The Answer is 42

 

Yet another YouTube video on how to beat procrastination later, the algorithm has probably picked up that I never will. All the more reason for it to continue suggesting more such videos. While the algorithm has not taken any responsibility of fixing me, it can continue to engage me. If I am meant to waste time, why not on its content as opposed to a rival's? Fair enough, I suppose.

Not that the video was a bad one. Deftly produced with the right amount of inset clips, slow zoom outs and relatability embedded in the script, it conveys what every well produced video on the topic should - that productivity can be enhanced and procrastination can be subdued by starting small, battling the amygdala (the primitive brain), System 2 dominance (rational thinking) etc etc. It even acknowledges that watching that very video is part of the easily pursued avoidance loop. Very self aware.

The ways I justify procrastination are many including some mentioned in the video. But in my universe, any delayed major project or lack of progress in the larger mission of life itself is most easily put down to the time not being right. The awareness that this excuse is not a valid one has never hindered me from using it. Decades of delay in the execution of grand plans is pinned on the lack of the necessary vibes. Hastily completed work after inordinate delays is celebrated as achievement and escape.

Even more dangerous is my tendency to retroactively frame delay and inaction as some sort of rebellion against the system. Every fictional and real rebel I have known or read about was completely invested in pushing their cause, however impossible, and sitting on their backsides is simply not in their script or their genes. Laziness cannot pass off as rebellion for very long no matter how many ways I try to spin it.

Through the sheer experience of multiple decades of inertia, I can claim professional acquaintance with 'just do it later'. I seem to be no longer burdened by guilt at my perceived lack of progress but at the same time, I do not revel in the easy releases of the avoidance loop either. There are many things that I wish I had already accomplished in life yet there is a certain peace in looking back at what I managed to do in spite of myself.

A particular insight came to me only last year, like an epiphany, while browsing a bookstore with fellow book lovers from Russia and Tajikistan whilst we were recommending personal favourites to each other. Without revealing the title of the book(s), all I will say is that the key plot climax at the end of a long quest in one of my favourite stories is the message "The answer is 42". 

I was in my 20s when I first read this classic, the randomness and irreverence of this disclosure left everyone including the protagonist and me the reader scratching our heads while quietly giggling at the same time. The conclusion remained true to the spirit of the book which specialized in not taking anything too seriously and did so brilliantly.

A couple of decades later in that bookshop in Dehradun, the number 42 did not seem like such a random choice anymore. As it happens, I was by then already into my 41st year approaching the next, pleased as punch despite a generally ordinary existence. I realized that 42 could have been a secret reference to a certain magic age when regret nestles with realization, at peace with what could have been and what has. I certainly felt so in that moment.

It did help that besides being the author of one of my favourite books, the concerned writer had provided me with one of my favourite quotes of all time too. When in some moment of undeniable genius, he had said "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by", I knew I had to look no further for a guiding light.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2026/04/the-answer-is-42.html]

In Plain Sight

13th November 2024, Kolkata

At a busy intersection in Kolkata, shorn of any elements of nature, this billboard lorded over the teeming masses. The green forests, the fresh air and the clean water promised could only be visualized but not experienced. To use such imagery for a product which has established health risks for users and contributes significantly to the dirtiness of our urban surroundings doubled and tripled the irony. All the more reason for busybees of the city to pause and reflect. Who are you trying to please by winning your race and are those egging you on doing so with the right intentions?

Quirk

Radek Kozák/Unsplash

The laptop charger which will charge only at the perfect amount of connection, not too tight, not too loose. The air cooler that will tumble over at the slightest touch of a stranger but which I have managed to keep stable to keep me company in peak summer. The induction cooking stove that will show an error message if I set the wattage at 1000 W but works perfectly at 800 W or 1200 W. The primary advantage of a machine is said to be that it works without complaints but even factory set-ups have ways of turning out tiny little flaws that are the difference between frustration and completion of desired tasks. Much like people, these machines too needed a gentle hand and patient enquiry to deliver. Like any good manager, I am proud of myself and my team. Hiring and firing is for cop-outs.

