An Expectant Father

For a country that is mostly conservative, elderly family members are sure able to suspend any and all manner of delicateness when it comes to the serious matter of issues, or as The Hindu matrimonial ads would have it, encumbrances. Short of bluntly saying “Put sattney, produce baby”, there are several unsubtle tricks employed. An example -  “The caterer for my grandson’s Ayush homam makes an utterly delightful sambaar. You should seriously consider him, I mean, after you produce a baby of course”. There was also a “haha” at the end of that.

So after five years of what felt like the Battle of Helm’s Deep, waves of orcs throwing themselves at the battlements of our “free wille and righte to make babies at a tyme of our choosinge”, the wife announced one day that we were successfully enrolled in the dastardly plan to make economy class airflight more uncomfortable for fellow passengers. I said “Oh!” and went back to drawing rage toons. A few months later she told me we had to go for some sort of scan, where doctors take that most beautifully romantic idea of a baby inside a woman’s womb and turn it into a cryptic medical report written seemingly by crows who had dipped their feet into a bottle of Bril ink and walked all over the paper. Pregnancy sort of whizzed past without much ado, aided in no small measure by the fact that it was the wife who was doing all of the work while I pondered long and hard about what it would eventually mean to become a father.

I kept pondering as the wife increasingly complained about the baby’s tendency to kick a tad more than Wayne Rooney on coke. I offered to play a soothing prelude by Bach to see if the baby would kick less. It didn’t help.

The wife then seemed visibly discomfited by the Chennai heat and TNEB’s tendency to shed more load than snakes shed skin during this time. Since I didn’t have any influence in the matter of regulating the the earth’s movements relative to the sun, I really couldn’t help. In fact, she helped herself by going to work pretty much the entire 9 months because office had reliable air conditioning.

As we got closer to the due date, I thought perhaps now is the time for some serious discharging of fatherhood duties and prepared myself by installing several baby related apps on my iPhone and doing a whole lot of reading online. That didn’t help much. You see, the internet has this habit of telling you about Brain cancer when you google for headache. I asked her if she wanted any of those apps. She politely declined and asked me to install board games like this instead.

Eventually, at 3 am on the 11th of May, she woke me up and asked me to get ready. At that moment, I didn’t feel much like a to-be-father. I felt like Kamal Hassan in Tenali about to do a solo sky dive. I was as shaken up as my wife was chilled out. I attempted clumsily to take control of the situation and asked her if she was experiencing labour pain. She gave me an expression that suggested that Messrs Holmes had some serious blockages in his digestive system. We had to climb down a flight of stairs and I was worried if she could manage it. She then told me to relax, climbed down with the grace of a ballet dancer and got into the car and I drove. She even navigated as I didn’t know the route and once we reached the nursing home, an assortment of nurses descended on her, took her inside, and asked me to wait outside.

After hours of nervous pacing, the doctor came out with what appeared to be a mildly peeved small sized male human being who seemed more bothered about the harshness of the corridor’s tubelight than gazing upon the mien of his creator. He further reiterated his distinct disinterest in his dad by starting to cry.

After a few days, I offered to pacify the babe to give my wife a break from the routine. I somehow managed to reach some kind of resonance frequency with my patting and he seemed reasonably peaceful. I then put him down with the gentleness of a bomb disposal expert and gazed into his face as he still seemed to be looking around, eyes wide open. Now Wikipedia had told me that newborns are short sighted so one needs to get real close for them to see you. I had this feeling that we were having our first dad-son moment. What Wikipedia didn’t tell me was that newborns will mistake your nose for being a nipple, expect nourishment, get disappointed and start bawling.

When he was a week old, the wife asked me to cut his nails because he was scratching his own face with them. He was born with longish nails and my wife did not have fond memories of them as he had quite often attempted to draw scratch graffiti on the inner walls of the womb when he was inside. She handed me a “baby nailcutter” and I asked her where the rest of the equipment, namely a powerful magnifying glass, was. I wasn’t going to risk hurting his tiny fingers. She gave me a vote of confidence and I went through 3 nails successfully before the nailcutter pinched something other than nail and his cry pretty much came with the subtitles “Who hired this incompetent baby-attendant?”. A while later, I was changing his nappy and my inexperienced hands took way too much time as he ended up peeing in a projective path that was aimed at his own face before I finished. Womanly intervention was required again to pacify him.

