It's a Dogs Life

Another long hiatus from blogging and I return apologetic as ever, both for not updating my own blog and for not taking the time out to read any other blogs. What's a guy to do, there's much work and little time to do it. The other day I had to leave the institute early just so I could get home early and clean up my room and wash some clothes.
But that's not what this post's about. Confusion had commented in my previous post the pictures helped in visualizing what i was talking about and Nothingman added that it was time I got myself a phone with a camera. Well... hard cheese, all I can do about it is try extra hard describing stuff.
On that note I think I'll begin with Kadugodi, the area in which I live. I think I mentioned in some previous post that it was a bit of a village, well that doesn't really do it justice. Kadugodi is actually more like an urban village, something you tend to find on the outskirts of any large city. There are narrow alleys, flanked by open drains through which thick black streams flow, there are the cows, the chickens and then the stray dogs.
I think I first developed a paranoia against stray dogs when one bit me when I was a kid. Since then, I've never managed to walk past a stray without my heart taking on a life of it's own. Some times it gets so bad, I wonder how nobody else manages to hear it.
There are so many dogs here, it would be impossible to keep count, according to someone who knows about these things, they've all been neutered, but that doesn't seem right because behind every bitch there runs a pack of puppies, just waiting to grow up and scare the shit out of me.
What I hate about them the most though is the fact that when compared to me, they seem to be leading quite a good life. Unlike most strays, they don't spend all day looking for food and that leads me to believe someone is feeding them. Thus freed of this concern, they spend the whole day, either sleeping or sunning themselves, what time is left, they employ in waging large scale gang war on rivals from adjoining alleys.
Getting stuck in between one of these is like hell. Normally i somehow manage to muster up enough courage to slip past dogs that are sleeping, scratching themselves or pursuing other such trivial activities. Once they start barking, try as I might, I wouldn't walk near them for all the fags in China.
My roommate observed that they idyllic life isn't that great, due to the density of dogs packed into the area, the territories of gangs are typically restricted to a single alley or occasionally to an adjoining stretch of the main road. Any dog that dares set a paw outside its demarcated territory is immediately set upon by dozens of its canine rivals. So far from leading a totally carefree existence, they too are prisoners of their own canine instinct.
Within friendly territory, however, they are free to chase after their tails, snap at flies, chase after speeding cars or pursue any random whim with dogged determination.
They have one tendency in particular that fascinates me, their self-appointed role as moral and social watchdogs. If a vehicle passes through the lanes at a relatively sane speed, they will ignore it, sometimes even consenting to get out of the way. Anyone who makes the mistake of driving fast suddenly finds a whole pack barking their bloody heads off chasing after him. Then there are the rag-pickers. While they ignore the regular morning trash collectors, they seem to hate rag-pickers. They're almost as class conscious as people. They seem to single out the poor and very obviously unwashed as targets for their wrath.
Then there is their mob-mentality, if one dog barks, every other one in a 200 meter radius will heed the call and come to investigate, it's funny sometimes to come upon a pack of dogs, all barking in different directions, sometimes I suspect, they just like the sound of their own voices. Or it would be funny had I not been so damn scared.
It's scary sometimes, the similarity between dogs and us, they're as vivid a reminder as any of our lowly origins.

Decay

The Discoverer building of the International Tech Park; this photo has been taken from the smokers 'lounge' , pretty close to where my institute is. Today is a Sunday, today, the normally busy tech park closes down. As the offices take a day off, most of the restaurants in the food court take a day off, the mall empties of all but a few people doing their overtime or others like me, who are so used to being here, Sunday at home seems unnatural.
Sundays at the Tech Park are awful. I've grown accustomed by now to the crowds, to the rush, everyone's running around, busy. On a Sunday this place goes into hibernation. You can walk around the empty corridors, without having to watch your step, the activity, the perennial sounds of voices and strained central air conditioning are gone. In their place, a deep sense of gloom and ennui settles down. With the holiday, the maintenance staff too relax, while a few continue with their normal duties, most switch over activities that are ignored during the week, like cleaning out the fountain. Thick plastic pipes run amok over the soiled floor, carrying water from the restrooms to the outside where dozens of blue shirted-men are occupied, scrubbing the accumulated dirt.
Our institute too succumbs to the temporary decay. The security guard is sitting around, un-uniformed, while housekeeping staff clear shards of glass from a shattered door. I can't but help thinking twice before I sign in. Is it really worth it, am I going to be able to get any work done under these conditions?
Apparently not, otherwise I wouldn't be posting this. Anyway I know that with tomorrow, the Tech Park will again metamorphose into the monster that I am used to, and till then all I can think of doing is use all this free Internet access I have.

Across The Railway Lines

Another long leave of absence from my blogging obligations and while the blogospher breathed a huge sigh of relief, my blog has been clamoring for attention that I just don't have time to give it. The whole week has been crammed with tests and assignments and then some more tests. I got some respite today after mailing in one assignment so here's what's been going on.
Every grandparent has some story of how they had to travel miles to get to school or something along those lines, well now I have mine. A five minute walk from my PG, on the way to the bus stand is Whitefield railway station. To get to the bus Stand, we have to cross the tracks and although there isn't much traffic on the tracks, our timings generally coincide with those of the trains. In the morning at about 9, I see the Bangalore to Chennai train pass and catch it on the way back 12 hours later. This being India, nobody on foot actually waits for trains to pass while the crossing is down, generally we run to cross the tracks before the train does and though we cross while it is still at a sensible distance, it's kind of unnerving to cross while a speeding locomotive hurtles towards you, screaming it's high banshee wail. A few days ago, o the way back, we were standing next to the tracks waiting for a train to pass when to our horror, we found another one bearing down on us on the track behind us. Although there is enough distance between two sets of tracks to allow you to stand without being hit, it's not a particularly comfortable experience having two trains run on either side of you.
And that's about all the fun we get to have here, like I mentioned in a previous post, I'm in the institute during daylight hours. The one day a week we get off I spend nursing a hangover from Saturday night, so playing chicken with trains is my only source of entertainment.
Oh yes, once a week, on Fridays (ie. today) the people who manage the Tech park, organize some sort of 'entertainment' for the many thousands of people who work here. In the open area reserved for us smokers, a stage is set up and someone will come and do something. The first one I saw was a bunch of school kids singing, then came a DJ, then some trick cyclists and today two Irishmen (he he it sounds a bit like the beginning of a joke.. A Dj, a cyclist and an Irishman walk into a bar...). All except for the cyclists were received with a very lukewarm response (what do you expect from software professionals?). The two Irishmen who are at it as I type are performing what is allegedly 'traditional' Irish folk music, interspersed with incredibly bad humor. After reading Spike Milligan i was of the opinion that the Irish were inherently funny people, but it seems that either I am wrong or these two specimens do not adequately represent the Irish. The little on-stage banter of theirs that I caught was unfunny to the point of being painful.
For instance while talking about some instrument they were using;
"And this (he pulls out an over sized mandolin) is a Bouzouki, a traditional Greek instrument that is also used in Ireland... not to be confused with a bazooka"
Bored titters from the audience.
"It's not loaded"
Silence
"And this is a Harmonica... this is not a bazooka either"
Dead silence
He went on like this for quite some time, grasping desperately into his bag of jokes, hoping something funny would eventually pop out. He only stopped when he had halved his already minute audience and shattered my stereotypes.
You see why I have to resort to playing with my trains?

