Those Two Days

Two months back I celebrated my first birthday. Do you this was the second biggest party of my whole life. We celebrated the first one in Kolkata. It was the day I got to taste of rice for the very first time and along with that a lot more thing that made very little sense to me. Many curries including Fish and also sweets, which could hardly fit within a 10” plate... all I could think of at that moment was... "ore baba re" (OMG)! They (ora) like to call it my annaprashon. You know, I was very sad this time as we do not have my relatives here in Dubai and I missed them all very dearly. I thought I will not write about this party at all as I missed the family so much. But now that I have spent a good one month time in Kolkata with all of them, I feel much better. This time most of the uncles and aunts we know here in Dubai have also gone out for their summer vacation and there were suggestions that we postpone the birthday party. But tell me how can we postpone my first birthday party.... yes the first birthday! Actually at the end we did have quite a few guests and I made many friends though they appeared to be a little elder than me. I had great fun running after them and shouting aloud... yes shouting with all my strength.... you see, I still have to learn how to talk like you guys! It was sad though that Ma did not allow me to go around the pool as it was too dangerous.I actually thought it would be somewhat similar to the annoprashon party. at one was in Calcutta Rowing Club and believe me, it was a great party. I almost felt like a queen, that evening. We actually sent out invitation cards well in advance all those cards created especially for me. I had my grandparents, uncles, aunts and so many other guests.
At the annoprashon earlier in the day it was great fun too. You know for we Bengalees it is a very auspicious occasion. This is the day we worship our family Guru and are introduced to the real world of all the perceivable senses. Everyone was ready with their cameras when Pishimoni (aunt, father's sister) got a plate with lots of goodies, as I was sitting on my mama's (mother's brother) lap and I was supposed to select whatever I liked. There were money, jewelry, cosmetics, pen, pencil and a book. Can you imagine that I selected the book from all those things? Everyone was very excited ... I did not quite understand why! It was actually a book on finance from kaka (father's younger brother). After that all the elders started to shower me with all sorts of ornaments.... I wish I had many of such occasions! But it only comes once in a lifetime.But all in all both my parties had been great fun. ... A lot of fun!

Thinking Aloud

Be it a tilt in priority or a time management issue but the matter of the fact is that I am not being able to do much of blogging for the past few weeks. I do try and take a quick tour of the blogs that I follow whenever I can manage. I wish I could scribble a few lines in my blog now and then but ….. I guess blogging have to wait a bit more!
I could best describe this situation by following Filmy line …. “Majboor ye halaat idhar bhi hai udhar bhi” (“I am restrained by the compulsion is on either side”. Excuse my poor translation)
Following are a few pictures of My City, Calcutta. These are taken from emails which have been making round for sometime now and most of us have received once already! These pictures were taken in 1930ies (nineteen thirties) less than two decades prior to our independence from the British rule.
One point bothers me whenever I look at these images. Almost 200 years into British rule our people have been dressing themselves in traditional attire. But what happened in the next 25 years that made us to abandon(except for special occasions/ festivities) the “dhoti - kurta” altogether? Could we not have tried to do make our traditional attire evolve itself to stand up to the need of the 21st century?
I am thinking aloud and would welcome your thoughts on this!
Please click on the image for a bigger picture.

About Awards, Copy, Paste et al

I believe one of the most powerful inventions of our life time is the personal computer. I was introduced to this thing of wonder a bit late in my life maybe not as late as some other but late enough. At our Engineering College the computer room or computer lab as it used to be called used to have an uncanny similarity to an ICU. This boss man used to reside in an air-conditioned glass room under lock and key and with limited access and strictly under supervision of the protector of the glass castle. When we were allowed to enter that room we had to leave our foot wares outside. It was imbibed in our mind that it was a very delicate instrument and one has to take extreme care while dealing with him. Little did I know at that point that you need to be a genius to spoil it (not by vandalism)!
Later on in life I got the opportunity to have regular handshake and at one point could manage the limited network of pc in the office. But those were the DOS days and we used to write long commands whenever there was a need to copy or move a file. But then came the windows and along with it came the user friendly way of dealing with the pc (I will not go into the controversy of PC adapting the Mac way of life).
But what it brought along is according to me the most powerful tool of our day to day existence today-the “copy & paste” tool. This tool has done wonders! This simply does not require any more elaboration. Now we can even “drag and drop” stuff but I still believe that “Copy and Paste” still wins hands down. But there is a catch:
I heard a story where a patient goes to a doctor with a knee dislocation problem. The doctor applies a light stroke with his hammer and the patient is fit to run again. The patient argues how you justify your fees of 100 bucks as a stroke like this is nothing more than a child’s play. The doctors say “my dear, you are only paying 1 buck for the strike while the remaining 99 is for knowing where to strike”.
Today I thank our fellow blogizen Aparna for giving me an award on 19th August 2009 and also sharing the knowledge of the place to copy it from and the location to paste it to. At this moment I regret to state that I will not be forwarding the tag and award that came my blog’s way any further. Let these rest here (I was tagged by Sujata on her blog on the 4th of July 2009) for the time being.

