Verification

NBA player LeBron James answers questions during a press conference after a preseason practice session Sept. 28, 2010, at the Aderholt Fitness Center at Hurlburt Field, Fla. The Miami Heat used the fitness center for their week-long training camp. James is a forward for the Heat. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An ordinary Tuesday was drawing to a close and all I wanted was to make it a little more memorable by watching the feats of some extraordinary people. Game 6 of the 2013 NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and the San Antonio Spurs was scheduled to begin at 21:00 and on the dot, I cranked on my X-Box 360.

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And of course, this was the exact moment that my identity needed to confirmed. Give me an e-mail address, demanded my X-Box and so I gave it my G-Mail ID. No, we have that on file, it said, give me an alternate e-mail address and so with a mild furrow on my eyebrow I punched in my Yahoo ID. Go check your e-mail, it then told me, that's where the pass code is.

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Off to my laptop then and into Yahoo mail I sign. But wait, I was signing in on a device from which I had never accessed my Yahoo ID before so now Yahoo demanded proof. Give me an e-mail address, an alternate one, Yahoo asked of me. So where else do I send my verification code, but to good ol' G-Mail. Into G-Mail then, for my Yahoo pass code which then enabled me to enter my Yahoo mail to see my X-Box Live pass code. Talk about complicated!

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But it's not over yet. Now the ESPN app on the X-Box demands a pass code. No basketball for you otherwise, it declares.  Back into the waiting arms of my laptop again to the URL given by the ESPN app. On ESPN.com, I hope to find my salvation. But no, I have to select my Internet service provider first and I select Comcast. Any guesses on which website I had to sign into now? Comcast login, here I come.

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I am good to go... finally says my Comcast screen. By the time I get back on my X-Box and the game starts streaming, LeBron James is looking seriously downbeat at the end of the first quarter. The Spurs under the leadership of Tim Duncan have clamped down on him hard. 

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Later in the game, the Heat come back spectacularly in the last quarter to squeak out as winners pushing the series to a 7th & final game on Thursday. LeBron proves that he is LeBron by defending like a demon and scoring 20 odd points in that 4th quarter. He needed to, with his fans rooting for him claiming him to be the GOAT and his critics waiting for him to screw up to call him the GLOAT. All that superhuman effort makes sense.

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What doesn't is why I have to work so hard to prove that I am me.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2013/06/verification.html]

Chauvinist

"You are such a chauvinist!" accused a female colleague from across the office cafeteria table I was at. Loud enough for colleagues on neighbouring tables to turn around and give a inquisitive look. Taken by surprise, I had nothing to say in my defense.

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I had made the mistake of expressing a simple wish. A wish that the baby my sister was expecting in December 2012 be a boy. There were some very clearly selfish reasons why I wanted a nephew, even though the parents-to-be, my sister and bro-in-law heavily favoured a daughter. 

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It all goes back to my days of after-school cricket. My idol of batting technique being Rahul Dravid, I liked to be SOLID at the crease. In 8 overs a side cricket, my impeccable front foot defensive technique was not widely appreciated or encouraged. 
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Most times, with a lingering sense of unfulfilled batting practice, I forged match-winning partnerships with a big hitting batsman, forced to knock the ball around for singles to give him strike as hitting the ball out of the park didn't gel with my natural philosophy.

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My plans for my future nephew-to-be were simple. I would brainwash him into wanting to be a fast bowler and then practice my batting. That's all. Batting nirvana right here on earth, I dreamt of. "Why can't a niece be a fast bowler, huh?" continued my colleague's interrogation. That I realized, was a painfully true question. Why can't she?

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If I was comfortable with girls becoming doctors, engineers, scientists, artists and politicians, why the barrier when they wanted to be sportspersons? Too manly a thing for a girl to take up? I guess that was definitely my line of thinking but when challenged, the stupidity of such an opinion was evident.