What does fatherhood really mean? There are cliches about being a friend, philosopher, guide (and add-on credit card provider) but those come much later. What’s a father to a newborn mean? For several months I have no role to play in the arrangement of his full meals and tiffens. And the women in the house have mostly kept me away from nappies and once in a while they amuse themselves by watching me try to burp him while he attempts to extract milk from my ear lobe. Any attempt at googling for information and passing it off as advice is generally met with a “Do you have a womb? No? Then let us handle this” response.

I wonder if there is an expression for that feeling of being over prepared for what everyone around tells you is going to be a whole new difficult experience in life and then realizing that one’s help is not really required for quite a while. I suppose every man goes through this. 9 months of just twiddling ones thumbs as the baby chills out in the womb and a few more months of watching the women nurse it to some semblance of mobility before you have any kind of role to play. It’s like nature is trying to remind us men what insignificant role we really play in the production of the next generation. Visitors keep telling me I must feel like a proud father. I keep telling them that I feel like a manager who takes credit for someone else’ work.

Of course, I know he will grow up to become someone I can play with, buy Darth Vader suits for and introduce to T Rajendar, but till then, I suppose I am still an expectant father, and I just can’t wait.

What was I crowing about anyway?

Did you know that regular urban crows in Madras, the ones with the grey neck have a caw that is distinctly atonal and harsh sounding compared to the larger jungle crows (Ravens, Andankaakka), which have a softer, tonally pleasing caw despite their unfortunate (and mythical, I might add) employment as Yama’s messengers. Perhaps it was by design. If ravens are harbingers of doom, it makes a certain morbid sense for them to have a more pleasing ‘harbinging’ voice so that they can say – “You are all about to die” but say it in a dulcet voice that softens the impact of the message.

I once tried taking my guitar tuner near a raven to measure his caw frequency, but the crow did not seem very comfortable with that situation. He let out one brief caw before flying away, and that registered at E flat momentarily on my tuner. Next time, I hope to try this experiment by leaving some rice and the tuner right next to it (and hope the crow does not get interested in Korg tuners). Of course, since I cannot see the readings on a tuner from a distance and the tuner does not record its readings, I will have to leave my cellphone (with its video camera running) near the tuner (and hope the crow does not get interested in touch screen mobile phones). Or I could try Puppy Manohar’s brilliant solution

That apart, jungle crows tend to be loners while these greynecks stick together, like birds of a feather and all that. Greynecks are also smart. They will collaborate to steal food from dumber animals. I have seen them cheat my neighbour’s hapless Labrador of his snack biscuits by co-ordinating a smooth distract-and-pilfer manoeuvre with one of the crows first making enough noise to convince the dog that it is worth his effort to leave his biscuits, lift his bulky labrador body and come chasing after the crow. The dog of course obliges and chases after the bird. The crow then says “caw-caw-caw-ca-ca-caw“, which translates to “How is it that you never seem to remember that I have wings?” and flies away to safety. The dog, with his characteristic labrador fat tail wagging furiously, tongue hanging out and panting, is now mentally cursing himself, not for forgetting that crows can elevate themselves, but for forgetting that Mr Crow probably has an accomplice who is, at this very moment, picking up his biscuits and saying “caw-caw ca-ca“, which translates to “So long, sucker”. He then goes back to his spot, dejected, and lies down with his jaw resting on the ground and puts on his trademark sad-eyed look that says “I could do with a few more biscuits”. I could walk up to him at that moment and read aloud Lonely planet’s review of Madras and he wouldn’t care, unless he smelled biscuits on me. Dogs can be remarkably sophisticated when it comes to the incredible simplicity of their lives.

Now, why am I telling you all of this? Because I promised to.