Alien(n)ation

Hmm... i see we meet again... by the looks of things, it seems this blog is going to die a slow painful death, i cant find the time to blog, yet I keep pestering myself to update. So with nothing new to talk about, let me describe where i am and what i'm doing. Im doing a one year diploma in bioinformatics in an institute in the international tech park, bangalore (ITPB). The tech park is one of those places in india where most of the IT jobs that go missing abroad turn up, all in the name of outsourcing. So here we are, a small group of biologists, bang in the middle of this massive aggregation of software professionals.
The ITPB, was never designed to bew like anything else we have in India, like most 'modern' ventures being concieved in india, it has been ctrl+c and ctrl+v'd right out of something that upto a few years ago, we would have expected to find only somewhere very far west of india.
But now it is here. It has been a bit of a culture shock for me, coming from grotty school and college buildings into swank centrally airconditioned structures, gone are the dirty (and cheap) roadside stalls and equally filthy cafeterias, here we have food courts.
Looking around, I can see I am not the only one taken aback. My favourite observation is how people use the trash cans here. Where we would normally expect rusted and infrequently emptied bins, there are pairs of green bins, one for recycleable and one for non-recycleable. Every one is confused, and as a result people basically use them based on which one is more convenient at that particular time. However the impressive fact is that they are being used, trash more often than not finds it's way into their gaping mouths' rather than somewhere on the ground in their vicinity.
Now a bit about bioinformatics, it is mainly discipline that involves using computers in biology, particualrly in molecular modelling and in determining structures and stuff like that. Like all this suggests, the subject involves an inordinate amount of mathematics, something I was never comfortable with, which is why I took up biology. Unfortunatley for me, a significant portion of biology is in the process of being reduced to chemistry and physics which rely heavily on math . In college I was never comfortable attempting anything vaguley mathematical without my trusty scientific calculator by my side, honestly this really amounted to cheating because this way I could get along without really understanding how a lot of things worked. Now, I fear this approach is not going to work and I am going to have to atone for neglecting math.
The only thig that compensates for all this is that most of our work is at computers, something I fell in love with a long time ago.
A lot of our classes here (for the time being at least) are on general professional skills, that's where the institute differs from conventional colleges, here they are geared to producing competent professionals who will succeed in a typical workplace as opposed to conventional academically oriented college graduates. I am not sure how well their point of view relates in terms of my own goals, which are still a bit idealistic. I'm still thinking in terms of getting into the research line, I don't know why, maybe it was drilled into me at college, maybe I'm to lazy to work to get a job and then face the pressure or maybe I am just being stupid.
I really dont know, but it's one of things that's embedded into my head, to work on my ideas, to be able to call something my own, rather than slaving away for interests other than my own, for someone elses' profit. I have an aversion to the typical 9-5 work routine that would require me to ignore my own impulses and my own creativity and subvert them to achieving what someone else thought up. I know that a good employee would be able to channel his/her own interests into achieving something that eventually contributes to the greater good. I on the other hand am too stubborn, too fixed in what I like and what I want to do and what I need to do to ever be any good at a job like that.
Crap I'm confused.

A Short (boring) Update

Man it feels like an eternity since I last posted to my blog and although the fact weighs down on me all the time, for some reason I can find very little motivation to actually come online and type out a post. I think mainly this is because there's so much going on here that I find myself compelled to live my life rather than talk about it as I usually do.
I know I said I'd blog once I'd settled into my accomodation and gotten myself comfortable at the institute, unfortunately this doesn't happen easily for me. The place I'm staying at now is a paying guest accomodation organised by the institute itself, we have one rather small, badly lit room that currently holds four people. Although it was originally intended for three, it looks like it was designed for two, so you see why spending time in my room is not my idea of fun.
Since there are between 20 and 25 people staying in the same building all in the same institute, it allows for a lot of interaction between us outside the classroom. This was the main reason i chose to stay there rather than looking for a flat on my own, which would have possibly been a more comfortable proposition.
The institute itself itself is rather impressive, for one I have not been part of any place that emphasises on professionalism as much as they do, although this is more demanding than had they been lax in that department, it's kind of good since I was going to have to learn that sooner or later.
Bangalore itself is a big beautiful contradiction, much like most other large indian cities. Fuelled by all the IT and services industries that have settled here, it has grown into a cosmopolitan city but at the same time, it still has pockets of resistance to change, small villages that refuse to grow up, on the outskirts of town. Case and point is the area where I live, it is a village, although, there are the occasional spurts of modernisation here and there. Yet just a few kilometers from that is the International tech park Bangalore, (where my institute is situated), which looks like it was plucked out of another age and slammed into the middle of almost medieval india and on the roads, airconditioned public buses, compete for space with antiquated tractors.
Although the residents of bangalore would have very legitimate greviances against this uneven development, I find it quaint and it is very much part of my idea of what bangalore is as a city. Of course i have the same complaints against the irregular development of my own city, Delhi and no, I don't think it's quaint in the case of Delhi. In the case of Delhi I'd call it shortsightedness, so maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

I know I'm being boring here and being a bad blogger buit I really cant think of too much else to say, mainly because I dont find myself time to think, which was my main fuel for my blog. Deprived of all privacy, without any time to think I find myself posting mainly about myself, something I didn't actually intend to do in the first place. So when inspiration does strike me, I'll make sure I blog about it.
Now I must go, because someone is insisting on peeking over my shoulder, and reading this (something that irritates me) and I find myself compelled to leave and give him a bit of a lecture on computer etiquette (ha!), anyway, till then, ciao.

I Be Bangalored

Hello all from the garden city, I'm sorry if this post is wholly incoherent but i am stuck in a hot cybercafe with a 100 degree fever, so i think i should be allowed that much!
Aah, there's so much to write out, but first things first.
I made the journey this time by train, partly because the amount of baggage i was going to carry and partly because it was so much cheaper. Even before i got on the train, i knew it was going to be s shitty trip, i could feel a vague tingling and numbness at the back of my throat, I had gon and caught a cold, right before the trip. The prospect of the trip itself was also daunting, for the last three years i had gotten myself used to the 27 hour journey between Delhi and Pune but the almost 40 hour ride to Bangalore is something that nighmares are made off. I got on at 9 at night so the first twelve hours would be ok but another one and a half days of doing nothing is pure torture for the hyperactive twenty on year old that I am.
Once aboard the train, things seemed to look up for a bit, my whole compartment was full of people travelling alone, families and particularly crying babies make me crazy, here at least i could expect some conversation. With me there were eight other people (AC 3), one ITPB guy (Indo-Tebetian Border Police), two south indian guys, a kashmiri, one tamilian woman and a couple of other assorted characters who kept to themselves.
It would have been an interesting trip had I not been under the weather with the damn virus. The first night was positively painful, partly beacuse of my blocked nose which kept me up all night but mostly because of the spine twisting, train berths. Honestly considering the number of passengers the railways carries, one would think they would spare a little thought to improve their services. But no, their berths are not too hard and not to soft, just right, to induce acute spinal discomfort.
I woke up early the next morning, around eight in the morning to find the attendant slamming my breakfast down near my head. Now as far as I am concerned, the Bread-omelette you get on trains is practically an institution, to eat anything else for breakfast would be an act of blasphemy. Some trains like the Rajdhani's (express trains that run from various important cities to Delhi) have customised their bread omelette and may serve you a few soggy chips (as in fish and chips, not wafers) what I got here though was a very basic bread omelette, ie. a two soggy slices of buttered bread, an omelette and a sachet of tomato sauce.
Now when I was young, travelling by train was a source of endless fascination to me, I would alternate between staring intently out of the window, reading/ drawing or bothering my long suffering mother. Now I have adapted to the normal adult mode of travel which basically involves sleeping only to wake for meals, of course I also subscribe to the students philosophy of frequent trips to the outer corridor for a quick smoke.
Now once my breakfast was done, there being nothing more to do, I went back to sleep and thats pretty much how most of my day passed, with the occasional drunk passenger who insisted on kicking up a row serving to relieve the tedium.
I got into Bangalore at about two in the afternoon today, on time, which is incidentally a minor miracle. I got a room in a small but clean hotel room, and had a long overdue bath.
I think I am probably an internet addict because once bathed and ready, my first urge was to get to a cyber cafe. Asking at the reception for the whereabouts of a cyber cafe, I was directed by the receptionist with a quick wave of his palm. Thus armed i found myself on the street. The small street on which the hotel is situated, leads on to a larger road and oh boy what a road.
Now i am a delhiite, I've been to Chandini Chowk, but this was a whole other level of insanity. I don't know if it was the fever or if it was the trepidation of being in new surroundings but i was overwhelmed by the chaos. It was like stepping into a war zone but I braved it.
I walk for about fifteen minutes but there is no cybercafe in sight, finally I ask at a chemist, he directs me across the street, motioning in the direction of a narrow lane. Thats well and good, sending me across the street, but how the hell an i supposed to cross it? Its mayhem with bikes and autos and cows, as a matter of fact this is a lot like pune, I'll fit in here nicely. Anyway i did eventually find the cybercafe, not in the direction I was sent off in but in a lane diametrically opposite. I'm almost done here now, and now I'm worried about finding my way back, but not to worry I am equipped with my famous sense of direction, something that lead me three times around Rashtrapati Bhawan, while looking for C.P. so maybe i should be worried.