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More so in my case, as I was usually the first one to be plucked out of the Republic Day march-past trials for my gloriously un-coordinated marching while my sister led the contingent bearing the flag. The only trophies which came home on school Sports Day were those won by my sister as I hadn't even threatened to come close to qualifying for the heats.

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On December 11th, 2012, my beautiful little niece, Annika arrived with fanfare and adulation from all around. Given her vigorous physical antics even in her crib, I see potential for my brain-washing scheme to come through. Boy or girl, it is all irrelevant. All I care for is that I will bat.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2013/06/chauvinist.html]

PMji Samjhoji

"Dear Dr. Manmohan Singh,

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Once I was asked to write to you as part of a Letter-a-thon to the PM initiative. This is the letter which I never got around to sending.

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Let me begin by stating that I am a fan, as in, am still a fan. A lot of people seem to think that a chest-thumping gorilla will be the true representative of India. I disagree. Quietness or loudness has nothing to do with inner strength.

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A fan of you, I must clarify, not of your rotting Family driven corrupt party that uses you as a pawn in their dirty games. You were the visionary tasked with saving India, while others were busy stuffing their pockets or plotting a mosque destruction for political gain. You made a decision to let the evil foreign money in. 

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That was 20 years ago. I am part of that economic section and age-group of India which benefited. There are still hundreds of millions of our countrymen who remained untouched by these changes but as an individual, if I crib about how my life has turned out, I deserve a punch to the nose.

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The Lok Sabha elections are around the corner and all indications seem to point to your government's exit. I feel extremely happy about that. Your present circle of friends is an unsavoury one and the sooner they are kicked out of power, the better it is. 

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You are a honest man yourself but compelling circumstances prevent you from being effective anymore. It is best now that you leave, as Maun-mohan Singh to your detractors, as the guy who never spoke out. But some of us know that actions speak louder than words.

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The alternatives to your government are not awe-inspiring but deserve a chance to implement their promises all the same. Democratic change is good. It shakes things up. Different parties, different philosophies. In a country like ours, who can really tell when the right idea will click?

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As you would know, India is always getting written off by the realists. This can't be fixed. That'll NEVER happen. Ha! Good luck with that! So on and forth, from its very inception. "The existence of India is in itself a miracle" school of thought is the only respite in those dark moments. 

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The critics rightly cite this "It could have been worse" defensive line as an excuse of mediocrity. Come to think of it, in any God-forsaken situation, it always could have been worse! That just can't be a real excuse.

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I feel extremely lucky to have seen in part, the older India of Doordarshan, pension plans & Ambassadors. I KNOW things have changed... drastically. The pessimist might rightly say that now we have an India of MTV Roadies, 2G scams and BMW-hit-and-acquittals, certainly a bigger tragedy. 

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Shut up, pessimist, I say. Enough with the downers already!

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You rarely smile these days, indeed have very little incentive to. A very gentle, wise man's smile does make an appearance in some earlier images of you. A smile of belief, it is, I might add.

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You seemed to know that India would be up to the task, the second time around the foreigners came back in, unlike 250 odd years ago. However different and regionalistic, we were one nation now. That Indian was an established identity and given a reasonably level field, an Indian could stand toe-to-toe to whatever or whomever he had to face.

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Optimism and confidence alone never fixed anything. But however misplaced, they give us beautiful illusions of possibilities. Possibilities that were visible only when you showed the guts to take us there. If I were to use a weird metaphor, you were our economic Felix Baumgartner (Super-cool man, sir, the first man to jump from space to earth. Check him out on YouTube!) 

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I think you must be worried by now about how long this letter is getting to be, but guess what? That's how true fan letters look like. 

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You, sir, have done more than most people in India's history to advance India's cause. Behind those bottle-glass lenses and underneath the blue turban, resides a very sharp mind who did his bit despite the muck that surrounded. Some people did emerge to realize their potential thanks to your mostly lonely battle to push forward your reforms.

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It is for them to pick up and run the race from here on in. The naysayers may b*tch, but the race is on. The CAG is an ultimately answerable to government body but it is refreshingly fond of slapping its master in the face, if all the scams it has been unearthing are any clue. 