Challenge

Ian Chen/Unsplash

For all the high-paying jobs in the world's biggest companies be it tech companies or financial behemoths, there is a stampede of the sharpest minds. At least the sharpest minds academically speaking. The dream then is to enter an organized system that is already printing money and join the party. The challenge in that case is how to make the product(s) of the companies unique or at least better than their competitors. How exciting! But how guaranteed! Don't they wonder with that all that brainpower to harness, having succeeded in some of the toughest competitive arenas how it would be to take on a real challenge? The challenge of the environmental crisis, the challenge of ensuring medical reach, the challenge of delivering education to the masses. Oh, but that sounds like the job of politicians, doesn't it? Occasionally a few of them brainiacs do wander into politics with mixed success but it is a wonder why more don't. I assume that they would (deservedly) hold their mental abilities in high regard but then why doesn't the complex multidimensional challenge that is politics fascinate (more of) them? Some would say that their being smart is the reason why most of them don't wade into this arena where popularity contest meets management ability meets mental sharpness. I would say that intellect is of the greatest value in solving the greatest problems and no role squeezes it to the maximum as much as that of a politician.

Ignore

30th December 2025, Indian Express

Far too often, you will hear that your opinion does not matter. That the system is beyond saving and all you can do is save yourself. The collective is no longer a thing, concern cannot be organized around. The powerful will do what they want and the others must endure. Ignore their ignorance.

30th December 2025, Indian Express

Agua

When Cristiano Ronaldo famously set aside the cans of soft drinks and replaced them with a bottle of water, I daresay he didn't mean this. At a global conference tangentially related to the environment, canned water was hardly an inspiring sight. As per the manufacturer, the use of recyclable cans and sustainably sourced water made it a much greener choice compared to the plastic PET bottle competition. But I suppose the simple choice of a water cooler and a few paper glasses would have left the water budget for the event severely underutilized.

21st July, 2024

Replicate

26th August 2024, Asan Barrage

A-Frame houses more suitable for the Swiss Alps find themselves far from home. There is of course the cursory connection of mountain cultures binding high living folks from Europe to those of Asia. To me, it is just a photogenic photo opportunity but the urge to design a barrage-side tourist lodge on the lines of Swiss chalets is beyond my understanding. Along the edges of the Asan Barrage where thousands of winged European tourists congregate, I have always found this tourist lodge devoid of tourists of any sort. While the chai and pakoda continue to be good each year, I can see the disuse creep in slowly but surely. In the lap of the Himalayas, an attempt to become a tourist magnet seems to have gone wrong. One suspects that originality of solution was not the priority here but it was blind replication.

Background

Kolkata Airport (CCU), 24th December 2022

I am obsessed with observing street and wall-art created exclusively for public consumption. Metro pillars, underpass walls and sides of urban buildings are now decorated with art of wildly varying quality around the world and I don't let any of that work pass by me ignored. I can't help wondering about the artist(s) who came together to set up this brush of everyday people with the good, the bad and the ugly of the principles of colour, perspective and culture. I want to imagine that they take a deeper joy in presenting their art to the world in places that are definitely not galleries but consequentially feature in most people's lives prominently even as they rush by to their next task. As a background, they might live until rain, sunshine and politics put paid to their existence but as projections of freed imaginations into the banal routines of their spectators' lives, they offer an inestimable value.

Travels Grimm

Once upon a time, I had a lot of Amazon shopping rewards balance left and in the upcoming change of countries, I would lose access to it. This meant that I had to spend the amount fast. Naturally, I defaulted to stocking up on books on my Kindle and given my flavour of that season, they turned out to be a bunch of travel books. V S Naipaul, Paul Theroux and Pico Iyer ruled the roost as I bought their entire travelogue catalogues electronically.

It would be more than a decade later that I would actually get around to reading them and in their respective formulae, one was particularly disturbing. Pico Iyer was comfort food, displaced across multiple cultures but finding peace and joy in almost every one of them. V S Naipaul may seem more aligned to the title of the post as his unique mix of precise prose and incredible self-hatred shone through. But for Travels Grimm, I refer to Theroux's span of work in particular.

8th January, 2023

Wherever he goes, he finds only terror and deformity, stink and decay until all of a sudden, he comes across something incongruously beautiful - an experience, a person, a thought. An incredibly effective formula for his developed world readers, most of whom would anyway never leave that reading chair to venture into the badlands being written about. In horror movie parlance, this was jump scare inverse but with a series of jump scares bookended with a aesthetic moment of redemption.

Now I don't mean to judge one of the most well known travel authors of all time, but it does seem that despite his travels, he carted around his privileged first-world understanding of how life should be. Any deviation, as per him, was nothing short of hell itself. That perhaps is a result of not knowing that people are happy in most circumstances. They find many ways to be. This is not to cloak the grinding pain of poverty and dysfunctional systems but to understand that a little more engagement with his subjects would have made his travels a little less grim.

