrade That Was Not

2006-08-15T14:38:00.000+05:30

Hell has frozen over! Blogger is rolling out a new backend. On second thoughts, it is only getting a bit chilly out here, but it certainly ain't cool enough for things to freeze over. At least not yet. Apparently, the greatest of the changes is in a place where the end user, like you and me, don't see much of. Blogger is going off the static publishing set up (one where it would pick up content from its database and spit out static HTML and XML files based on the templates and settings you had specified) and moving to a new set up where all the content is served dynamically (the way in which Wordpress blogs functions now).

The immediate change you'll get to see is a top bar, quite similar to wordpress.com once again, that will show you as logged in and also display other useful information, if you are logged in. Behind the scenes, and I am guessing here, the entire operation would now move to an application server (probably the same server that handles the posting/editing backend) from the old set up which was probably serving a directory of files based on the host header. The other significant change is the authentication part, for which you can now use your Google account (for new blogs, not for existing blogs) or your old Blogger account. The logic there is quite mixed up and needs a lot of work.

That said, the new beta is a complete dud compared to Wordpress.com. The interface is still the dated, clunky one and true to the beta label, some of the stuff is broken, like the new WYSIWYG layout editor that was spewing out Ajax debug information on to my screen when it was not functioning as intended. Access control is nice, but I did not see the option for controlling access per post and determining access on the blog level is not a fun thing to do.

The good points? Well, the archive links are laid out much better now and there are Atom feeds for posts and comments (per post too) now. There is also something called "labels", which looks like a bastard child that resulted from a love making session between tags and categories. Pretty nice, but once again it is something they should have had yesterday.

But someone really has to get some new default templates into the system pretty soon. I am sick of seeing the same 10 all over the place. And the upgrade itself is symptomatic of how Google treats Blogger, more like a stepchild than as a product that deserves a whole lot more of attention and resources allocated to it. Yeah, I know, it is not easy to roll out features for a framework that supports a huge number of users, compared to something like wordpress.com that is new and had a clean sheet of paper to start with. But it can't be that difficult either. After all, it is all just a data, pulled in and out of database servers and presented on web servers.

Lovely Writer

2006-08-14T13:22:00.000+05:30

Thanks to Chris, I stumbled upon Windows Live Writer. Till date, I've used a variety of blogging clients like wbloggar, ecto, Performancing for Firefox (the current one) and almost everything else that supports the Metaweblog API. And I have to say I am quite impressed. The only weak point I can see is that it does not allow easy Technorati tagging like how Performancing does. Now, for the positives:

WYSISWYG authoring with non-MS Office mangled HTML source.
"Web Preview" that allows you to see the post within your blog's layout without having to publish it.
Multiple account support (meaning that you can post to Blogger, Wordpress, Windows Live Spaces etc).
Spell check (ahem, one feature that's badly needed for most bloggers).
SDK to integrate other services (that should take care of my tagging complaint).
Support for RSD, Metaweblog API and Movable Type API (in layman lingo that means it would support most of the blogging services out of the box without forcing you to wade into the ugly tech details).
Absolutely spanking support for embedding images.

So the verdict for now is that it is really a non-Microsoft product in terms of being usable and irritation factor. There are downsides like being based on .Net and a standalone application. But for most Average Joes, this would really be a great addition to the regular blogging toolbox.

p.s: The spell checker does not have the word 'blogging' in its default dictionary. Now, that's really hilarious.

Update: Tim Heuer, as promised, has made the Flickr and Tagging plugins.

tags: windows+live+writer, microsoft, blog

Satisfy Me!

2006-08-10T13:55:00.000+05:30

When you start a new business in an already crowded market place do make sure you get one thing right - go out of your way to satisfy your initial set of customers and treat them like you'd treat the most valuable person in your life. This holds true even more in the food industry where established tastes and loyalties are hard to switch and you get more or less only one go at getting them to move.