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The media (when it is not discussing Pamela Anderson on Bigg Boss) has a TRP/readership incentive to name and shame every two-bit man-in-power accused of corruption and sexual harassment. The courts are in an unhealthy hurry to confirm death penalties but the urgency & pressures may soon begin to tell on the lower courts too, where some of the justice may be delivered during the lifetime of the disputing parties.

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Anna Hazare's movement and its political offshoot, the Aam Aadmi Party may yet fizzle out but the sentiments they generated will not. Upcoming leaders in the BJP/Congress genre of parties may think thrice before even thinking of any underhand dealings. Fear of being actually being punished for wrongdoings may no longer a theoretical concept in the circles of power.

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If the above read like a lot of Mays, I am sorry, because it is still April. Sorry, I also make really bad jokes sometimes... Yes, there are too many mays, I know but I am sure you already knew that too, you being a two time Prime Minister and all. It don't seem like that scared you from doing what you needed to. 

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After all, there are only a couple of options. (A) Do something about it (B) Roll over and die. And God knows that there's enough of us that even the smallest percentage of people doing something about it, would mean a huge lot of something being done.

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Happy Baisakhi and Happy Bengali New Year to you, sir! You must be wondering, where and why this dosage of the can-do spirit is coming from!

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Regards

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PS: Did I tell you that you and I share the same birthday? OK. Now I did. Just an interesting side-note."

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2013/04/pmji-samjhoji.html]

Smiley

Nervously, the 6 tourists on the airboat scanned the pond in front of us, fringed as it was by the thick mangrove vegetation of the Florida Everglades. The sun shone bright and it was a cozy morning, despite this being the end of November, a luxury of being in the South. But we had a little something on our minds right then. We were on the lookout for the big 'un.

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An airboat is a very low, very flat bottomed and very fast boat with an enclosed aircraft-style propellor tagged to its rear end, a machine designed for navigating the swampy shallow terrain of the 'Glades. Trouble was, our captain (pilot?) had killed the motor and we were lazily drifting along in the water. He didn't look like he wanted to get away quick just in case things got hairy.

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If things got... scaly would be a better word, I guess. For if you know of the Everglades, you know of their most obvious residents. We had already seen a momma alligator from a safe distance away basking on the banks and shielding her young ones, 20-25 of them. All of 7 feet in length, she was lethargic enough to provide ample photo opportunities, without giving us cause for worry, by moving towards us. But now we were in open water.

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As if in tune with a communal sixth sense, we turned around to check on the one place beyond our collectively scanning eyes had missed and sure enough, a member of a species which had stay unchanged in shape since the day of the dinosaurs was silently sneaking up on us. It was with a mix of fear and awe that we realized such a massive animal could swim perfectly soundlessly. With that peculiarly reptilian crawl often times seen on TV wildlife documentaries, he came cruising right alongside our boat.

At this point, all the 6 non-Floridans on the boat including yours truly shrank towards the centre of the vessel, instinctive self preservation, I guess. The captain was hardly re-assuring in his 'assurances'. Sitting high on his seat in the middle of the boat, the farthest away from the creature, he pronounced "That's Smiley. Almost 11 feet long. If he wanted to, he could leap clear of the water and land on my lap." Having a nickname for a huge alligator might earn our captain some brownie points in the regional macho-man competition but we were not eager to have some particular aspects of Smiley's physical abilities on display.

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11 feet is hardly a record breaker, especially if you think of how other big crocodilians like the estuarine crocodiles can get, but 11 feet of scales, teeth and muscle circling our boat with an interested eye was alligator plenty for me. At about 450 menacing pounds in weight, and with 55-60 years of hunting experience (Fast fact: Alligators grow a foot a year for the 6 years of their life and from then on, their length increases only by an inch a year!), Smiley wasn't quite ideal company to have when out boating. A swamp creature of my nightmares was now within biting distance of me and there was no telling what was going on in the pea-shaped brain of his as he evaluated our boat and its passengers.