Horsing Around

So I’m waiting at a red light, on my way home from the bank when something nudges my helmet from the back. I turn around to find I am staring a horse in the face, something wasn’t really expecting, even on a Delhi road. It was one of those white mares used at weddings. Now it’s not everyday that I come in such intimate contact with a horse so she looked petty huge especially when she drew up to my side. When the light turned green, she began to take the turn; this was pretty scary, being boxed in, with a bus on one side and a horse on the other. I don’t know if her shoes were slipping on the road or if horses naturally take wide turns the way she did. She took the turn not by following the curve but by maintaining a tangent to it. To do this she half ran/ half jumped her way through the turn, now I’m not by any means an expert on horses but this looked unnatural. Normally I don’t enjoy letting people cut me off while taking turns, but those are cars, horses I don’t know how to deal with, so I made sure I kept a good distance while following her into the turn, the moment I got a chance, I cut across a truck and wedged myself between two buses, anything to get away from that horse.
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Yesterday brought with it another load of bhasad, driving down a long empty road, I suddenly lost tyre pressure at my rear wheel and it took me half an hour to find a guy to patch it up. When he removed the tyre he found a nail half an inch long embedded in the rubber, a simple 10 buck repair job, had not been for the fact that the valve on the tube had ripped off. I had been on my way to meet a friend an not only did I arrive an hour late but 200 bucks poorer.
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Earlier I had commented on how google was sending a lot of po*n searches to my blog but now AOL, Yahoo and Netscape too have joined in the act. From the keywords that people follow to my blog, it seems that my blog is rated highly on the topic of ‘south Indian aun**es’, this reflects in the fact that nearly half of all the hits I get are search responses, most of which are for keywords that are variations of the same theme.
I did a trial search in google for my most recent hit ‘free movies of malyali fu**ing’ and this is what I got, a mention of my blog in the top ten results.


Two thing confuse me here, first, why are people looking for fat/ bathing south Indian aun**es, whats wrong with young and nubile south indian girls? And second, if you actually take a look at the description of my blog in the search results, does it look anything like a po*n site? Does it? Sheesh.
(I’m asterisking the relevant words because every time I mention it on my blog, increases the chances of getting a search hit for it.)
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This will be my last post for a while and definitely be my last post from Delhi for the next six months. I hope to be up and blogging in Bangalore soon but you never know. I have a lot of work to deal with over there, most importantly arranging my accommodation. Additionally I’ve been vela in Delhi for the last six months, hence the blogging to relieve the tedium of a purposeless existence. I’m not sure yet how much time I’m going to have once classes start. However if this place is anything like my college I’m going to have more free time than ever. So on this happy thought I bid you adieu and hope to be back soon from down south.

Bhasad

Another classy new word I have learnt, bhasad translates roughly to ‘fuck up’ but I’m not too sure about the exact meaning, a friend of mine who works with Microsoft in technical support taught it to me. The reason I mention where he works is just to illustrate in what situation it would be used. Everyone who has ever use windows, has at one time or the other come across a situation which could be summed up as ‘bhasad ho gaya”.

Yesterday was bhasad, everything that could go wrong went wrong. For those who have read my previous posts you can guess where all the problems started, with my bike. My grandparents live in Gurgaon, Delhi’s fastest growing suburb, (read Mr Nose & Mr truck for more details) and I try visit the at least once a week. Yesterday as I was leaving for Gurgaon, I noticed that the chain of my bike was rattling against the chain guard; I would have ignored it as I was running a bit late but as fate would have it, the chain got stuck. When I removed the cover I found the chain had gotten stuck on the cover twisting it out of shape. Since I hadn’t much time, I took the cover off and left it at home, planning to fix it when I got home. Running the bike without the chain cover isn’t much of an issue, particularly since I didn’t intend to keep it uncovered for long. Considering the issue resolved, I set off for Gurgaon.

The road to Gurgaon runs through some rather dusty stretches, also, the roads aren’t always in the best state of repair and there a lot of stones lying on the road. I have been hit in the face by these stones often enough to force me to drive with my visor permanently down. Since my visor is pretty badly scratched today I had the bright idea of wearing my glasses while driving, unfortunately since I cant put the helmet on while wearing my glasses, I put them into my pocket and promptly forgot about them. I only remembered about them, five minutes into the trip, reaching for them, I found to my dismay that my pocket was empty. Stopping, I searched through my pockets, bag and anywhere else I may have put them to no avail, bugger, they were bloody expensive. Somewhere along the route I must have lost them, probably over some speed bump (which I have a tendency to tackle with much enthusiasm). Depressed I continued, I love driving and I soon forgot about the loss and enjoyed the drive as I always do.

Thanks some random whim of the Haryana police, in order to get to my grandparents place, I actually have to drive a kilometre past their house, take a U-turn and drive back. I like this U-turn; mainly because on my bike I can take it easier than people in cars and generally rip out of the turn, while cars that started the turn with me must carefully navigate around the median and watch for oncoming traffic. Taking the turn as usual, a wrung the throttle hard and my bike leapt forward, I might have released the clutch a bit too fast for my front wheel left the ground briefly. This only made me happier, thus lost in contemplations of how wonderful my bike was, I didn’t notice something was going wrong. I was brought out of my reveries by a loud ‘growl’ from the rear half of my bike, accompanied by a sudden loss of power. Thinking I had hit a false neutral while shifting, I desperately tried to shift into gear, tapping up, tapping down, even sideways; nothing happened. An Innova was coming up my left, fast, shit scared, I frantically signalled with my left hand to get him to slow down, seeing he had, I guided my bike left, across the road to the pavement. Stopping to look, I could see the sprocket on my rear wheel, empty. I was a bit confused, where was the chain? Putting my bike up on the main stand, I moved the wheel back and forth hoping to find the chain. It took a while for me to realise the chain must have broken. Walking back to the intersection, I was just in time to find a rag-picker retrieving the chain from the middle of the road and putting it into his rickshaw, luckily, he gave it back to me.

Greasy chain wrapped around my hand, helmet hung off my wrist and heavy bag across my shoulders, I had to drag my bike more than a kilometre in the sun till I found a garage where I could get the chain fixed. Correction it wasn’t a garage, it was just a guy with a box of tools and a sign that said ‘puntchur repair’, it took him about 15 minutes to put the chain back on, during which one guy offered me a stolen Nokia N-series and another guy offered me his sister. Though both were tempting, I had but enough for the work being done on my bike.

The chain has held though, I managed the trip back today without incident, though I did have to drive slowly, ignoring all temptations to do otherwise.

In Pursuit of Justice?

I have been neglecting my blog for quite some time now, I haven’t posted on any of the beautiful things that are going on in this beautiful world of ours so to clear the backlog, here’s a brief summary of everything that has been bothering me.

Priydarshini Mattoo, Jessica Lall and Nitish Kataria, three high profile cases that have featured prominently on our newspaper front pages for a long time. For those who don’t know, all three are murders allegedly committed by the kin of influential people. All three of the cases have dragged on in Indian courts for ever so long; the Delhi police scuttled the investigations in all three of the cases and through their (deliberate) mismanagement ended up in court with no evidence against the prime accused. Witnesses in all of the cases have (under pressure) turned hostile and all seemed lost till the media and public stepped in. A massive wave of public opinion and media pressure reopened these cases and the courts too were swift in delivering justice. The accused in the Priydarshini Mattoo case was recently awarded the death penalty and Manu Sharma, accused in the Jessica Lall case looks like he is headed towards a similar end. Delhi and the nation seem satisfied. It is a common problem in India, anyone with a little influence or money can get away with murder. It is a simple three-step process,

a. Pressure the victim or victim’s family into withdrawing the case

b. Bribe the cops, something easily accomplished.

c. Pressure witnesses to turn hostile, either by paying them off or by getting cops on your payroll to pressure them into withdrawing their statements.