Unsung

Among the various ways that language preserves bits of our past is through turns of phrase that jump centuries and classes. That art has long been supported by the privileged is no secret and without the largesse of the nobility, many a poet, painter and the occasional philosopher would not have had the time to produce what they did. Naturally, much of their art acknowledged the greatness of their patrons often overlooking their sordid realities. Songs composed in their honour therefore were the norm, not anomalies. Carried through in that spirit, 'unsung' continues to be used for overlooked contributors whose efforts were never appreciated in a manner or time period which could have helped them find success or acclaim.

In that league of extraordinary people fall the group of people locally called 'tihadi' in Uttarakhand. Daily wage earners ready to be recruited on a daily basis for whatever odd jobs that a neighbourhood required. Here in the outskirts of Dehradun too, you would see milling around in the dozens near a designated location at 08:00 AM looking for employment in this rapidly urbanizing part of town. In a quest to clean up invasive vegetation from our campus lake, it is this pool of readily available handymen that we drew from to eventually accomplish the herculean task of ridding ourselves of our Central American overstaying guests. The so-called water lettuce or Pistia had gorged itself on the nutrients of our lake and taken up residence covering every patch of water available. Our office softened backs were more than ready to give up after the first few buckets of removal. It was due to and only due to the engagement of these relentless extractors that the tons of green goblins could be dumped out of the water.

11th December 2022, Dehradun

Wintering ducks and itinerant birdwatchers have them to thank for getting their favourite haunt back. They, on the other hand, are back again at the designated location at 08:00 AM hoping that the next day or days will put some money in their hands, some to feed themselves and the remainder to send on to their families back home in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar or Bengal. Problems get fixed, buildings go up and gates get hinged by these very hands but the luxury of choosing to not do anything may never be in their fate.

Supporting and Unsporting

In the joint Indian military press briefings that were held to update the media on the progress of Operation Sindoor, a stark moment of contrast between real warriors and keyboard wannabe warriors was on display. An overexcited, headline seeking, warmonger of a journalist asked the panel something to the effect of when would they proceed to an all-out war against Pakistan. The answer from the Navy representative was sharp and clear. He said “Madam, our job is not to go to war. Our job is to end it.”

For the professionals who put their colleagues’ or their own lives at risk on the front, war is necessarily focused, measured and non-escalatory in the pursuit of peace. For the kind of lowlifes who abused even the widow of Navy officer Lieutenant Vinay Narwal murdered in Pahalgam, for asking Indians not to fall for Pakistan’s divisive strategies, war is just another occasion for fake patriotism, political agendas and public display of their ignorant biases, safe in the knowledge that they are hundreds of miles away from any flying bullets or shrapnel.

Which is most likely the reason why my landlord needed to ask me the question “India-Pakistan match ho rahaa hai. Dekhoge nahin?” [India-Pakistan cricket is on. Won’t you watch?] and in a first for the 41 years of my existence, my answer has been No twice in the past week and a half. As a dyed in blue devotee of the Indian cricket team and of cricket, it was a question that would never need to be asked of me as I would be already watching. Experiencing the nation v/s nation narrative of international cricket and the intense play-by-play pressure of squaring off with our neighbour was an opportunity I had never passed on no matter where in the world I was.

Now, this is not the first time that India and Pakistan are playing in the aftermath of a violent act of terrorism supported by Islamabad. While hundreds of millions watch this contest for the intense cricket it produces, India-Pakistan also draws the worst type whose only interaction with cricket is for India-Pakistan matches. Such has been our volatile geopolitical reality for decades. Yet in this Asia Cup’s no handshake environment, where that basic courtesy to each other was shelved, fuelled further by simulations of planes being shot down and machine guns being fired, multiple sanctities have been violated.

War is a failure of humanity. Sport, on the other hand, is a celebration of it. War, very aptly described as old men sending out young men to die, is an all-around tragedy where both the victor and the vanquished are traumatized for life despite all the sugarcoating of glory put around it. Sport, in contrast, allows for the most intense competitiveness to be exercised but within a framework that recognizes and respects the slim margins of fate scripted into it. To club war and sport together is a travesty and confusing a soldier with a sportsperson is disrespectful to both.

If the atmosphere was not normalized enough for a team to acknowledge a fellow team’s efforts in a sport that both teams clearly love as do billions of their countrymen, then why play each other at all? Play is the key word. Despite all the emotions we invest into cricketers fiddling with a small sphere, a plank of wood, and physics, cricket is play. If the 25 lives so horrifically taken by terrorists in Pahalgam and the lives put on the line by our military to defend our security were to be really respected, is not shaking hands really an appropriate response?