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We joked and laughed about dangling fingers in front of Smiley and about this being a especially bad place to fall into the water, for the most part, to stifle that queasy feeling generated when a large predator is encircling you quite casually, in his own domain. This was the cliched tourist experience we had come for, wasn't it? The whole "Been to the 'Glades, seen a gator" photo-op deal to boast about when we got back home. Only for that pesky voice inside to pipe up and say that is a real big ALLIGATOR and that we were on WATER and if he wanted to, there really was NOTHING stopping Smiley from making that humans equal to meat connection.

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It's been centuries since we have moved out of the food chain which sustains the rest of the natural world. We have devised our own fancy but safe ways of obtaining food for ourselves. A little reminder once in a while does help a lot to appreciate this privilege. Out there in the REAL real world, we are not at the top of the chain. No. Most definitely not.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2012/12/smiley.html]

Racist

[Re-worked... to make it a little less of an angry rant] 
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Anger. My only reaction to the comic strip above, published on the Dilbert website for 31st October 2011. How callous and insulting the use of a short line "I grew up in India" at the right (wrong?) place could be, I hadn't realized before this. 

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The comments below the strip weren't helping. Quite a few geniuses had commented to the tune of "I am an Indian and I laughed along with this joke. It needs to be enjoyed in the right spirit."

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Right spirit? Right spirit, my a**. The joke was not only offensive for us who have had the privilege of a very blessed & protected childhood in India but twice as offensive for the unfortunate fellow citizens of our country who have very real issues with drinking water & health. Not a joking matter at all, for whatsoever reason.
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Asok, the intern character from India, is a simpleton targeted for laughs with his nauseating diligence and his eager-to-please attitude, a counterweight to the scheming work-shirking Wally. That much I accept is a necessary aid to keep the story flowing.
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But this wasn't humour or even if it was, it didn't seem like it. Humour presents an opportunity to cross the line of Political Correctness. But it matters, it really does, how it is put across and who does it. I have been a frequent reader of Dilbert myself and though the quality wavers a lot, it had never stooped to the level of racial mud-slinging like this before.

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As a cartoonist, Scott Adams reserves full right to say what he wants to. What I find very unfortunate is that a mainstream and popular artist like him didn't think twice about portraying such an unacceptable point of view, normally the preserve of white supremacist websites and such like. 
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Yes, there are comedians like Russell Peters who consistently make fun of  the cliched Indian qualities, but his Indian origins help him to be a more suitable man to make jokes about Indians. A smart insider's self-criticisms can be superbly funny. An over-smart outsider's unwarranted comments come off as ugly and racist.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2012/11/anger.html]

I-Sheep v/s Fandroid

Image via CrunchBase

Screeching my car into a Vassar Street parking slot, I looked around for the McNair Building where I was supposed to have been in around half an hour ago. There was not a pedestrian in sight, a rare scenario on the afternoon streets of Cambridge, in and around the MIT area. There was always someone. Finally there he was, that one person, strolling down the street, who seemed like the type to ask directions from. I hailed him with an "Excuse me!", enough to be greeted with a look of mild irritation of having to look away from the magic of the 3.5 inch I-phone screen in his hands.

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"Yes?" he asked.

"Would you know where the McNair building might be?" I ventured forth.

"Don't you have a phone?" said Mr. Mildly Irritated

"I do." I answered, more than a little puzzled, struggling to bring out my phone from my pocket.

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Seeing an Android phone pop out in my hand was the tipping point for my reluctant guide. "Oh! It's not an I-Phone!" he rationalized aloud, justifying to himself the obvious lack of intelligence and sophistication that he seemed to have pre-sensed in me. I would have told him that my smart phone loyalties were not iron-clad, that I wasn't allied to the 'enemy'. It was only because I was getting the Samsung Galaxy S for free with my plan that I had one. Didn't seem like he would believe me, so I didn't bother either.