And also because, 300+ comments, regionalist hate, and an unchanged Lonely Planet entry later, I needed a therapeutic post. Because Lonely Planet does not matter. In my desire to rebut their craptastic overview, I had to assume that their review actually matters in some meaningful sense, because unless they mattered, my post wouldn’t matter and if my post didn’t matter, I wouldn’t have posted, and since I did, this ridiculous chain of illogic must come to an end somewhere. Let’s just say that it was just one of those xkcd-esque moments. Somebody was wrong on the internet, and I had to get involved.

If you want to read a real introduction to Madras, read maami’s, not Lonely Planet’s.

I decided instead to make some small updates to my Madras map

And I also give my neighbour’s labrador some Tiger biscuits. He approves.

Swamijis and Science

Dear Spiritually Enlightened Person on TV in the mornings (and late nights),

I must first thank you for sharing your wisdom and understanding of the human condition with the masses. In the frenetic rat race we call urban life, your skillfully presented nuggets of common sense, wrapped in insightful readings of mythology and scripture, provide a small yet valuable window of time for people to introspect.

But I have problem when you pontificate on the impact of modern science and technology on the masses. So far, every one of you seems to belong to the camp that has declared technology to be the bane of our contemporary lives. You declare modern medicine to be a sham and urge people to value spiritual truth over scientific veracity, as if both of these were mutually exclusive entities. So I am afraid I am going to be a little blunt here.

By perpetrating the falsehood that scientifically verifiable truths are somehow inferior and trivial, you are being disingenuous. Science is a method, and technology, one of the tangible outcomes of applying that method. Like any subject of knowledge, there is nothing inherently good or evil about science. It’s what you do with it. Nuclear Bombs or mobile phone induced attention deficit disorder, it’s human choice, a behavioral flaw that you, with your insight into human nature, can effectively help address. But instead, what I find is this half-baked dismissal of science and technology on the whole, continual urgings to believe in mysteries and sadly, repeated warnings to not question certain religious truths. Every time an elderly relative of mine tells me with glee “Can your science explain this?” and point to some random occurrence of nature, I cringe and can’t help wonder how much your daily morning preaching on TV contributed to his cyclically reaffirming faith in the mysterious.

The other fallacy you often perpetrate is this whole “In those days…” nostaliga thing. While it’s important to appreciate the contribution of the past, our collective tendency, happily cheered on by you, to somehow believe that our glorious past was this paradise of peace, knowledge and pushpaka vimaanas serving gourmet meals in economy class, sweeps under the bed the harder to digest lessons of female infanticide, women’s rights, caste bigotry and gratuitous violence. Give credit where it’s due, but please do send the collection agents to defaulters once in a while.

So in a sense, you reinforce the average person’s convenient misconceptions (and ignorance) about the laws of nature. By dismissing scientists as being vain characters who have not come anywhere close to deciphering the mysteries of the cosmos, you are revealing a stunning ignorance of the advancement of human knowledge from a geocentric universe to dark matter, Quasars and Supernovas. By dismissing modern medicine, you conveniently ignore the shots of polio vaccine you likely received as a child that probably kept you from belonging to the infant mortality column, a rather common occurrence in those days incidentally. Life expectancy has gone up by almost 20 years (at least in Urban India) primarily because of better neo-natal care and advances in geriatrics.

Last but not the least, sitting in front of a television camera, a technological marvel that began its journey with Anton Van Leeuwhenhoek’s use of lenses for microscopy onwards to Galileo’s telescope, to John Logie Baird’s contraption to capture moving images, and speaking into a microphone, where vibrations from your voice causes a capacitor to generate an electric current proportional to the nuances in your voice, to transmit it across a wire that, along with the video signal, is amplitude and frequency modulated and beamed up to a satellite that was launched with a deep, mathematically precise understanding of escape velocities and embedded with gadgetry that takes your message and beams it to the world, your dismissal of science and technology causes me, and anyone with even a smidgeon of understanding of science to say – “WTF?”