All three cases followed this pattern, fortunately through public pressure and extensive media coverage all three cases appear as though they will be resolved. What bothers me about all this is that it sets a dangerous precedent, of public opinion affecting the judicial process. Though all three cases seem straightforward, it is plausible that we, the public have it all wrong and have been grossly misinformed by the media who will obviously follow the more interesting angle of a story, even at the cost of having to make it up as the go. I don’t want to comment on these cases in particular but consider another hypothetical case that is similar to these, where the accused is innocent, yet the weight of public opinion eventually leads to an unfair conviction, how do we prevent this?

You may argue that judges, particularly those of the Supreme Court are not swayed by public opinion, that their judgements are based on objective facts. However, the Jessica Lall case, a case, which had been dismissed by the courts, an accused that had been acquitted on the grounds of insufficient evidence, is being re-tried based on public pressure. The public had already passed their verdict and now sought a legal declaration in their favour. Although I have little doubt that Manu Sharma is indeed guilty, what do I base my opinions on? Primarily what I see discussed in the media, this leaves the media much room to manipulate me and millions like me.

Though I do feel a sense of pride at the awakening of the Indian public, I am uncomfortable for sometimes I see it as the masses uniting against injustice and raising their voices against the abuse of influence and against the rampant corruption in the Indian police an at other times all I see are mobs thirsting for blood, seeking their next victim.

Today, Saddam was declared guilty and sentenced to death for killing a couple of hundred Iraqis, funny something like 47,000 have died since the US lead invasion. Oh yeah and the elections are right around the corner right? Hmm...

Light a Damn Candle

"...An Interpol database contains more than 10,000 images of child victims, but less than 350 of them have been found, the report warned..."

"...Most child pornography is exchanged for free online, but it has also generated an underground business worth billions of dollars that circulates millions of images of child abuse, the report said..."
(Source: DNA India, Technology outpaces law to stop child pornography )

Light a million candles, hopes to light a million candles by the end of this year in order to pressure governments to step up to eradicate the industry of child pornography. There's a permanent link to the site through the sidebar on the left. Please light a candle, light two or light a dozen, they don't want money, they don't want anything else, all they need you to do is to light a simple candle online.

"...This petition will be used to encourage governments, politicians, financial institutions, payment organisations, Internet service providers, technology companies and law enforcement agencies to eradicate the commercial viability of online child pornography...."

Memetic Wierdry

Tagged by Aunty, am required to list 9 things about me that are weird, now, though I’m dysfunctional enough to finish this one easily, the problem is that, I don’t really consider myself weird.

Anyway, I’ll still try this one out, though I’m not responsible for what I list here.

1. I am obsessed with organisation, I have to arrange everything I own. Everything has to be just right, my bookshelf, my table, even the ‘my documents’ folder on my computer. Yet despite this, everything I touch turns into a mess. Right now my room looks like a bomb exploded in it.

2. Like I mentioned I’m organisationally obsessed. My bookshelf is also a victim of my distorted sense of organisation. For instance by my system of classification, Dostoyevsky sits between Spike Milligan and Wodehouse.

3. I get a sore throat when I don’t smoke.

4. I pierced my own lip, once for the stud and a whole lot of times just to scare friends, including the one time I did it whilst in class.

5. Sometimes on a long, wide, empty road, I’ll drive slow, cursing everyone else who drives fast, then when it gets crowded, I’ll drive like a maniac, switching lanes, cutting everyone off and cursing the people who drive slow.

6. I can go from boisterously happy to raging loony in under 5 seconds.

7. I can’t sleep unless it’s absolutely dark and totally silent. Even a hint of a radio within a kilometre radius keeps me awake.

8. I generally end up paying for everything when I’m out with friends, even when I’m almost broke.

9. I have an extremely short attention span, yet have been able to post regularly on this blog for over 4 months.

I think i'm supposed to tag nine people, fat chance, here are some tags anyway

Indian Lucifer, Ainz, Anamika, Confusion and Nothingman

Scientific Mythology

In a previous post, I had considered the scientific validity of Nivea’s claims that their DNAge product(s) can help prevent UV induced damage to DNA. While I think that their claims are technically valid, I came across another interesting view the other day, Rick points out that Nivea are exploiting the hype surrounding genetics to sell their product to a public that does not completely understand the implications of their claims. As a result most people will assume that the product can do much more than it is actually capable of achieving.
Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic, and that is exactly what Nivea seem to banking on to sell their DNAge.
Most science and genetics in particular suffers from this conversion into a modern mythology. Everyone has heard of genetic engineering, cloning and stuff like that and there’s so much popular debate on it that a lot of the ideas being thrown around aren’t necessarily scientific or very accurate. For an average person, it may become difficult to separate fact from fiction.
I had never thought this possible but even movies seem to influence a lot of people. Flicks like X-men, The Nutty Professor, The Hulk (or is it the Incredible Hulk?) and even Spiderman use a lot of pseudo science to try explain seemingly impossible phenomena. Now I never imagined that someone would take this seriously till a friend asked me if it was possible for mutations to create an X-men like situation. This woke me up to the fact that a people could actually take this seriously. If X-men can seem plausible then DNAge probably sounds like some kind of a scientific breakthrough.
What worries me about this receptiveness to scientific manipulation is not the risk of commercial exploitation but what it means for actual scientific research. Today, where there is much public debate surrounding research into genetic engineering and so much controversy surrounding GMO’s (genetically modified organisms), I wonder exactly how many of those raising their voices against them actually understand what they are opposing. Obviously if you think genetic engineering can create X-men, then sure, even I would oppose genetic engineering.
Unfortunately, I don’t think scientists spend enough time actually explaining their science to the public and that leaves a lot of room for people to push their own ideas to forward their own agendas.
Take for instance, this page I found on the International Vegetarian Union’s site (a vegetarian union, wtf?). The author states;

“Genetic engineering is wrong simply because scientists are mixing different DNA from different species, from different genes, from different families or orders. They are simply doing what Mother Nature tries to prevent through certain mechanisms, thanks to which the breeding can occur only between similar individuals, that is belonging to the same species. Nowadays genetic engineering can take pieces of bacteria or virus and put them into an animal or plant. Furthermore, they can take genes from an animal or human and put them in a vegetable or other species. In nature we could never find a vegetable with human genes, with bacteria genes or even with fish genes in it. .”

The problem with this is that there are a number of genes such as those for histone proteins or for cytochromes that are conserved across species. It isn’t accurate to classify any gene as being a vegetable gene or a human gene since many genes aren’t confined to a single species. Additionally I’m not that sure that ‘Mother Nature’ actually tries very hard to prevent transfer of genetic information between species. The inability for different species to crossbreed is a consequence of speciation not the reason for it. The author here doesn’t really raise any argument against genetic engineering other than that it is ‘unnatural’.

"…part of the scientific community strongly believes that there is a real possibility that feeding animals or humans with grain containing genes giving resistance to antibiotics, the intestinal and stomach bacteria can cross over with the bacterium in the grain, thus making the whole body resistant to antibiotics. In such a situation we would no longer be able to use certain antibiotics for veterinary or human health purposes."

Now in this one, I’m not sure if the original text has been modified after translation but this is mostly nonsense. However despite that he does raise a valid fear that genes for antibiotic resistance in plants may promote the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. What they fail to mention is that these antibiotic resistance genes are naturally occurring in many different bacteria in any case, they haven’t been artificially synthesised. There are also many other proposed alternatives to using these antibiotic resistance genes so it’s not much of an issue anymore.

“…90% of gene life in India has been patented in the US…”

This I seriously doubt. It’s not possible to patent those many genes, no way.

If you have read the original article, you may have noticed that I’m ignoring a large portion of the text, that’s because it deals with topics I don’t understand well enough to discuss. However there are more errors in the text than I have pointed out and I am not too sure about a lot of the figures they have quoted, particularly those pertaining to the dangers of GM food.

