Category: Personal

  • Motorcycles

    Unlike many others in my generation I learnt to drive a car much before I could drive a motorbike. I perhaps a missed a vital stage of growth because of this. There is a culture and a group of friends that I couldn’t become part of because I did not ride or own a motorbike when many of them did. I drowned out any disappointment I felt of not belonging by taking up my astronomy and space activities up a notch.

    I yearned for a motorbike again only when I read Robert M Pirsig in his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, said thus:

    You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

    On a cycle the frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it any more, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it any time, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from immediate consciousness.

    We recently got a motorcycle in my name – the Bajaj Discover 100 cc. It was purchased with the idea of intracity commute. It also partly fulfilled the purpose of certain reimbursements I would get from the bank.

    I know how to switch gears and ride the motorcycle in a straight line. I can also take the straightforward turns that present themselves on the road. The trouble arises once I stop and have to start again. Knowing the traffic conditions in Mumbai, you would understand that this is not a good situation to be in, at peak hour traffic. No matter how much I try this impediment has not passed yet. I am still working on it.

    One of the first places that I want to go to on a motor cycle is the Yusuf Meherally Center on the Mumbai-Goa highway. After that, I don’t really have any other place to go. But, this is a good thing to motivate myself to learn to drive a motorcycle.

  • Holi

    Today, the whole nation celebrated the festival of Holi. I didn’t. It’s not like I was taken in by these initiatives that called for a water free holi this time keeping with the record drought situation prevailing in many parts of Maharashtra right now. It’s just that I have never played/participated in Holi. I find the idea of colouring others faces and throwing balloons at each other rather odd and crazy.

    I have never played Holi. As a kid, I used to remain holed up asking my parents to make up excuses for not having to go out and play. I have escaped Holi’s persecution with colours thus far. I hope to stay away from it as far as possible.

    In the meanwhile, conserve water on other days as well.

  • How do you do?

    There are three ways to do something. You either try things out youselves. Experiment or play around with it. It strangely comes to you. You are never sure that that is the correct method. However, you can keep doing it functionally. The second is to be taught by someone else. This is mostly how trade practices are passed on from one generation to the next. The last is that you refer to a guidebook on the subject.

    Like many people I have experienced the first two methods to learn to do things. I am just not the type of person to sit and read a guidebook about how to do things before I set about doing things. I am trying to inculcate this habit now. Might be useful.

  • Hello World!

    The last revision of this blog was lost to an episode of hacking. Poor security and lack of backups mean that I pretty much lost all my blog posts in the interim period other than their existence on Google’s cache. So, this continues from my previous blog here.

    Just to bring you upto speed on my offline events. I quit my job in Bharuch and moved back to Mumbai. I work in a bank here.

    I spend most of my time working online and offline on Wikipedia related stuff. I am the GLAM SIG for the Wikimedia India Chapter.

  • I’ve Moved!

    I’ve moved to my own domain. You can find it here.

  • Toilets

    Toilets, especially public toilets in India have been a subject of discussion recently. Bill Gates’ and his foundation want to work on sanitation in India. Office toilets in India have moved to western commodes with people having no idea whatsoever on how to use it – especially the men (I cannot speak for the women, as I have no anecdotal or direct evidence :) ). I prefer the Indian toilet although have very rare access to one. The New York Times’ carried an article today on a campaign called Right to Pee, urging government officials to let women pee for free. This led me to want to write this blog post.

    I cannot speak for the women, but the men’s room of most public toilets I take a look at in Mumbai are horrible. I wonder why we pay the INR 2/3 that we do for the use of the facility. It would be interesting to collect data on how much a public toilet facility earns on average. I have not searched for such data, if it were available. But, I understand from the above article that activists are first trying to figure out how many toilets do exist. Similar efforts are on in Mumbai too, it would seem. So, I am extrapolating that the above required data is absent.

    A public toilet provides the following facilities – water supply, lighting and exhaust fan (generally one – generally not working, but let’s assume it’s working) as well as a mug in an Indian toilet. There usually is no flush facility. The usual cleaning process involves cleaning the floors with a mop with phenol locally sourced. The toilets are then flushed several times with water aping the flushing process. This is usually done just twice a day. There seems or there is no such treatment for the men’s urinal. I’ve only seen the flushing process being done once in a men’s urinal. What goes untouched in the process are the paan stains on the wall, which give the men’s room its stench other than the urinal which adds to the stench there. Broken tiles and ceramic are usual. You usually don’t get good mugs and most people seem to not know how to use the toilets.