Or, as Lollu Cat would say in such situtations,

photo © James Jones for openphoto.net CC:Attribution-ShareAlike

Pray, this is not arrogance speaking. Scientists question each other openly without fear of religion style recrimination, and also continuously build on each others knowledge. Your knowledge of human nature comes to you from your own keen observations and the abstraction of such knowledge over history by philosophers who used symbolism in the form of mythologies to embed such key observations. The symbols in our epics are memes, much like Lolcat is. In an era when we need a all-round understanding of both the scientific method and the spiritual truths about human nature that are so beautifully woven into the fabric of our mythology, you are doing, rather literally, a half-baked job. So if you are going to pass judgement on science, please do so after first understanding what it is. As the professor of calculus once said – “If you can’t differentiate, don’t integrate”. You are all extremely intelligent people. Not misrepresenting the scientific method is not that hard. Till then, apples and oranges please.

Actually, I am not asking you to just consider science and spirituality as apples and oranges. I’m really saying that I prefer Panchaamrutham. At the moment, you are discarding perfectly healthy oranges.

Update: The above-mentioned spiritually enlightened godman who wasn’t a fan of science was undone recently by an apparatus involving CCD sensors, some flash memory and a battery. Just FYI

My experiments with tooth

Revolutions tend to begin silently, and secretly, and often start small. Secrecy is like a nanny, often needed in those initial stages, but growing up necessitates the termination of a nanny’s services. And when it’s time to break out, it’s all or nothing. It takes uncommon courage to be revolutionary. To do the unpopular because it is the right thing to do. But revolutionaries die young. The price of rebellion is at best death, at worst, torture or exile.

GP was a revolutionary.

He was destined for glory right from when he was small. He broke all the rules. He loved the good life. He liked chocolate. Of the dark, sticky variety. As a teenager, they called him names. Deviant, crooked and a troublemaker, they called him. Nothing good will ever come of him, they declared. But as he grew larger and mightier, the world could not ignore him. Love him or hate him, there was no ignoring him. His influence was starting to worry the nearby nation of Gingiva.

Soon enough, the high priests of Gingiva had convened. “It is our responsibility”, they solemnly announced. “The moral turpitude of that base rascal GP bothers us. It is our burden to keep our neighbours stable, and not let them sink into cavities of chocolate induced greed. What will happen if everybody wants to live the good life?”. GP, they decided, had to be confronted. But it was not that easy. GP had grown larger than life, and commanded an influence well beyond the high priests abilities to deal with. GP could not be willed away. He had to be betrayed, and some one just had to bite the thirty pieces of silver.

But betrayal does not come easily. The high priests were not popular in their land, and a mass swelling of pride in the land of Gingiva was inevitable.  But the tale took a tragic turn as this swelling of pride was mistakenly interpreted by the kingdom of Dent as a precursor to military aggression. The priests smiled. They knew this would happen all along. The tragedy of the commons. The authorities of Dent panicked and sent an emissary to the court of Orthodont, the most powerful nation in the land.

“Oh mighty Orthodont, we are under grave threat from our neighbours, the Gingiva. While we could have dealt with this threat in the past, we have grown weak, our erstwhile mighty defences enfeebled by that popular rogue GP. He has grown mighty, and he wields influence, and we believe he is in truck with the enemy. We need your help”

The Grand Wizard of the Orthodont sighed and cogitated thus – “It always comes to this eh? But at first, our machines of war need intelligence. We need to understand GP’s weakness before we order a surgical strike. Go ask your Farseer Roentgen to give us a closer view of GP’s fortress in the nether worlds of Dent.”

Farseer Roentgen’s prognosis was graver than expected. GP had grown large, crooked and was spreading his malevolence far and wide, he said. The Grand Wizard declared that there was no time to lose, but an immediate surgical strike was fraught with danger. GP was popular, and he had on his side, the swelling Gingiva and his fast growing army who were in his thrall. GP had to be weakened from the inside. He had to be betrayed, as the high priests had correctly deduced.