Yesterday night, I wanted to order out from a new joint in Saket, called The Blue Tandoor, because I was more or less sick of the existing joints there. There are more than enough eateries out there, mostly around the PVR Anupam area, but almost all of them follow the cost saving approach to cooking non vegetarian food, which uses the base marinated meat that's given the final treatment/masala/garnishing according to the order.

The only other joints in the vicinity, who do it differently are Cafe Rendezvous and Swagat in Malviya Nagar and neither specialise in doing Mughlai. So, at least in theory, they do have a window of opportunity in serving to a niche within the food spectrum that has a ready and massive audience in the area they are located in. But they botched it up and in a terrible way.

Firstly, their menu card did not have the minimum order figure listed anywhere. Second, it was priced too high, at Rs 500. When your price point of your main dishes is at an average of Rs 250, it would be hard to top that figure. And most people who use home delivery don't often order three course meals, thus making the "sir, please get a starter or a dessert" line a non-starter.

I spent five minutes with them ordering what I wanted to order, after which the chap told me that it fell short of the Rs 500 mark, following which placed the order with my regular chap who was only too glad to serve me, and even better they call up the day after asking if there were any problems with delivery and quality. Five minutes after I placed the other order, the chap called me back clarifying that the manager had said they would serve me. Nice, but it was too late by then.

I have seen this across Delhi, that new joints or even older ones, don't value their new customers. Most times, going out of your way just once for a new customer could win him/her for you for a long time. And good service also works to get you brownie points in terms of peer-to-peer reviews. One satisfied customer often leads to many more from the same segment. Just one among the many points that's lost on them.

Company

2006-08-07T23:31:00.000+05:30

On the daily late evening drive back home there is often not a lot to lift my eyes and thoughts away from whatever that is occupying it at that point. On most days it is mostly all about nasty traffic and roads, messed up by both the weather and the never ending construction and the exceptionally brilliant evening skies on those days when I can manage to drag myself out of the office before sundown. On the odd occasion, when the traffic holds up for long enough, I get to see a couple or two, sometimes in a car, or like today, on a motorcycle zip by and I wonder what is it that they really feel?

Sometimes it is very evident, like it was day-before-yesterday night, on the table adjacent to ours where there were two couples with expressions on their faces that ranged from indifference to regret. Then there are the happy ones, at least they appear to be so, and you wonder if they are one of those couples who appear to be shipshape on the surface and in quite a bit of a mess underneath. But appearances were not what I was getting at here, it is more about that empty feeling that often greets you when get home, park the car, pick up the bag and walk in and there is actually nobody home.

The strange thing is that I am not depressed or down in the dumps about it. I don't have the time for any of that and honestly I am quite happy with where I am and what I do; but I do crave for company that I like every now and then. The world+dog, of course, has the age-old quick fix solution for it: Get Married Like Now! I really don't have anything against it either, but really, I can't look at a person and decide in five minutes, or even five months, if she is the right one. More so because I am completely anal about a couple of things that makes my pool of possible/probable options even more miniscule/non-existent.

A major issue is that I've pretty much crossed the part where I could change myself to fit into a relationship. I've put in a lot of effort to get to where I am and I would, probably never, throw away all that in the name of love or things similar to it. Speaking of which even romance or its embryonic stage - attraction - is something that I've not known in a long time. Relationships are mostly a practical arrangement, but for even that you need to give people and circumstances a chance and enough time. I have neither to give right now. And after three major relationships and a handful of flings in six years, curiosity and intrigue does fade a fair bit.

Strangely, I don't want to be with anyone to get hot steaming food when I come home or get my clothes washed. I manage the former quite well by myself and money does afford good part time domestic help who do their part in keeping the place clean. That said, I do genuinely regret not getting enough time to spend at home. The empty feeling notwithstanding, I love the familiar smell that it greets me with when I open the door and turn on the lights. Then over to the fridge freshly stocked over the weekend, the tiny kitchen and later on to the low bed, the triumvirate of pillows and the television that sits now on the wardrobe.