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Swift as the wind, he pulled up an app on his piece of technological perfection and punched in 'McNair Building'. What the phone told him, I do not know. All I got was a broad sweep of his arms which I think covered for 50% of the MIT campus in view, as he announced with surety "My phone says this building is somewhere over there."

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"Thanks!" I said, with force-of-habit politeness. Then almost eclipsed by his triumphant face, I saw the stencilled name McNair on the wall of the building about 1o feet behind him. I would have pointed that out to him too, but then who was I to endlessly, hopelessly deny the future. Using them things called eyes would be too much work and accessing that messy gadget called a brain would mean total under-utilization of that monthly 3G data limit.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2012/11/i-sheep-vs-fandroid.html]

Bounce back?

It was quite like being poked in the eye, over and over again. Even the sombre settings of the 9/11 Memorial in lower Manhattan and the quiet introspection that came along with it were not sacred enough for some, it would seem. 

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On an August Sunday morning, hundreds of visitors walked through the area where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center stood before September 11, 2001, now cleared of debris and open to the public, developed as a memorial to that horrifying day of violence and to bring peace & reconciliation to the limited extent possible. The footprints of the North and South Towers were now fountains pouring into pools on the ground and rising again. The names of the 2983 victims killed in an earlier 1993 bombing of the buildings, the subsequent 2001 plane hijackings, the Pentagon crash and the buildings themselves were engraved on the black marble surrounding them. 

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It was quiet as would befit the location, with people gazing in silence at the pools or sitting on the benches surrounding them, submerged in deep thought. I couldn't have been the only one noticing the odd behaviour of the couple clicking pictures by the North Tower pool. They were busy trying to get an appropriately grey image given the location but it was the fact that they were setting it up to look real that gave me a sick feeling. The female half of the partnership was being directed by the male half to turn this way and that way, to hold 'that thoughtful gaze'. In between the shots, there was laughing and smiling by the gallons, indicating a disgusting mission to look it, rather than to feel it.

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I guess it will stay that way, the simplest of narratives for millions of people. Here they were, the good guys with not a care in the world living in the greatest nation on the planet. Then came these bad guys (from a different religion and region of the world, it'll be whispered) and killed so many innocent folk in their country. The good guys got our own back though, went into their countries and bombed their evil souls to hell and beyond. End of story. The complications and realities of geo-politics and history will permanently be side-stepped by these folk. 

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Who were these people and who got them going on their path to murderous madness? [Hint: Which secret agency first funded Osama bin Laden's radical Islam agenda, back when he was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan?] Were all the innocent lives lost and the irreparable destruction caused in retaliation based solely on the aim of defeating terrorism or were there other factors at play? What, if anything, can be done to prevent future games of international chess using the governments and people of weak countries as pawns?

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It is criminal to justify the murder of nearly 3000 people and the numbing sadness that it caused to a people happily leading their daily lives completely uninvolved in the schemes and ploys of realpolitik by saying that they had it coming. The perpetrators of such an heinous act have, will and should meet the fate that they deserve, a less than pleasant one, I might add. 

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But what is also criminal is to reduce this to a comic book level of simplicity where the bad guys are the bad guys tarred with a paint brush on basis of their ethnicity, the god they worship and their geographic location while the good guys are all sunshine and roses. The need is to keep is keep our eyes and ears open, to understand that in this imperfect world, everything is linked to everything else and that it takes two hands to clap.

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9/11 was a terrible day in the history of humanity, an awful culmination of blind hatred towards a religion/nation/people. It'll be impossible to put behind and in many ways, it should not be. Lives will be re-built, losses will be absorbed in the folds of time but what should stay is a conscious effort to smile a little less (the self-absorbed vacuous variety) and think a little more. What may seem too irrelevant and far away to be of concern should matter to all. Wilful ignorance is too dangerous a disease to let infect our species. We are capable of engaging our thoughts and actions towards issues beyond our immediate environment and we should. 

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9/11 and the dark depths of its tragedy should never be reduced to a mere photo op.

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[http://virtual-inksanity.blogspot.com/2012/09/bounce-back.html]