Random Ramblings

I finally got this post up. I was at it for an hour last night and blogger refused to publish the damn thing

I haven’t posted for a long time, mainly because I’ve been running around getting ready for the big move to Bangalore. There’s so much to be done, so much to take care of, most importantly there was the question of sending the money for the course. Naturally the more important something is the greater tendency there is for someone to try to fuck it up for you. First my wonderful bank, refused to approve the signature I had used on my cheques. To sort it out, I had to spend a day running between different branches of the bank, before they finally showed me what my signature should look like. Then the courier company, to whom I had entrusted the hard-won demand draft, kept me guessing by taking over a week to deliver it.
Just after the first draft had reached, I needed to send a second one out, again the banks refused to help me out, their computer networks were on the fritz and again I was shuttled between branches before someone finally made out the draft for me.
In between all this, friends who have ignored me for the six months I was in Delhi with nothing to do suddenly want to meet up, as a result I alternated between getting hammered and arguing with difficult bank tellers who seem to live just to make my life miserable.
Next thing on my to-do list now that my major financial and social obligations were taken care of was to actually book my ticket to go there. Normally this would be a no-brainer and I’d just sit at my computer and book an airline ticket in five minutes but since I’m going to have to carry a lot more than 15kgs (the allowed limit), I had to get in a long queue to get the train ticket. Train lines are really irritating; first there are the smart-asses who try to jump the line, then the people who insist on spending their time screaming into their cell phones and to top it off there are the ones who insist on standing right next to you, touching you. The other line always seems to move faster than the one you are in and when you switch lines, your new line suddenly slows down. Then there are those wonderful individuals who sit behind their plexi-glass screens, who somehow never have any change.
Me: ”How much is the ticket?”
Irritating Man: “fifteen hundred and twenty three rupees”
I give him three five hundreds and a fifty, he throws the fifty back in my face, “no change”
I have to go about a kilometre to the nearest shop to get change, luckily twenty-three bucks is exactly how much change I get back on a pack of fags.
After the drafts and ticket are taken care off, shopping is the next priority. I buy clothes once year and I never actually buy as much as I need. As a result I lived in college off an average of 3 pairs of jeans and a few assorted T-shirts. Now, a limited wardrobe necessitates regular washing and since I had to wash my clothes myself, by the end of the year most of my clothes would be shredded. Shopping is something I can’t stand, I feel uncomfortable buying anything and what’ makes it worse is that those irritating attendants always guilt-trip me into buying stuff I don’t like. Most of what I buy is on impulse and either doesn’t fit or falls apart after the first wash.
The one thing that I have to do, which I look forward to is selling my bike. I have only had it for two years, I bought her second-hand in college, but she is easily my favourite possession. I learnt to drive on her, I first experienced true freedom on her, freedom from cheating rickshaw drivers, from irregular bus time—tables, she affected my life profoundly. Despite being thirsty for fuel, expensive to maintain and a pain to drive sometimes, she still is fun as hell.
There is still a lot of shit to be taken care off before I leave and I still don’t understand how I am going to be able to manage it all because I’ve (for maybe the tenth time this year) decided to quit smoking. It’s something I try on a very regular basis and most of the time I cant manage it beyond about 5 or 6 hours. Right now my head is swimming and the keyboard is zooming in and out, so I think I’ll quit before I lose consciousness.

Something funny- the powers to be at google have decided to show me a little favour and are sending a few searches my way, but what searches they are, here are a few key words that are leading people my way;

malyali porn (Google)
tamil movie ah..aha (Google)
South indian bathing aunties (Google) [!!! wtf. !!!]
JNU+campaign (Google)
Rajnikanth bullet scenes (Google)
export companies culture about us in indain company (Google)

bianca castiafore beauty past compare (Google)

two people were disappointed for sure.

The Celebrity Within

Found This extremely cool little thingy on Confusion's blog, haha I'm Marlon Brando and Gabrielle Union's love child, not bad.

A Glimpse of Truth in a Mad World

Aunty Helpful Dictator, scourge of the senile; left me this link on my previous post and urged me to use my limited scientific knowledge to expose Nivea’s lying ways. Unfortunately it seems that there may be a hint of a scientific basis to their claims regarding their DNAge products.
They claim:
” 80% of skin ageing is a result of external influences, e.g. exposure to sunlight, which lead to damage at the skin cells’ core… With age, the DNA’s own renewal capacity declines and cell damage accumulates… Contain the powerful combination of cell-active Folic Acid and Creatine to stimulate cell renewal from within and protect the skin cells' DNA against future external damage…The result: The skin looks younger and firmer and wrinkles are visibly reduced…”
Accumulation of errors in cellular DNA is generally regarded as one of the major causes of ageing and UV light is capable of introducing errors in our DNA. I don’t know about if sunlight is responsible for 80% of skin ageing, however folic acid is responsible for major DNA repair mechanisms particularly with those responsible for repairing UV damage. Here however, repair doesn’t imply a correction of errors that are already present, rather it merely implies that any errors that creep in during the replication of DNA are corrected before they have a chance to become permanently established in the DNA strand. Additionally the folic acid will only make a difference in those individuals whose diet is deficient in that particular vitamin (folic acid is a B-complex vitamin), for those whose diet provides them with their RDA of folic acid (0.4mg/day). It is estimated however that 88% of North Americans suffer from folic acid deficiency. For those who don’t, any extra folic acid won’t make a difference.
The folic acid however cannot, as I already mentioned, corrects errors already present in the DNA. Since wrinkles are a result of an accumulation of errors in the DNA of skin cells, folic acid cannot remove wrinkles already present on your face. This they seem to claim is the role of creatin, which in their words “stimulates cell renewal” to somehow iron out the wrinkles. I’m not sure if creatin is capable of doing this, however it makes me wonder whether you really want to be using a formulation that stimulates cell division.
What we were taught in college was that any animal cell has a finite number of divisions that it can undergo before dying out. The reason is that with each cycle of replication the number of errors in it’s DNA increase, (errors that folic acid cannot prevent), till eventually so many errors accumulate that the cell dies, so voluntarily stimulating unnecessary cell division seems counter-intuitive. Of course it will have been clinically tested before approval for marketing, however no clinical trials last long enough to test this theory of mine out. Such a test would involve regular use of the product for many, many years and clinical trials that long are unheard of.

Diwali!

Aah happy diwali, it's a beautiful diwali this year, there's a chill in the air, every one looks happy and I'm a miserable little fuck.

Sulk sulk.

Happy Diwali everyone

The Beautiful People Part Deux / Advertisements Gone Wild / It’s All Lies Folks

For more scary ass pics, visit celebs without makeup, thanks for ruining the illusion guys

I got a gret link from Confusion on a previous post, check it out.

This is the second instalment of my post, ‘The Beautiful People’, I know it’s been a long time since I posted that one but I have a few more things to say now.
What provoked this post was an ad for a major bathing soap, manufactured by a brand whose name rhymes with ‘fucks’ and believe me that’s exactly what they are doing to our minds.
Some time ago, they introduced a miracle soap (yet another one) that contains collagen and grape-seed oil. These two constituents of the soap allegedly help ‘firm’ up your skin against the ‘ravaging effects of ageing’. Yeah right, what complete and utter bullshit, grape-seed oil maybe but collagen, never.
Collagen is a pretty large protein with three polypeptide strands per molecule, each fibril of collagen has about a thousand amino acids. Now how does something that large get through your skin? Keep in mind the cells on the upper layer of the skin are dead so there’s no question of them taking up anything. If it were possible, then why would people with diabetes be sticking needles into their arms every time they needed their insulin, wouldn’t it be easier to use an insulin ‘patch’?
How do they allow this kind of advertising? Aren’t there any regulatory authorities whose job it is to keep this kind o crap under control? Apparently there aren’t because this kind of misleading advertising is everywhere.
Take for instance Manikchand, who manufacture chewing tobacco, banned by Indian law from advertising their main product; they began marketing mineral water under the same brand name. The main focus of their campaign was the fact that their water contained 300% more oxygen. More oxygen than what? The polluted air we breath? Anyway what is this oxygen going to accomplish? We aren’t fish so water is not exactly where we get our oxygen from and even if we did, we’d have to snort the stuff, not a pretty thought.
Then there was an air-conditioner manufacturer who claimed that their AC’s blew Vitamin C enriched air, a water filter that can filter viruses and soaps that can kill viruses. How does it make a difference, how do they manage that and right on is all I have to say.
Advertisements in India cross over from product endorsement to the realms of fiction and it sucks because nobody seems to care. There needs to be slightly more scrutiny of their wild claims, someone needs to put an end to their lying ways.
Even worse are the tele-shopping channels; somehow everything they peddle was discovered by scientists in the depths of the Amazon jungle, from pills for weight loss to those that make you grow taller. Those products not of Amazonian origin were discovered by sages meditating atop the lofty peaks of the Himalayas, for some reason they took time off from their spiritual aspirations to produce fairness creams and anti-acne lotions.
What’s dangerous about their products is that I doubt that they actually do anything apart from parting you from you money. They are not manufactured under the standards required of pharmaceutical products as is evident from studies which show that a lot of ayurvedic ‘medicines’ contain very high levels of heavy metals including arsenic and mercury.
Forget a clear, ‘fair’ complexion, you’ll probably get Minamoto’s disease and grow a lot of attractive holes in your face, but hey, holes in you face help reduce weight right?