Orthodont sent his spy Imol to poison GP and weaken his influence. GP was being drugged. To be rendered powerless when the surgical strike is ordered.
For weeks, GP fought valiantly against the influence of the narcotic that was weakening his hold, but today, the day of reckoning had arrived. Th Grand Wizard ordered the strike. He put on a fantastic last stand, resisting the might of Orthodont and surprising their machines of war with his uncommon size and stength. And in the end, he died, bloodied in battle.

R.I.P Gnaana Pal (Wisdom Tooth)
Born – Unknown
Died – 27th Dec 2008
You have left a hole in the soul of our land. Crooked and deviant, you might have been, but you lived the good life.

Dear 21yr old fake Versace T-shirt wearing guy

Was it the virgins or did you expect to be back home after your exploits in Mumbai? I am also told that your brainwashers don’t necessarily specifiy  the gender of the virgins supplied in the Mission-Accomplished-Bar you guys chill out after your courageous displays of blowing up unarmed civilians. In my opinion, I don’t really think virgin women (and men) dig your kind of kill-for-statistical-glory bravado. Playing video games involves more bravery because the AI at least shoots back.

So what was the point really? To shut India down? So you think repeatedly attacking Mumbai enough times will push it over the edge into collapse. Um. Not going to happen, and I am not speaking with chest-thumping Rambo-style aggression, or Dubya style bring-it-on fake machoness. I know my India well enough to know its limitations. We have our fair share of corrupt, ineffective politicians, a slower-than-a-three-toed-sloth administration, a crippled alertness and rescue infrastructure, and an educated middle-class that mostly does not participate in the democratic process. We also have people like Raj Thackeray, but the India I know is not likely to panic and indulge in an overdose of security theatre. I speak as someone who has lived in Mumbai in the past and studied at OLPS, Chembur for a couple of years, eaten its Vadapav and wolfed down its Pani puri. Listen to this. While the NSG was flushing you guys out of the Taj, the city was already back on its feet, back to doing what it does best, learning from its mistakes and moving on.

Guess what. The city will slowly, yes, painfully, learn, and do what it needs to do to keep itself safer. Mumbai will demand that the administration be better prepared, and that a local version of the NSG be created. Mumbaikars understand something that your guns and grenades cannot blow away. They understand the myth of 100% security, and that it’s more important to live and enjoy one’s life while being sensibly prepared for the worst. That spirit, I am told, is more or less bomb proof. The people I’ve been following on Twitter and occasionally on TV all exemplify this attitude. While our media will chew on this fodder for a few more weeks, the city will take a deep breath, commit to memory, and reboot.

Other minor matters. One hears that the plan was to “Marriot” the Taj? To bring a historical building down and sear the collective consciousness of an entire city?

It’s still standing.

Again, no misplaced pride here. Perhaps a slightly better understanding of civil engineering might have helped, but then again, had you guys paid more attention to the teachers in your school than the brainwashers who packaged a suicide mission as a go-buy-some-candy-for-me request with a return plan, you might have learned enough to call their bluff.

A small request to the Taj hotel management. How about a one-week, all-expenses-paid vacation for these guys at your hotel? This was about the only time they could have afforded to sit in your reception

The Dummies’ Guide to the US Elections

It’s well into 2008 and another US election is around the corner, and therefore, like any other dutiful blog in the blogosphere, it is my duty to comment on it despite the fact that I neither have the knowledge nor the perspective to comment. And therefore, that makes me perfectly qualified to author the “Dummies’ guide to the US elections”.

(Thanks Chittaranjan)

American elections are important to the world because we never know where they are going to drop bombs next, and a close analysis of media chatter is necessary to figure out if one’s country is in some sort of “axis of evil”. So let’s get right down to the key issues at stake, shall we?

All US elections are fundamentally about left vs right. The Democrats are Left (usually licking their wounds), and the Republicans are Right (in the thick of stealing elections). The Democrats believe that it’s right that the rest of the world is best left alone. The Republicans believe that they have the right to invade what’s left of the world.

In the interest of brevity, for the rest of the post, the Democrats shall be referred to as Ds (as in Docile Donkeys), and the Republicans shall be referred to Rs (as in Rogue Elephants).

