Doing Jalsa and Showing Jilpa

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.

Thank you WordPress.

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

One would expect

Pronto: –adverb Informal. promptly; quickly.

Right?

In Toronto,

Pronto: –noun A flatbread that originated in the Indian subcontinent. It is usually made with whole-wheat flour, pan fried in ghee or cooking oil, and often stuffed with vegetables, especially boiled potatoes, radish or cauliflower and/or paneer (Indian cheese).

So I find myself in Toronto, Ontario, which is actually an extension of Amritsar (sort of like Niagarey wale Gali) and it has more Pnjaabi restaurants per square millimetre than any other place in North America. And where Pnjaabis are to be found, can their accent be far behind? For instance,

I sport congrass

does not refer to a person wearing a new kind of grass called “con”. It actually refers to throwing ones lot in with a particular political party in India.

The rules of Pnjaabi English are ridiculously simple and logical.

• Gobble, munch and swallow first vowel sound (with Mint da chutney and Mango da pickle) if it lies between 2 consonants that can be joined together like Heer and Ranjha. (Like S&P, C&R, S&T etc)
• Extend 2nd vowel sound
• And “uh” to the end
• Eliminate all plurals when you speak

Accents and flatbreads aside, I finally saw the Niagara Falls from the Canadian side, and the view, I must say, is nothing short of amaklamatically spectacular. Apparently Niagara dumps 154 million litres of fresh water every minute, enough to make every unscrupulous Thanni lorry operator in the history of Thanni lorry operators salivate. Like Ian Salisbury standing next to Shane Warne, there is a distinctly unawesome “American Falls” next to the Canadian Horseshoe, but it’s just there to allow Canadians to gloat.

And that brings me to Canada itself. A curious country. It’s a formerly British, adamantly French, culturally American and soon-to-be entirely Pnjaabi country that’s mostly empty once you drive a 100 miles (sorry, 160 km) north of the border with the US. Like its behemoth neighbour, it too has a glorious tradition of exterminating Native American tribes and naming places after them (Saskatchewan, Ontario, Manitoba etc). With a population slightly larger than North Usman road (Ok. Slightly more that, I’ll admit) and enough land area to swallow India quite a few times over, it is a beautiful, green country with vast open spaces only occassionally dotted by Brar’s Pnjaabi Kitchens. It is also almost entirely covered, as you might expect, with Maple trees.

Since it’s summer here, the sun rises at unholy hours and sets at unearthly hours and that tends to put us near-the-equator types, a bit off. But since I can sleep even with strobe lights and heavy metal music around, it doesn’t bother me much.

The Canadian economy is mostly sustained by desi tourists from the US paying speeding fines due to the non-realization of the fact that the “90″ on Canadian speed-limit signs refers to km/h. Canada is metric while the US is psychotic (they use miles, gallons and other non-intuitive units).

Here is a question for all of you. When Carnatic artistes tour Canada and sing “Alaipayudhey”, do you think the audience will snigger when the raaga’s name is mentioned?

Anyway, more when I get back to Madras.

Update: This post is not an open invitation for a Paratha vs Parotta war as armistice has already been declared. I would like to distract all of you from this with a new feature on the blog - the avatar chronology

Update 2: Photos of Niagara, thanks to my colleague, co-traveller and friend Bala

It is a bright, hot day in July, and the clocks were striking for better pay. I have been busy watching, in one go, 3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica, and today morning, while putting on a shirt that felt distinctly uncottony, I was wondering whether Battlestar Cottonica was at war with the Nylons. Not good at all. And in this state of mind , I find myself apartment hunting in Chennai.

It’s not easy. Apartments in the city cost an arm, a leg, and another arm. Where have all the “L”s gone? It’s all “C”s now. A 1200 sqft apartment in Adyar will cost x + iy(where x is what I can afford, and y is the imaginary component I need to cough up extra). Car parking extra. Water charges extra. Registration extra. Oxygen extra. It turns out that I have a choice between a dog kennel in T Nagar and a luxurious apartment in the outskirts of Palayamkottai.