    So, before anything else. We just need better public education or awareness on how to use a toilet (not just a public toilet), better and cheaper disinfectants and enforce the no tobacco/smoking in the public toilets rule. On the Right to Pee campaign above, I think the men’s urinal must be recognized as a part of the toilet, charged for and kept clean through water flushing and use of disinfectants and unclogged drain pipes. Once this is done, Bill Gates and others are welcome to work on improving sanitation, etc.

  • A post that says many things that I want to say but for which a singular title does not work

    The last time I wrote any thing on this blog was on February 5, 2012. The rest of that month and the days since have been tumultuous to say the very least. Many of my beliefs and faiths in various things and various people have been shattered. I went through a period, briefly of depression. I cannot claim that I am completely out of it, yet. Hence, the silence on this blog.

    I have been updating my tumblr in the mean time, once in a while. I purchased a new phone that I hoped will distract me and then realised that what I needed was not distraction but confrontation. The phone did help me calm down as I began to learn and appreciate a new instrument. I had named my last phone Robbie, from a tradition of naming some of the things I use a lot since my childhood days. I have named my current phone, Athira, the Indian name for the star Betelgeuse,my birth star, per Indian calendar system.

    I have started writing somewhat lengthy stuff on my tumblr which I guess means that I can take a shot at writing something here as well.

    I quit Wikipedia. I won’t be going back to that place, again.

    I trust fewer people now. I cannot live like this for long. I have started doing a few things to fill up the time generally.  I have started reading again. You can follow my reading on goodreads. I have also start putting pics up on instagram, though they get shared through tumblr.

    I have started taking swimming lessons. I had almost started doing OpenStreetMaps but left that for now. I started preparing for banking exam. Not reading much of that, now. I am spending most of my time just sleeping. I’ve started tracking my expenses now, now that they have spiralled out of control. I am not in debt yet. The depression made me eat – a LOT. That made me gain weight again. That meant more expenses, again.

    I wanted to say all of the above because it was just lying around there, like orphans, without being tethered to anything really. I started or promised to do a bunch of things since my first year of engineering. I really wanted to do them but I came in my own way. I am drawing up a list of stuff I want to do or said I would do and plan to implement them. One of the first things I had said I’d do was to learn swimming and do astronomy. I have started taking baby steps in both these fields already. I will write about both of them in separate posts on this blog perhaps in the new year, as per the Malayalam calendar.

  • Link-Bunch for Week 5

    Every week I read a lot. I get this from various sources – from other blogs, to twitter, to facebook. This is an attempt to collect the week’s posts and news stories I read and liked in one place. Will be done weekly or as often as possible.

    1. Brain Pickings Blog: A 1928 letter to Jackson Pollock from his dad. Letter writing is a lost art. I sometimes wonder what great insights we’ll miss out on tomorrow’s leaders, writers and others because these are all electronic now and I wonder how accessible they will be.

    2. George Monbiot is a journalist who writes for the Guardian newspaper. In this piece, he explores how the fast breeder reactor might be the best bet we have with current technologies. His thinking is pretty realistic and grounded. I wonder if the Indo-US nuclear deal will push India away from such technologies and go back to less mature technologies to serve corporate interests.

    3. Vidyut writing almost hours after the Supreme Court verdict cancelling 122 licenses in the 2G Scam whose verdict was delivered presenting an alternative perspective. My only concern, which I believe is still not addressed, is how this verdict will be implemented.

    4. Sonali Ranade writing about how capitalism needs to reinvent itself. An important step back and take a look post.

    5. danah boyd writing about how parents normalized teen password sharing of websites like twitter and facebook. An important read, especially for the parents.

    6. Abhijit Bannerjee argues well for the need of better and honest data collection in India in this article from the Hindustan Times.

    7. Krishnadas Rajagopal reports in The Indian Express on the Supreme Court questioning the Army invoking the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA) to protect its officers from charges such as rape and murder. An important perspective on the continuing public debate on AFSPA.