The Ds want to kill babies. The Rs prefer to kill women. Ds are anti-business and the Rs are anti-worker. Ds talk about securing jobs while outsourcing the manufacturing of “Obama-Biden” bumper stickers to China. Rs talk about securing America while outsourcing the torture of prisoners to other countries. Ds believe that gay marriages between man and animal are OK. Rs believe that not-so-gay marriages between priests and young boys are OK. Ds don’t believe in family values. Rs believe strongly in family values such as the sanctity of marriage and abstention, as long as one is not a former prisoner of war or a 20-month old Alaskan governor.

Ds are best described as a pluralized slang term for cats lacking patriotism while Rs are best described as people with scarlet shading in the neck area indulging in ugly jingoism. Ds believe in bombing the hell out of places where there is a faint suspicion of the presence of a man named OBL. Rs believe in bombing the hell out of places where there is a whiff of this thing called OIL. Ds are like remixed dubchick Bob Dylan music. Rs are like country music. Ds prefer to save polar bears while making America energy starved. Rs will run their extra large SUVs on the fat of polar bears, if necessary. Ds are out-of-touch elites. Rs are rich old white people.

Ds want to take hard earned money from rich people and distribute it to poor, unproductive people. Rs want tax cuts for the rich and build gulags for factory workers. Ds are French. Rs have so many balls that it impedes their movement. Ds follow racist black priests. Rs are generally racist.

Ds have blogs. Rs have Fox news. Ds believe that the media has a conservative bias. Rs believe that it’s an evil liberal media out there. In reality, the US media, like any other, has a monetary bias.

Thank you.

Back from the brink

The wordpress editor feels like heaven right now, with angels playing Beethoven on ethereal harps and other things like that. It feels like crisp onion rava masala from Saravana Bhavan. It feels like the “Ga Ma Ni Da Ma” section of Reeti Gowlai. It feels like how Andy Dufresne felt when he escapes from Shawshank prison.

Stop. Rewind. Explain

So why all this unbridled adulation?

Astute readers might have noticed a complete lack of activity on the blog since July 20th. That was the day that I woke up in Toronto, Canada and found that two very bad things had happened.

• My gmail account (since 2005) had disappeared. Much like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank Redemption. Disappeared. Gone. Deleted. So in one inexplicable cyberswoosh of e-tragedy, my digital life was wiped out. All my contacts, emails and chat transcripts. Gone. The first groundnut-putting email I sent the girl who went on to become my wife. Gone. The first version of the first ever song I recorded on Garageband and sent to my close friends. Gone.
• I could not login to my wordpress account. It seemed like somebody had taken it over and changed the password on it. The email domain to which it was registered was a fairly well known scammer domain. So they could have turned this blog into something obscene. Like a Kumar Sanu fan blog or something.

I could use some more drastic similies to describe what I felt like, but I’ll spare you. So the last 4 days have been a desperate exercise in (trying to) contact Google support to find out what on earth happened. Now, trying to find the Gmail ticket submission form is sort of like a mirage in the desert. One thinks it’s out there, right there, but it’s actually pretty hard to find. Eventually I did log a ticket and pretty much got an instantaneous response, fully sealed in aluminium.

Thank you for your report. We’ve completed our investigation. Because our investigation was inconclusive, we are unable to return your account at this time. At Google we take the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we’re unable to reveal any further information about this account.

So essentially I was being told that in order to protect the privacy of my (recently deceased) account, no further information will be revealed to the owner of the account. Sort of like the Military telling parents that they are unable reveal whether their son is dead or alive because of national security reasons, but in any case, he won’t be returning home.

That was Google. I don’t blame them. One cannot provide free support for free email. But what about WordPress? They are free and open source to boot. How good was their support?

For a change, I got to talk to human beings, not bots packaging responses in aluminium. Antony, Noel and Heather from WordPress support took the pains to read my lengthy, verbose emails explaining why I was the real Krish Ashok, and that somebody from a suspicious domain had hijacked my account recently, and today, they restored my access. I quickly changed my password to a string that contains, among other things, Hieroglyphics, Klingon and musical notes in addition to alphanumeric characters, and I am back posting.