The Magical Mystery Movie Tour

The mystery behind the movie that I referred to in a previous post has been really irritating me and I finally got down to looking it up with my trusty search engine Google. Following up on a clue that Anamika had so kindly provided, I first searched for ‘SaiKumar’, no nothing here, I found a huge list of movies he’s acted in but none fit the bill. I was getting tired and frustrated so in a fit of desperation, I tried a search for the caption, ‘When God is silent, he is violent’; and there they were, three links to movie review sites.
As it turns out the name of the movie is ‘Thirupathi’, not ‘Thruth’ as I had mistakenly read. Here’s a brief review of the movie I found on one site, complete with Indianised grammar;

When God is silent he is violent. That is Thirupathi.
…There is nothing new in the story. It is the same old revenge saga after beaten life in the beginning days.
Thiru (Sudeep) has served 10 years in jail and in these years he has grown up tough. Thanks to his mother and jailor. He is good in studies and sports. As he grows he becomes a tough cop.
… It is Michel Raj the king maker who is behind all ruckus in the society. This Michel Raj is nothing but Dhanraj father of ACP Thirupathi.
…Now the one point agenda of ACP Thirupathi is to destroy the empire of Michel Raj as he has done injustice to his mother…
... He uses his power to relieve him from the cop job. Now Thirupathi finds it easy to take on things…
…he makes everyone believe that Michel Raj gang has done the killing. Now the Home Minister completely tensed asks Thirupathi to save his son. In return Thirupathi ask for reverting him back to duties and shoot at sight order to end Michel Raj. With uniform and order on his hand Thirupathi goes on a hunt but his mother and fiancée are kidnapped by Michel as expected….
This is a feast for action lovers. No disappointment for Sudeep fans

I know you won’t be able to make much sense of the storyline from this heavily edited review but believe me; you really don’t want to know the rest.

So that’s that taken care of, next; Ainz made a reference to a particular south Indian actor who catches bullets with his teeth, well there is only one man who does shite like that, the indomitable Rajnikanth.
Rajnikanth along with a few other south Indian actors like NT Ramarao, MGR and Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi (a scriptwriter) are worshipped across south India, to the extent that most of them have based successful political campaigns based on their popularity. Their fans worship them; build temples in their honour and riot when anything happens to them. Schwarzanegger may be governor but he’s got nothing on these people.
Rajnikanth is known up north but not for being a great actor but for crazy antics in his movies, here are some I’ve heard off, keep in mind these are based solely on what I’ve heard so they may not be entirely true, though knowing Rajnikanth, they probably are.

Scene 1, Rajnikanth is on one side of a wall and the bad guy is on the other side, he picks up a metal pan and chucks it in the air. As it is about to go over the wall, he shoots at it, the bullet ricochets off the pan and hits the baddie.

Scene 2, Rajnikanth has no bullets left in his revolver, but the bad guy does. The villain shoots at him, Rajnikanth slides out the bullet holding thingy of the revolver and catches the bullet with it, then he takes the bullet out, turns it around, puts it back in and shoots the bad guy with it.

Scene 3, Rajnikanth has one bullet in his revolver and there are two bad guys, he also has a knife. What would a normal hero do? Naturally, he would shoot one and try getting the other one with the knife. Aah, but you forget this is not just any hero, this be Rajnikanth. He places his blade in front of the barrel and shoots; the bullet splits in two and kills both the evildoers and puts an end to their evildoing.

What I really love south Indian movies are the fight sequences, while in Bollywood, they go at it without thinking, South Indian heroes have to pause to tie up their Lungi first, fuck that’s funny.

And The Trip to Bangalore Was a Success!

Dear KARTIK RAJAN (Appl. No.:XXXX),

I am pleased to inform you that you have been selected for the Postgraduate Diploma in Bioinformatics. The offer is subject to your meeting all the admission requirements.

Ah aha haha! I though I'd fucked up my interview but apparently I had not. Aah this means another year and a half away from my beloved Delhi. Who fucking cares, I'm going to Bangalore!

A Multi-Cultural Land Called India

Though technically I’m a South Indian, I have lived in the North too long for me to be accepted as a fully fledged south Indian, it’s a bit funny because in the North, people are happy to categorise me as being a South Indian despite the fact that they (South Indians) will have nothing to do with me. That’s mainly because I don’t speak any of the major South Indian languages so when in the South, I have to try converse in Hindi, which automatically makes me a North Indian. Not that it bothers me much, I’m quite happy being the true product of the national integration that we Indians are so fond of talking about.
Despite being genetically South Indian I am most definitely culturally affiliated to the North but that’s only because I’ve been brought up there. As a consequence my frequent trips to the southern half of our country always involve a bit of a culture shock.
He first thing that I noticed about Bangalore this time whilst coming in to land at HAL airport were the palm trees. Like I mentioned I’ve been to the South a lot since most of my extended family is settled there and palm trees aren’t anything new to me, but for the first time I noticed that they bother me. It’s not just the palm trees but everything they are associated with. Every self-respecting South Indian house has as palm tree in the garden or somewhere close by. It’s the houses that disturb me really, not the trees. I can’t describe it but they have this whole terracotta tiling, weird overhangs over the walls, barred windows and funny intricate facades all over the place. Not that north Indian houses are any better, most are just badly lit boxes, but I’m used to looking at theses boxes. My grandfather’s house in a small village in Tamil-Nadu (another South Indian State) is another example of a crazy architecture because Tamilians for some reason love blue and every second house in the state is painted blue or brilliant green. I know it sounds silly but it’s one of those weird associations I make, I hate palm trees because I associate them with South Indian architecture.
The funniest thing I saw in Bangalore this time was a movie poster. Movie posters are another major difference between a city like Delhi and any of its south Indian counterparts. Delhi walls though adorned with urine stains and tobacco spit are mostly free of movie posters. Here it’s a wild poster-fest, with posters for everything from dubbed English movies to B-grade kannad flicks. The posters themselves range from black and white stencils to full colour ones. My favourite was one for what I’m assuming was a kannad flick, in the centre of the sheet was a picture of an actor dressed as a cop (a favourite Indian theme), he was wearing Ray Ban aviators and held a machete in his outstretched hand, the word ‘THRUTH’ ran behind his head (spelling mistake or a kannad word?). What really caught my attention was the caption under the title. It inspired this Ally McBeal-esque fantasy, bear with me for a bit.
I imagined a caption writer, sitting in a dark and miserable room, lit by a small naked bulb hanging from its wire from the ceiling, its feeble rays struggle against the oppressive darkness intent in enveloping the room. He sits, head in his hands at an unstable desk, cluttered with scraps of paper. He lifts his head for a moment as he throws back the last of the desi in his glass. Sweat runs through the furrows on his wrinkled forehead and flows in steady streams down the grimy stubble on his face. Then for an instant his countenance clears as he is struck by inspiration, he bends over the desk, a chewed, blunt pencil in his hand scribbles furiously across the sheet in front of him. At long last, he collapses back in his chair, which groans dangerously under the burden. He reaches for the paper and holds it against the light and reads to himself the caption, which will define a generation. He reads to himself these lines of pure genius, he reads; ‘When God is silent, he is violent’.

Leave of absence

Sorry for he long time since I last posted but I was away, I'd gone to the great garden city - Bangalore. Will write something of it tomorrow!
Much love to everyone!

When Memes Attack

Once again Terra out of the goodness of her soul has tagged me, this is a more sinister meme though, on working and on death, seemingly unrelated topics? I think not.
A word of clarification, since I do not have any real workplace at the moment, I’ll consider my college lab as a workplace. I’ve already taken on the ATC lab so this time it’ll have to be the Recombinant DNA lab.