Weirdly for a sub-continent brutalized and intentionally destabilized by British planning, an originally British sport manages to bring it together somewhat – cricket unites gullies, roads and maidaans with its simple tales of flashy batsmen seeking immortality as toiling bowlers with flying fieldsmen deny them the same. But it is patently unfair to expect this beautiful game of angles and flair to bear the burden of politically motivated conflicts that flare in cruel ignorance of the daily needs of their citizens. Cricket’s poetic script of ups and downs, edges and sixes should not be a proxy for nasty war but an escape from it.

What then of this Sunday’s India-Pakistan final, you ask? I feel that when even the two militaries which had engaged in a vicious short-lived conflict of Operation Sindoor reached terms for a ceasefire, are pampered billionaire cricketers or extremist fans claiming to be more soldier than them? The Pakistan government had to spin their military defeat into alternative realities for their citizens but that need not intrude into the field of play. The war is over. An India-Pakistan cricket game should be just that, an epic contest in and of itself, but I do sincerely hope that the two teams are sporting enough to shake on it.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2025/09/supporting-and-unsporting.html]

Lawrence in Arabia: E-Books and War

Lawrence in Arabia

In a recent conversation with a fellow bibliophile, I had to agree that e-books had no soul. The weight of a paper book in hand and the texture of the pages can never be displaced by the best soft backlighting or sharpest of images that their electronic avatars tout. The conversation also reminded of a 15-year old tablet in my possession and of the e-book within it which had long awaited my attention. Soul or no soul, the fact that the tablet still functioned and that the e-book was still unread led me back to Scott Anderson's "Lawrence in Arabia".

The book's fairly long subtitle "War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East" was what had drawn me to purchase it back in 2010. Nothing beats reading yet another record of the casual psychopathy and apathy with which the imperial nations of the modern age, maybe all ages, treat their 'subjects'. While nothing about their behaviour is truly surprising, it bears repetition every once in a while to prevent relapsing into quiet acceptance and a "Let It Be" mentality. The past cannot be undone but it need not be forgotten.

In that jolly spirit, I dipped into the soulless e-book and came away surprised. For one, the core story of Thomas Edward Lawrence (a.k.a "Lawrence of Arabia") turned to be much more than the white 'saviour' of the 'wild' tribes who did not deserve him that I was expecting. For the uninitiated, the legend of Lawrence of Arabia goes that there was this British academic turned spy turned rebel leader who went full "native" with Arabian tribes during the first World War helping them win their freedom from the Ottoman Empire of the Turks only to be immediately divvied up by the British and French ones at the end of it. Lawrence as the lonely symbol of British honour was thus betrayed and his noble intentions were flushed down the drain.

My only acquaintance with the Lawrence legend until this e-book was through an overtly celebratory movie on him, a much awarded 1962 cinematic blockbuster - David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia" - which my Dad and many of his generation were big fans of. It was like the Jurassic Park of their times so they were blind to the movie's faults as much as I would be of Steven Spielberg's 1993 masterpiece. As a post liberalization Indian, I already had a less than rosy image of such British 'heroes' but Scott Anderson, as an experienced war journalist, brought me a lot more nuance on the legend. 

The cloak of macho-ness that mass murder (under the banner of war) requires a person to put on and the terrible turbulence caused from the same in any sane person's conscience is captured exceedingly well. Lies, half-truths, averted eyes - all in pursuit of 'national' objectives fuelled by old men sending young men to die brutal deaths for questionable gains. As the book indicates, Lawrence was an extraordinary man shaped by equally extraordinary circumstances but subject to almost all the same flaws as an ordinary one. What Scott Anderson also does very well is flitting between multiple memoirs of the same events, giving due cognizance to the Rashomon effect of individual perceptions and self-images.

It was clear to me through a reading of the story how books, even e-books, stand head and shoulders above any other medium of learning. Here I was, in the comfort of my home in a rainy week in Dehradun, travelling to multiple destinations threaded together through 4 main protagonists - the aforementioned TE Lawrence representing British interests and conflicts; Curt Prufer a German spy academic who was then serving the Kaiser and would go on to serve Hitler too; Aaron Aaronsohn an agronomist cum Zionist with a key role to play in forcing the momentum that would one day birth Israel and William Yale a Yankee scouting for oil in the same war torn provinces while also keeping America up to speed on goings on. 

As an authorial voice, Scott Anderson goes well beyond the usual to elaborate on the confusions, double-dealings, personality quirks and blind coincidences that would shape what continues to be one of the most troubled regions in the world today. More importantly, the book performs a sincere takedown of the glories of war and pseudo-nationalists leaving a bitter and necessary aftertaste of what it does even with its so-called heroes and victors. All sides in a war belabour under the pretence that they are doing "the right thing" but the blood-and-guts journey to victory leaves even the most ardent believer in doubt of their methods.