I recently finished playing what I think is one of the greatest video games of all time – Portal, and the villanous GLaDOS cheats me in the end by not giving me the cake that was due to me, but to the WordPress support team, here you go. You deserve it.

Update: July 28th – Google restored my account, and all the data. Thank you Vish and Thaths for helping out from the inside. So this black forest cake is for everyone involved.

Thank you WordPress.

ps: Note changed email/gtalk. Plisxcuse and update your contacts.

Book Cricket, age unknown, R.I.P

Dear Reader, 

For some reason, the IPL T20 tournament reminded me of something I used to be passionate about many years ago. 

A decade ago, a game died, and there was sadly nobody to write a eulogy. This is a humble attempt to remember that great game, its classy origins and the treacherous road to its eventual demise.

The game was called Book Cricket. Those of you who are young (in other words, those of you who spell What as Wat  and Anyways as NEwez) may not be aware that such a game existed. But it did, and it held its own against fierce rivals such as Hand Cricket, French Cricket and the rather bowler-friendly One-bounce-out Cricket. 

The unique advantage Book Cricket had was its ability to fill up those dreadfully boring periods of time all of us are forced to waste in school classrooms, unlike the other games which required outdoor space and time. The classic version of this game a involved large, voluminous book (hereinafter referred to as The Book) being randomly opened and the last digit of the page number being scrutinized like Dickie Bird pondering over a leg-before decision. 2, 4 and 6 counted as they were, and 8 counted as 1 run. A page number ending in 0 was of course out. Games were nerve wracking as tomes were jerked open with adrenaline fuelled excitement with complex strategic manoeuvres being played out between opponents. 

There were the Openers (the ones who opened The Book first) and the Middle-Order (players who preferred opening The Book right down the middle, as if it had magical powers that kept the dreaded zero-ending page numbers away) and the annoying Accumulators (who would fold certain pages that end in a 6 and keep opening that very page till somebody realized that something was rotten in the state of CBSE pass mark). Games lasted 2 innings and the final innings was usually a spine tingling affair, and often some idiot would get over-excited and attract the attention of the teacher who was busy trying to force feed us “4 key factors that resulted in World War 1“. 

There were many choices for The Book, but my personal favourite was Wren and Martin. But with increased teacher vigilance, exam pressures and smaller books, the longer version of Book Cricket started to wane in popularity. Time suddenly became money and all that sort of thing, and Book Cricket had to evolve the OMI format – The One Minute International. Each team had 30 openings of The Book, and the highest scorer won. It had little of the finesse of the longer version with careful, well-thought out strategies being thrown to the dogs and unbridled aggression becoming more and more popular. The Book started taking a good amount of wear and tear as the slam-bang version of the game introduced a new brand of Openers, called Pinch-Tearers, who had the nasty habit of unleashing a high pressure separation of pages using their thumbs and index fingers in rapid succession.

But the advent of the computer and the internet dealt another blow to this game. Who wanted to be flipping pages when one could use the special six-hit button on Codemasters’ Brian Lara Cricket? The BCCI (Book Cricketers Council of India) tried desperate measures. They shorted the game even more. 5 page flips per team, and it was even branded as F5. It even encouraged the use of magazines such as Stardust and Filmfare as The Book, so that our players could additionally have the pleasure of staring at Kimi Katkar and Pooja Bedi when they opened a page. 

But the final death knell was sounded when companies was invited to advertise in The Book. Players now had to look at advertisements on the pages they opened. Page numbers started carrying subliminal brand messages, like 24 nutrients in Complan, 300 percent purity in Kalyani Covering Gold etc. The game became secondary, as players spent more and more time discussing the finer aspects of Kimi Katkar’s anatomy and becoming consumerist zombies staring at brand messages all day. 

The game then died. 

ps: I wrote this for the New Indian Express Saturday supplement called Zeitgeist this week. 