Two Tales in Two Cities

Today India celebrates 63rd Independence Day. We undoubtedly achieved a great deal in the past years. But there is a long and bumpy road ahead. There are two events that bothered me this morning.

First Incident:
"Do unto others as you would have others do unto you." It's the Golden Rule and we believe that it is the ultimate norm of high morality in all culture.
Last Saturday night I was on my way back from Kolkata, my hometown, where I went for a brief break taking a week off. I was travelling back alone as my family stayed back for a few extra weeks so they could spend some time with the family.
We were on an emirates Airbus A 330 aircraft and the flight was smooth enough to let me start writing this blog at a height of 36000 feet above the sea level. I was a bit skeptical about the departure time as the flight preceding ours was delayed by a few hours. To shake my confidence further I spotted a dead cockroach in the waiting lounge and none of the house telephones were in working condition. Once up in the sky I discovered that my co passenger was just a little short of a robot and since I did not know where the switch was, I never got to start a conversation and I was on my own. Emirate airlines provide a wide range of choices for in-flight viewing. After dinner I dozed off for a while. When I woke up the lights were dimmed and I the plane was very quiet. As I looked around I could make one definitive conclusion and that is SRK is a superstar. I could conclude this because all the video screens visible were tuned in to a movie starring SRK and yes all of them without an exception. It was the movie called “Rab ne bana di Jodi” (“a match made in heaven” is probably a close translation). That is his level of popularity among Indians, Indian Diasporas and also many non Indians. I remember the Al Nasr cinema in Muscat used to witness plenty of fighting and back marketing when one of his movies was screened. SRK is the initials of Shah Rukh Khan who is only the second movie superstar of India and second only to the one and only Amitabh Bachan (The Big B or AB as he is popularly known).
Today He was stopped at an airport in New York and interrogated for two hours and not allowed to make a phone call either. While a mere search in the “Google search” would have brought out all his details and the total number of pages would have been many times of that of Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Johnny Depp put together. So the security agents have detained him because of the word “Khan” attached to his name. Now the question is those guys are uninformed or Stupid or stubborn or simply Idiots!
I think Indian authorities should take a note of this and treat the same way when one those Tom Cruises or Brad Pits visits our soil! But probably we are too cultured to treat our guests likewise …. We are like this only….. !!!

Next Incident:
At the dawn of our independence from the British our first prime minister’s words are worth remembering... "The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over." -- Jawaharlal Nehru’
But unfortunately we have a quite e different scenario today and left with some leaders who seem to have quite different views towards life, country and countrymen. Mayawati wants to decorate the state with statues of leaders. She is the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the northern state which is among the largest and most populous states of the country. It is also one state with a high number of rural population most of whom are below the poverty line. To make things worse a drought is looming overhead this year. But apparently our Mayawati has requisition the central government for Funds worth 5.56 billions of Indian rupees for statues building while allocating only 2.5 billion rupees in her budget as a special economic package to deal with drought hit provinces of the state.

But these are only a few glitches in our way of progress …. Jai Hind!

My Password protected Life.

We all require safety and protection from the big bad world outside. Today I am sitting at my desk well protected and with a sense of security but totally entangled in a web of random numbers and letters. Every moment of this existence, I am reminded that all good things in life come with a price tag and in this case I am almost paying with my mind. I consider myself fortunate that I can still use a key to enter my house (a remote key like the car is in my wish list though) and a keyless biometric provides access at work. I am thankful that keyless access to cars by punching access code did not go too far.
Password has been in existence since time immemorial. I am told that in earlier days sentries would only allow a person or group to pass through or allow access only if they knew the password. The dictionary meaning of the word “password” is a secret word or expression used by authorized persons to prove their right to access, information, etc.
Before we were required to make an effort and somewhat match the signature stored in their record (which was a difficult task by itself) to get our money from the banks. At times we had to explain across the counter how prettier she became over the years to justify some modification to our signature. It did work most of the time!
At the beginning I took it as a challenge to have difficult passwords which was difficult to guess and even more difficult to create. But soon I was inundated as a huge demand for passwords came my way as I needed a user name and password right from reading a online newspaper to accessing the internet banking. Friends came out with ideas: using favorite brand names; pets’ names; friend’s names etc and then spelling those names forwards or backwards or sideways or another possible direction. Slowly I realized that I was getting entangled into the maze of password. Everything I did required a password. If that was not bad enough they started to demand a new password periodically. While some providers only advised a change of passwords, the IT systems at work as well as banks are a bit ruthless. Passwords there come with an expiry date. I had this bright idea to have a set of 3 passwords and keep them rotating. But my plea was summarily dismissed and it refused to accept them fully or partially.
The security priority varies from site to site but we need to bear in mind that if someone is able to crack one he might be able to take a guess how your mind works and it might make cracking the rest. The pundits say that the most difficult passwords to crack are the ones created by a combination of Mixed-case Letters together with numbers (D5x0rJ00dZ, Ur2GooD4Me). It is also the most difficult ones to remember.
I dream of getting liberated from this password trap some day, but till that happen we need to remember that no password is un-crack able and the best we can do is make it difficult and non-trivial to determine our password. Also whatever method we choose, it's a good idea to change the password often.