What is the best thing about my workplace?

100% pure alcohol. Compare it to; normal hard booze (~42%), wine (~9%) and VicksCough Syrup (9%) and you’ll get what I’m talking about.

What do I hate about my workplace?

It goes a bit like this;
*Crash*, the sound of a glass beaker smashing on the stone floor, my teacher sticks her head around trhe door.
“Kaaaartiiik”
“It wasn’t me maam, I was here in one corner, I’m not handling any glassware maam, I’m only working the centrifuge, it didn’t do it.”
“Did I say anything?”
“No maam.”
”Then why are you defending yourself?”
“I didn’t do it”
“Why do you talk so much”
“Yes maam, sorry maam”
“Who did it?”
“Not me maam”
“Did I say you did it?”
“No maam”
She walks off in mock anger
“Maam?”
“Yes what is it now”
“Is this a black thing?”
She throws a beaker at my head as I beat a hasty retreat.

What small irritants at my workplace really annoys me?

Sharing the weighing balance with people who tak an hour to measure out a gram of bacto-treptone and then leave a stick mess on the scale, which I inevitably get blamed for.

Describe the actions/quirks of the weirdest person I work with (can be a co-worker, employer, or a vendor if you are self employed):

A friend ‘S’ who felt the heat more than everyone else. He kept opening the windows in the lab. Since our lab was pretty high up, every time the window opened, a strong breeze blew through the lab and everyone’s flame (on their bunsen burners) would go crazy. Once the guy while sterilising a bottle with alcohol (see College Days), covered the whole thing with alcohol not just the neck of the bottle (as was required). When he flamed it, the bottle and his fingertips caught fire. Haha, very funny. He was a good friend though (just to clarify).

What is one thing that I would change at my workplace to make life a helluva lot better?

If they allowed smoking in the lab (not likely).

Pick five songs that I'd like played at my funeral......

Ideally when I die, I’d like the national anthem to be played as they take my body through the streets. Beautiful young girls would throw themselves at my dead body (since they refuse to throw themselves at my living body) weeping. The country would go into mourning at the loss of a national hero and a national holiday would be announced in my honour.
But I‘d happily settle for these five songs, played in this order of course.

1. Child in Time- Deep Purple
2. Smells Like Teen Spirit - Nirvana
3. Paranoid – Black Sabbath
4. A Hazy Shade of Winter- Simon and Garfunkel
5. The End/ When the Music’s Over – The Doors

But it sucks to have to pick just five songs.
---
Now for the tags (I rub my hands with glee): Anamika, Ainz, Aunty, Confusion, Indian Lucifer, Jill and Nothingman, you are all tagged (in one fell swoop he tags them all, haha…HA).

Chapter -41, Where A Conversation Compels Kartik to Reflect

It all started slightly over three years ago when ‘M’ moved into the hostel, into my room. We were possibly the worst matched roommates in Boys Hostel D and our relationship developed as such. For the first few months that we knew each other, we hated each other’s guts. While in the hostel we were seldom in the room together, and at college we mostly kept out of each other’s way. Then a few months on, ‘G’ moved into the room with us, it changed the whole equation, from being arch rivals; we began to bond out of our common hatred of ‘G’. By the time our first year at college had ended, ‘M’ and I were pretty good friends. Then when college started again, I moved into and apartment with another friend and by that M’s parents had moved to Pune, so he was forced to stay at home. Despite that, we remained good friends and by the time college finished, m had become one of my closest friends.
I moved back to Delhi and he stayed on in Pune, neither of us is good at staying in touch so in spite of Orkut, Yahoo messenger and the good old telephone, we hardly talk.
Then earlier tonight he called.
M: “Oye saale Kartik how are you?”
Me: “M! kaisa hai?” (How are you?)
M: “Dude, this is going to be my last call for a long time.”
Me: “Why, what happened?”
M: “I’m off to OTA.”
Me: “You’re leaving? When?”
M: “Tonight.”
We spoke for about half an hour but the first ten second were enough to depress me. OTA for those of you who don’t know is the Officers Training Academy, one of the institutes that trains Officers for the Indian Army.
I knew he had always wanted to join the army and that he had been selected for the OTA but hearing that he was actually leaving shook me up a bit, thinking that in eleven months he’ll be sitting in a bunker on the border taking pot-shots at a Pakistani, who in turn will be after his blood. I know, there are literally thousands of Indians at this moment sitting in bunkers doing exactly the same thing but I don’t know any of them do I?
The first time I realised the futility of our current state of affairs was two years ago while on my way back to Delhi from Pune for my summer vacation. Travelling on the train with me was this guy about my age, with one of those black metal trunks that are so characteristic to army personnel. Trying to strike up a conversation, I asked him if his father was in the army;
“No”
“I only asked because you looked like you’re from an army family” (children of army personnel really do look different from us civvies)
“That’s because I am in the army”
Wtf? This guy was only a year or two older than me and he was already doing his bit for the country. We got to talking and got pretty friendly, that only made it worse for me because here was this great guy going up north, possibly to get killed.
Now, it’s the same, only much worse, much, much worse because it’s such a good friend of mine.
It’s a truly fucked up system that takes intelligent and productive men and women and puts a gun in their hands and sends them off to be killed for the petty whims of a few corrupt politicians who can’t manage to take a piss without getting it all over themselves, let alone manage a whole friggin country.
And that’s all I have to say about that.

...And The Results Are In

Ok fine now it gets fun for me, this is the part i love the most where i tell everyone that no-one got all ten right. Hah!
Before I reveal the correct answers. Anamika, no you dont get extra points for being cheeky. Confusion and Aunty (espescially Aunty) I didn't make up anything. Here's what a bitter gourd looks like;

You aren't missing anything great though because it tastes awful.

Ok now before I reveal the correct answers, here's the principle behind the whole thing. A fruit is defined broadly as a mature ovary ie. the reproductive part of the plant. Or more simply, anything with seeds is a fruit.

Here's the list of answers.

1. Banana - Fruit

2. Brinjal / Aubergine / Eggplant - Fruit

3. Karela / Bitter gourd - Fruit

4. Potato - Vegetable It is actually a modified stem, for the storage of starch.

5. Carrot - Vegetable

6. Lemon - Fruit

7. Pumpkin/ Squash - Fruit

8. Cucumber - Fruit

9. Onion - Vegetable It is again a modified stem, the layers of an onion are actually modified leaves.

10. Tomato - Fruit

Hah total brainfart (to steal a phrase from Confusion) eh? Don't worry though and dont look for cucumbers in the fruit section of you supermarket because this classification is the botanical clasification, not the commonly used nomenclature.

Thanks for participating though.

Fruit and vegetable game

Ok here's a silly game i invented at college. The reason behind inventing the game was to convice my parents that I was actually studying at college, so everytime I came home I'd bug them just to remind them I was actually doing something useful there.

This is how it goes. Below is a list of fruit and vegetables. All you have to do is point out which one's a fruit and which one a vegetable, easy right? Oh yeah, No googling (sp?) allowed.

1. Banana

2. Brinjal / Aubergine / Eggplant

3. Karela / Bitter gourd

4. Potato

5. Carrot

6. Lemon

7. Pumpkin/ Squash

8. Cucumber

9. Onion

10. Tomato

If anyone gets all ten right you get (pause for a drumroll.....) nothing. Did you really expect anything anyway?. Good luck and god speed.

Gandugiri!

I know that this is the second time I'm picking out Sanjay Dutt for ridicule, it's not that i don't like tha guy, frankly i don't really have an opinion about him either way.

Sanjay Dutt, released his newest movie Lage Raho Munnabhai recently. The movie has recieved a lot of praise for its attempts at promoting Gandhism ie. nonviolence. Dutt as being hailed as the the new messiah of Gandhism, few notice however that the release of the movie coincided nicely with the his court appearences for posession of several AK-47's. Hardly a Gandhian.

Gandhigiri as they refer to it the Gandhian philosophy in the movie roughly means; to act according to that particular way of life. It is derived from the word Dadagiri ie. to act like a bully/ rowdy or to generally behave as a roughneck. Here the suffix giri implies acting according to a particular stereotype. Methinks Sanjay Dutt would be more credible promoting Gandugiri; or the act of behaving like an ass (slang).