Help. I am a Hypowebiac

Dear Doctor,

Go get an X-Ray done

No no wait. First listen to me. I believe I am suffering from a new hitherto undiscovered syndrome.

Oh. Ok. Go get an MRI scan and a Feline Scan.

Can I at least describe my problem first?

Hmm. I’m not used to this sort of gross deviation from standard operating procedure. Ok. First promise me that that after you tell me your problem, you will go to Ssri Kaamalegshumi Scans in Pallavaram and get all your scans done. I don’t diagnose anything without them.

Ok. I promise. So here is my problem. I believe I’m suffering from Hypowebia

Eh?

It’s a troublesome mental condition that forces its victim too connect everything to the internet. At times it turns into a depression that comes from a constant state of regret that the availability of the internet earlier in human history could have changed the course of civilization. The disease consumes every bit my mental processing power (which is not exactly Core 2 Duo), as it uses several computation intensive algorithms to construct elaborate what-if fantasies involving crucial historical events and their hypothetical connection to the world wide web.

Go get all the scans done please.

No wait. Let me explain it to you. Have you head of Google Suggest?

Nopes.

Well, its a tool that presents search suggestions based on statistical analysis of others’ search patterns, such as the one shown below

Ah. I see. A Wisdom-of-Crowds view of America.

Oh yes. And very democratic. For instance,

So my mind is constantly thinking about how Google suggest could have had other interesting consequences. Perhaps religious people during Darwin’s time could have been persuaded to drop their foolish belief in

And perhaps Herr Adolf could have avoided disaster by trying this query

If the good Archduke had bothered to check Gavrilo Princip’s facebook profile on that fateful day, the world could have been spared World War 1

In fact it gets even worse. Some kid asked me what the Protestant Reformation was really about, and all I could think of was this:

Another kid asked me how the Mahabharatha was transmitted orally over the ages, and I said “The original guys subscribed to Vyasa’s podcast and recorded their own version of the podcast and reuploaded to iTunes. And so on. “

Another question was about how the original archaeological remains of Troy were found. And all I could say was that Schliemann conducted the excavation, but it was reported by diggers as being possibly inaccurate.

And what were my thoughts on Socrates’ speeches in the marketplace in Athens? “5 Insightful”

And why was Ulysses such a turning point in James Joyce’ literary career? That was when he moved from Blogspot to WordPress

And the sensitive question on the historical origin of the gender bias? The annoying American accented “You’ve got male”

I need help doc. I see the web everywhere.

Stop surfing for 2 weeks. And 1 tablet of The Hindu Daily morning for curing Insomnia. And don’t forget Ssri Kaamalegshumi Scans

What’s in a spelling?

Dear Flying Spaghetti Monster,

I have a confession to make. Over the years, I have logged an untold number of person-hours LOL-ing, ROFL-ing, ROFLOL-ing, taking mobile cam shots and showing to friends and ROFL-ing together at unintentionally funny spellings in Indian restaurant menus. And since we are talking about food, I thought it might be appropriate to invoke thy holy noodly presence and share my thoughts with you.

I used to think that I was part of a small clique of above-average spellers who found vicious joy in laughing at spelling gaffes, but when I see whole blogs dedicated to them, newspaper sections (with photographs no less), I feel my mirth dissolving like sugar cubes into already over-sweet tea.

So I have made a list, and I would like all well-to-do, middle-class, urban, lucky-enough-to-have-gone-to-a-school, rich, college-educated, white-collar, blog-writing, net-surfing, mall-hopping, multiplex-ing, over-consuming, car-driving, polluting folks of India (like me) to ROFL, LOL, ROFLOL for one last time, and then, stop finding this so funny.

I realize that humour is either intentional, or the outcome of embarrassing pomposity exhibited by the high and mighty, and not a result of a struggling man who left his village to run a “Chaines” joint out of a ramshackle van struggling to communicate what he’s trying to sell in an illogical, unphonetic language he has never been taught in his life.

Thank you for your patient hearing, Oh Noodly one. I will do Abhishekam with Arabiatta sauce as penance for my shameless elitism over the years.