Remake and remixes

A Taj Mahal Remix by me

I resisted myself from watching the remake of the film Don directed by Farhan Akhtar even though I like his films. In fact when I finally watched it on the cable I have to admit that I quite liked it even though in my opinion, it was not as good as the original one. But the matter of the fact is that I am not too comfortable with this concept of Remake. I do agree that many changes have been made to the original one to align it to the present times but the fundamentals as well as the concept remains unchanged.
I wonder how the people of the world, particularly the French, will react to the idea of remaking the Eiffel tower with some modifications and changes. Maybe we could suggest adding a few stainless steel members in between to get some polish and shine. Another remake I may suggest of my mind is the Statue of Liberty. Maybe we can replace the crown in her head with a baseball cap to give it a more realistic look and connect with days generation. After all in current time not many people wear a crown as compared to the baseball cap. Or closer home maybe we start replicating the Taj with a double glazed dome and Grey steel minarets.....
On the other side of the coin sits the remixes. Many songs that we grew up with and were very popular when originally composed are now being recomposed and released as remixes. Most of them got dance beats injected into them with some raps punched in between and not to forget the eye catching videos. Unfortunately many of the younger generation is not aware that there exists an original version and there exists an authentic & original creator, while the new version is just a replica. Now a days the remix version is created alongside the original composition with variable input from the composer. These should be called a variation rather than a remix. But generally there doesn't seem to be so much of apathy against remixes and everyone is happy to listen and dance to those tunes.
Do you really like imitation or accept that there are any sense in imitating? Doesn’t it virtually signify the end of creativity? As we walk through the shopping high street of any popular city which are frequented by tourists, we see scores of imitation products. Replicas of Lui Vuitton bags and Rolex watches or Gucci sunglasses are most common. Interesting enough we use another terminology for such products. They are called counterfeit instead of remixes. These are actually a form of remixes by their own rights. Usually they use cheaper materials where the color and texture are different and inferior to the genuine ones. At times we see that they pick the design of a model and use the material of another model. And in the interiors of the developing world people use these products even without realizing that they are actually the end result of hardwork and creativity of some designer and design house.
Hence I conclude that the matter of the fact is that someone has decided for us that remakes of movies are acceptable and remixes of old music are acceptable but a replica of a Rolex or a Gucci handbag is definitely illegal and a counterfeit.

Navigating the high street

A shopping trolley abandoned in the middle of the aisle in some super market is a common sight and we all have learnt to navigate our own cart around such obstacles. Abandoning one's shopping cart in the middle maybe still acceptable with a little bit of inconvenience to fellow shoppers but to find a pram with a child nicely parked in the middle of an aisle makes me nervous.
Certainly there is something mostly in the female genes (no offence intended) and in some males too, that causes the brain to freeze the very moment the eye spots an interesting package on the display shelve. All other logic stop working if there happens to be some red tag declaring a “Sale” or a yellow tape wrapped package stating "special offer" or “buy 1 & get 1 free” or maybe a yellow sticker with "free" written in red ink attached to any product on display. The world around does not exist anymore as the brain starts working on complex calculations towards establishing how much profit this offer is going to make to the weekly budget. The shopping cart is abandoned then and there with no consideration for fellow shoppers.
I had been all along trying to get some traffic sense into shopping cart driving of my better half and finally took charge of the steering bar. While she does the shopping I and our daughter who has recently graduated from her pram to the shopping cart take care of the maneuvering. Now I have come to realize that there is much more grief than to worry about an abandoned cart. One has to steer through groups of people socializing with no concerns for fellow shoppers. The good thing is that sometimes they move and give way when you give out an irate grunt (excuse me please)! The other menace are the learners as the proud parents lend the control of the cart to their 5 year olds who is already sporting a pair of skates (the normal shoes fitted with the wheels) which does not make things any better. They come and hit you from behind (believe me it hurts!) and you are not supposed to even yell at someone else's kids.
Now a days we are able to beat the traffic, both inside and outside the supermarket, as we do our weekly shopping during the middle of the working week. It is peace and tranquility for now till others decides to do the same.