While I would have loved to have partaken of this story through the pages of a well-thumbed hardcopy, browsing this 15-year old digital replica of a book made me reconsider, albeit briefly, my rigid declaration of the soullessness of an e-book. Are the words that make a book less important just because they have been coded into binaries of 0 and 1 instead of being printed in ink on processed wood pulp? 

All I can say is that I am happy that Scott Anderson's version of the Lawrence story found its way to me, convolutedly, through an ancient barely functional tablet. Digital though it was, its impact was like that of all good books and soon enough, when the tablet dies as it is bound to, I will miss these journeys I took with it across space and time. Unlike a 'real' book, it will not stay on my bookshelf to remind me of our past association. That to me is a different sort of tragedy.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2025/09/lawrence-in-arabia-e-books-and-war.html]

Utility

Old is slow. Old is stagnant. Markers of growth are shiny and cold. Air-conditioned spaces fuelling the furnace outside. That doesn't quite matter because if we all make enough money, we can always shift to another planet. Thoughts on the past are productive time lost. New ideas, new visions. Onwards and upwards. Let the rust and the vines find somewhere else to live. Preferably on pages of diaries and in dystopian TV series. While selling dreams of an imaginary perfect past, let's paint over all the real imperfections - those wandering steps that brought us here that could yet give us pause to wonder what exactly is the rush?

05-Oct-2024 Nostalgia IE

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2024/11/utility.html]

Both

Isn't it time to call an end to this either/or? Pack away notions of the binary-ness of the past? We have suffered enough stupidity and tolerated absence of nuance for far too long. Simplicity is not the same as harshness. Competing versions of the 'story' need to be compared not for choosing between them but for developing a composite. Bluntness is not honesty. It is dumbness. The extra mental energy spent in piecing together how powers (try to) bend history to their ends and how not to miss the beauty of the complicated human stories behind is well worth it. History resists dilution and weaponization. With a lil' help from its friends it can do a lot.

William Dalrymple 4-Nov-2024 IE

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2024/11/both.html]

Gentle

In typical Times of India fashion, this is an attempt to get away with the fluff. At a time when a 20% drop in the elephant population of India is likely to be reported soon, their focus is on Hollywood adaptations of elephants. We all know that Los Angeles, California is the original habitat of the Asian elephant and any stories emanating from there are likely to be the most authentic (NOT).

12-Aug-2024, World Elephant Day, ToI

Without taking away the importance of a Colonel Haathi or a Dumbo, particularly for an urban audience used to such 'cutification', the occasion presented the perfect opportunity to talk about the living breathing animals which are being choked for space by human activities and transportation structures. Friendly and wise they are but in the real world, any challenge to their sense of security and privacy leads to tragic consequences for both animals and humans when the elephants show their not-so-gentle side. 

Too much darkness for the Delhi Times, you say? I counter to say that there is a reason why Hollywood has made so many elephant characters despite being continents away from any actual wild elephant. These creatures are no less celebrities than the starlets that they choose to pack their Page 3 section with. The individuals whims, fancies and tantrums of elephants are packed with anecdotes much more interesting than the gym-look of a has-been. Where the juicy gossip and 'personal challenges' of tinsel town have such a strong viewership, a column or two on the surprisingly human like attributes of our planet sharers can go a long way in humanizing them the right way - flawed but well within their rights to be so.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2024/11/gentle.html]

Morning Meditations

IMG: Dall-E 3

A sequence of tough days at work led to the eventual sleep-in. My daily almost dawn walk with the dogs was pushed down the sundial to more of a morning walk timeslot to allow me to dwell for a little bit more on the comfort of refusing to start a new day. The electronic drug-dealer in my palm served up UEFA Champions League highlights from last night. I partook of Bayern Munich steamrolling Dinamo Zagreb and Manchester City stuttering against Inter Milan mainly because swiping on to the next video felt like too much effort. The irony inherent in cheering for pinnacles of fitness and energy while representing the opposite end of the spectrum was not lost on me. It was still well within the definition of an everyman's early morning when the dogs' earnest confusion finally guilted me into abandoning my contract with sloth. The route was regular, the sniffs and woofs along the way routine but the advantage to a time-table, however externally enforced, is that it ensures that even the most shapeless of mornings eventually meanders towards a generally right direction.

[https://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2024/09/morning-meditations.html]