It is really not that bad and life is good, but who said you can't ever ask for even more?

Oh, just shove it, really

2006-08-07T13:24:00.000+05:30

Because I am number one, very old and very naked too. No other Indian blogger, (and I stress NO OTHER), features on the first page of results for Google search for "looking for females in bangalore for fun with cell numbers", "Nude deepa sahi" and "prostitutes in noida film city". Which other Indian blogger can claim to have done such a lot of invaluable service to the Indian bloggogol? I repeat, like dear Mr Leghorn would have said, I am the nakedest, oldest and number onest. Now that the point is clear, old, loud and very naked, feel free to get on with your respective blogging lives.

p.s: for my honest (cross my evil dark heart) take on this and background information do read this. For I know (because I am the oldest, nakedest and number onest Indian blogger) that all of you clothed, younger and non-number one bloggers have too much of time on your hands. Please to be clicking the Google ads on your way out too and help this naked emperor get some clothes. Please, purty please?

Afraid

2006-08-01T18:11:00.000+05:30

Threesome
Originally uploaded by codelust.

"If you have an infant and the baby has gas, burping the baby is being a good parent. But when you have a 10-year-old who has metaphoric gas, you don't have to burp him. You have to let him sit with it, try to figure out what to do about it. He then learns to tolerate moderate amounts of difficulty, and it's not the end of the world."

-- From A Nation of Wimps.

Almost a month ago I ran into my niece again after seeing her for the first time when she was some seven months old. It is scary to be around the little children of today, for they are anything but children as we know them. They are almost born competitive straight out of the box and have feelings, needs and reactions that are quite different from what we used to have as kids. It must be so very difficult to be one of them these days.

I think we are gradually forgetting that it is okay to be not okay all the time. Somehow we have to project an attitude/image of invincibility and ruthlessness even when we don't quite feel like it. In the process, we often forget that we are human after all and that the same is the case for people around us. Sometimes we just need to take a deep breath, step back and count the good things, including whatever bits of sanity left, we have in life.

We don't need to be scared, at least not all the time.

Enough

2006-08-01T14:12:00.000+05:30

I think a week's worth of self-inflicted torture should be good enough punishment. Don't you agree?

Hello, world. Again.

Aside

2006-07-31T14:58:00.001+05:30

One of the funnier sides of the recent blog ban is that it has given a bit of a glimpse into possible numbers related to bloggers in India. From the numbers on BloggersCollective, which I guess is the largest number of Indian bloggers/blog readers from India assembled in once place, we have more hype than actual numbers to back it up when it comes to participation.

At the last count there were 432 members in the group and if we were to invoke the 1% rule and extrapolate the audience possible, the number would be 39600 (99*400) who contribute to the process strictly within the Indian context. I'm not taking the other 32 into account because a lot of the bloggers become part of the 39K number due to their participation on other blogs and also there is no way to account for Indians who read blogs from India while being abroad.

Attribute an average of 3 page views per user to that number and you'd still get figure of only 120,000 per day, which across 432 blogs is a very low number. Low enough maybe to start a whispering society, but not large enough constitute a readily marketable or easily targeted demographic. Please don't tell me that such a number has been quite effective, as shown by the banned blogs episode; effectiveness and scale are two different things. Besides, a lot of the bloggers are media people, which certainly did help in getting good enough traction on the mainstream media.

Another contentious point is that blogging by itself does not do much. It does well only when it is sold as part of something more easily recognised, like how Indiatimes does it with 'News Blogs' on timesofindia.indiatimes.com. Does that mean blogging in India is no great shakes? Right now, I think the answer is 'yes' and I don't think it will take off at a major level till the vernacular crowd moves in and that is a different story in itself.

Meanwhile, NDTV.com launches its blogging service, replete with avenues for cross domain scripting attacks and numerous other holes. A ten minute inspection of it already has shown ways to steal posts from other people, requiring almost no technical knowledge, making our gaffes look pre-pubescent in an instant. C'est la vie, I guess.