    8. Since I’m in the ship building industry, I just read this item in passing. Ship freight rates have now become zero. You can now hire a ship, apparently, by just paying for the fuel charges!

    9. Nuiman writes in countercurrents.org on the problems faced by the Malayalam publication Free Press. This is a dated article from 2005 but worth a read.

    10. Jonathan Shainin writes in bookforum.com reviewing Katherine Boo’s book, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”. I yearn to read book reviews like this and aspire to write like this. Working on it :) .

    11. Emily Lakdawalla writes on The Planetary Society blog providing an awesome example on the keen sense of observation and what we can learn from it. It also is a push for naked eye astronomy that I have been slacking on. Worth a read, especially if you’re a parent.

    12. Strategic analyst B Raman writes on the impact of the Supreme Court verdict in the 2G scam on the up and coming UP elections.

    13. Stephen Clark reports for Spaceflight Now on the SpaceX successfully testing its launch abort system, an important step towards man rating the SpaceX’s Dragon capsule, which the US hopes to send astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS).

    14. A controversial film made by film maker Sanjay Kak called Jashn-e-Azadi was to be screened at a festival on Kashmir at the Symbiosis International University, Pune. The programme was cancelled because of pressure from the right-wing group, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and Pune Police. A student, Akshath Jitendranath, writes about dissent and its value in society and specially in the campus.

    15. Farah Rahman writes in The Mint about how Indian children are not encouraged to tinker.

  • An Obituary of a Tea Shop

    The management moved recently to remove all the tea shops in the ship yard where I work. The grapevine and the only reason known for the removal was to reduce the time wasted by engineers in the tea shop. This post is an obituary of one of the tea shops that was shut down.

    This happened two weeks ago. The tea shop that I used to frequent almost daily at 10.30 am was shut down. The grapevine spoke that the management had cleared all tea shops from the yard. This was a move, apparently, to reduce the time the engineers wasted here. I speak about the shop – a tin and plywood shack really – that was run by three ladies. The relationship among them was unknown. Their real names are also unknown. One lady was definitely old and the other two were definitely young – perhaps in their twenties.

    The central location of the shack meant that it attracted quite a large customer base – contractors, workers and engineers. The shop, in addition to tea also served up samosas, various farsan items, choclates, biscuits, cigarettes and tobbaco.

    The shack was a meeting place for engineers from different departments. It was also a meeting place where people at various levels – from workers to engineers and even managers spoke with each other. Enquiring about work – but also about people’s backgrounds. About their families and co-workers and their well being. Here, tea was bought, farsan was had. Many things that cannot be negotiated over email or in official settings were sorted out here. Co-workers and juniors confronted other co-workers and seniors on various things that concerned them – openly. The shack thus served a social function.

    The shack also addressed a problem. Our canteen is infrequently open and poorly stocked. The shack provided a solution by offering the aforementioned items at any hour of the working day. The quality of tea was also much better. Many people suggested, in conversations, suggested that the canteen staff be sent as trainees to the tea shack.

    I guess at some place in our minds, we knew that the shop would close down. The shop occupied a space where construction of the yard was progressing. It had to be removed for the construction to continue. It was also possibly not following many rules that such an establishment would have had to follow in a town or a city. However, this brief association with the shack proved to be a space where I met with many of my colleagues and my seniors – where we shared a cup of good tea and some idle chatter. Now, with the shop gone, we miss both. The day seems somehow incomplete and the people somewhat restless.

  • A new Dell Inspiron 14R

    I am now waiting for the arrival of a brand new laptop. This will be the first laptop that I buy off money that I earned. The laptop is a Dell Inspiron 14R, Intel Core i3 processor with a 2 GB RAM and a 350 GB Hard Disk configuration. This seems very little in today’s world of terabyte level consumption, however, this is what I have asked for.

    Only thing that put me off a bit in the Dell experience is that their website provided wrong information. Following this webpage, I went to the Staples store in R City Mall which had only 1 DELL laptop in the whole place! The Dell Experience Zone is actually on the ground floor inside Croma. A little off-putting but it’s now ordered and expecting it around November 8, 2011.

    Also thinking of reading Michael Dell’s book.