Mechanical Misadventures

Well, I had it coming; I was going to have to get my bike serviced. I’ve been driving it around in Delhi for the last three or four months ever since I moved back to Delhi from Pune. After a particularly hard day of driving a few days ago, my bike pretty much gave in and it was all I could do to coax it back home without breaking down. Today being the only free day I have in my schedule for this week, I forced myself to get the required work done on my bike. Going to a mechanic is not a simple issue for me, while most just put their faith in the mechanic and leave their bikes to be worked on, I don’t trust them to do a good job without supervision, so to get a servicing, I require a full free day.
Since this was the first time I was getting my bike worked on in Delhi, I was going to have to look for a mechanic. Company authorised showrooms are no good (see Original Duplicates), so I found myself looking for a regular mechanic. The one I found and settled on was a small shop, in an area full of mechanics. Unfortunately his shop was downwind of a meat shop, as a result, when I first entered the shop, it was to the accompaniment of screaming chickens being slaughtered, in an atmosphere dense with the stench of chicken faeces and rotting blood. As the wind blew, it brought with it a storm of feathers and intensified the smell. Hardly an auspicious start.
Explaining to the mechanic what it was that I wanted done was typically complex. Indian mechanics have their own dialect, half of their vocabulary is bastardised English and the rest is unintelligible Hindi. For instance a worm gear is a garare, nose pliers are plas and the muffler becomes a pungli. You would think that their lingo would be easy to pick up but the problem is, their jargon varies from one place to the other. Pungli for example is used in Pune, in Delhi, no one knows what it means (and this suits me fine because, frankly it sounds a bit obscene), garare on the other hand is used exclusively in Delhi, Pune mechanics (thankfully) still call a gear a gear. Plas are more or less universal.
Mechanics are a wide and varied bunch, while most are inept to the point of seeming retarded; some in particular are really special. I found one such special mechanic in Pune. I was really far from my usual garage (pronounced gaa-ridge) and I found that my kick (kick starter) had stopped working. Since my bike has no electric start, I was pretty much stranded. Somehow with a friends help, I got my bike started, not willing to risk the long ride back home, I decided to drop my bike off at a nearby garage that my friend claimed was very good. Entering, his large compound, the first thing that I saw was Lambretta (a classic Italian scooter) in decent condition, this got me really excited, I was thinking to myself that the guy must be a great biking enthusiast to have a classic like the Lambretta in such good condition. Inside there were hundreds of photos of his father (a veteran bike racer), with Jawas, Thunderbirds, Nortons and dozens of other classics, I really thought I had died and gone to heaven. The man himself impressed me to no end, he spent the whole evening jawing about what a great guy he was, what he’d done and how much more he knew about bikes than anyone else while two friends and I sat enraptured, listening, worshipping; silently. He had made himself out to be such a superhuman that for a while I was under he impression that he was a character straight out of Ayn Rand, Howard Roark or Hank Rearden maybe. I was actually worried about how I was going to pay him, the way he talked, I half expected him to tell me that my money was worthless to him.
The problem with my bike as he discovered was that a small lock that had broken, however since it was late in the evening, I’d have to wait till the next day till the parts-shop opened. It was pouring with rain the next day as I made my way to his shop. Once I had bought the lock, it took him about an hour to fix and re-assemble my bike. With my bike fixed, I braved the rain and drove home. On my way home, I had stopped halfway to meet some friends, standing talking them in the rain, I noticed large purple blobs floating in the water under my bike. Intrigued, I investigated further only to found that it was engine oil dripping slowly out of my bike. The bastard for all his bragging couldn’t even seal my engine properly, something even a mechanics apprentice would be able to do in his sleep with one hand tied behind his back and both legs in plaster.
I filled the engine up with cheap recycled oil and drove back, my mind in a paranoid frenzy, imagining everything that could go wrong with my bike. I could almost see the bare metal gears eating into each other, in every false neutral, every gearshift, I could hear my bikes death rattle. Fortunately though nothing went wrong that day and I made it back to his garage before any serious damage occurred. The major problems that I have faced though have been the result of the bumbling ineptitude of other mechanics; I will leave those stories for another day and another post.

College Days

As always, when I am half drunk, I began to reminisce, today’s topic of reminiscence is college. The only thing I can remember right now of college is my final Animal Tissue Culture practical exam partly because it was almost the last thing I did in college and partly because during the exam I came ever so close to disaster.
ATC for the uninitiated basically involves growing cells from animal (we used human) tissue in the lab to further use in experiments or in industrial production of a lot of important drugs. The most important factor in your technique is in maintaining sterile conditions, without which, your experiment pretty much goes to shit. So to ensure sterility we don our lab-coats, masks and the lot, pretty much standard stuff. The only difference between us and a proper lab, being that we preferred to remain barefoot rather than buying a separate pair of slippers exclusively for lab use.
The ATC lab was divided into four 2 by 5 meter cubicles with a corridor outside. Each cubicle had a glass door through which we could be observed. The cubicles were equipped with a Laminar air flow hood, basically a box close on five sides, you sit at the open end and a stream of filtered, sterile air blows at you, this theoretically ensures that all work you carry out inside is in sterile conditions. We additionally used a Bunsen Burner inside the airflow to reduce chances of contamination.
So picture this, a tiny sealed room, no air-conditioning, no fresh air, in forty-degree heat and on top of that, there is a stream of air being blown at you across a hot flame while you are wearing a thick lab coat and a mask which renders breathing normally, near impossible. Now imagine working like this for almost two hours.
On top of that, the examiner was well known for being a bit of a bastard. He looked a bit like a mummified corpse too and that was enough to scare me shitless.
For the practical, we were assigned a set of procedures to carry out to demonstrate our ability to work in the lab, apart for being judged on the actual result of the experiments, the examiner would constantly watch us, peering malevolently through the glass panes as we worked, marking us on our skill.
To start off the day, the electricity in our labs kept going and even when they had rectified the problem by laying down miles of wiring across the floor (which I inevitably tripped over), for some reason the supply to my cubicle kept going on and off. Now when the electricity goes, the airflow stops working so you have to stop work, get up and pull down the cover of the hood to maintain sterility inside.
Wouldn’t you know it, whenever the electricity went, I’d get up to pull down the cover, then suddenly the airflow would come on again. As I would sit down to resume work, there would be the examiner, staring bug-eyed into the lab, licking his chops and writing down something in his note-book. I pretty much was under the impression that he thought I was a bit of an idiot, who kept getting up, pulling the cover half way and then shoving it back. This unnerved me to such an extent that for the first half an hour I gave up work and just sat in one corner doing calculations on a piece of paper till my teacher told me to get a move on and actually do the experiment.
Once I had started though I got caught up in the flow and worked pretty well but every time that gargoyle stuck his head against the glass, I’d lose my rhythm and come close to doing something stupid.
Now working to ensure sterility is not easy unless it’s something you do on a daily basis, the intricacies are... well… too intricate to describe completely. One thing that we were required to do was to wipe down the caps of all bottles handled with an alcohol swab and then set it alight in the flame of the burner to kill all bacteria that may have settled on it.
The undead examiner had just glanced in while I was swabbing a bottle, unnerved, I set it alight, being pure alcohol, it burnt with a clear flame. Not noticing that the thing was still alight, I began to swab it again. The swab caught fire between my fingers. I threw it into one corner of the airflow, somehow managing to stifle a scream. The damn thing wouldn’t go out. If mummy-man looked in now, I knew I’d be dead so with a flick of my fingers I sent the thing to the floor. No-good, it was still happily burning away, still in clear sight of the door. Maybe because of the heat or maybe it was because of the stress, who knows; but my mind just shut down. I sat staring at the flame with horror for what seemed like an hour. I had to act. I finally got up and put it out with my bare foot. Then picked it up and threw it into the trash. As I got back into my stool, I caught him looking at me again, he knew I was upto no good but he hadn’t caught me, which was the important thing.
The rest of the practical went (in my mind) from bad to worse, with a little help from my teacher who as always managed to confuse me. Fortunately though when I came back after four days, I had a near perfect result (I still don’t know how). If I hadn’t I wouldn’t be recollecting the whole episode so eagerly would I?