But in this process, I have now achieved the equivalent of an SCJP certification in REPML (Real Estate Peter Markup Language), and I can now, without even blinking, figure out what a 1450 3BHK CCP 1C near Adyar BS means. But REPML is for beginners. Real pros talk REVML (Real Estate Visual Markup Language) and I am still a beginner at that.

REVML was invented by our ancestors in Africa, millions of years ago. It was when mankind had to move out of his ancient homes to seek newer pastures and set in motion the wheels of human history that the first real estate agencies were setup, and presumably, somewhere in the Central Africa, long ago, a real estate broker was planning to advertise new “projects” that were being developed in Jericho, near modern day Jerusalem.

That was when the world’s first real estate advertisement was drawn up after lengthy deliberations, such as,

Boss, Israel is too far away. How do we convince people to move to our new projects there?

Ah. No worries. All we need to do is draw a map that is not to scale, and simply forget to tell everyone that it isn’t. Just move the horn of Africa a little up, and no one will notice. After that, we just add a few attractive landmarks nearby, rephrase certain unfortunately named nearby lakes, stress on the centrality of its location, and we are done.

So now you know. Moving forward in history, REVML was handed down from generation to generation, as it continued to adapt to the times and boldly maintain its status as the bastion of real estate obfuscation over the ages.

So today, in modern day Tamil Nadu, REVML continues to evolve, and one can find many fine examples in the newspapers. The Hindu Property Plus is a particularly keen patron of this ancient art.

So what’s next? Advertising Alpha Centauri as being just a “stone’s throw” away from the sun? Advertising the risky star system next to the Cygnus X-1 black hole as “Just on the outskirts of the Event Horizon”?

Chennai, 3672 A.D.

The golden rays of the setting sun made the translucent spires of Chennai Spaceport glisten, causing a brilliant interplay between bright bursts of light and the thousands of black and yellow A.U.T.Os (see glossary) ferrying passengers to and from the spaceport, as Counassegarane stood watching from his high-rise apartment in Trisulam Sector V. I need to get myself a new hypershirt from the local Saravana Gigamart, he thought to himself, as he attempted, in vain, to tune the temperature settings on his 2-year old thermosensitive hypershirt to a comfortable 293 (Kelvin). He had taken the 7.14 FTL coach out of Pondicherry  and it had been an enervating day since then. Sipping on his Pansolaric Coffeeblaster, he couldn’t help wonder why the drink was so pricey in Chennai. He didn’t mind it much, as the low cost of P.C in Pondicherry brought the tourists in droves, and that was good for the local economy. The rogue weekend 2-wheel roadcruiser crowd was a bit of a nuisance, but he didn’t mind them much.

He thoughts drifted to the day’s events. Sure, he might be Sambaria’s top Pseudomicrobiologist, with years of experience dealing with dangerous pseudomicrobes, but this was different. It began with Dr. Sastram’s terse “Guna, we have a situation” as he was woken abruptly from his sleep this morning by high priority mentalcast. Not many in this part of the world had mentalcast access, so it was with a pregnant sense of unease that he walked into P.O.I (Pseudomicrobiology Oversight Institute) headquarters on South Mada Hyperavenue, Mylapore Sector II.

We could have an outbreak on our hands, said the good doctor, and we need your help. Guna sighed. Holy Mother of Melmaruvatthur, an outbreak? How did this happen?

Our sensors detected a mild breach in a flat on Devanathan Parkway, but the guard on duty didn’t pay much attention, as minor breaches were all too common nowadays, what with the A.C.L.U (Antipseudomicrobiology Covenant of Liberal Universalists) spreading their vile propaganda on Orkut. But before we could blink our eyes, the minor breach became a catastrophe, with the entire apartment becoming contaminated. We had to send in the S.P.I.T (Secure Pseudomicrobiologists Intervention Taskforce) to take care of the situation, but I suspect we might have been too late. The doctor then explained to Guna, the full scale of the unhholy mess of a situation at hand.

“Can somebody explain to me what exactly is going on here?”

Goddammit. The last thing we wanted. The cops. The M.A.M.A squads (Madras Anti-Miscreant Assault) were a necessary evil in this city. They hardly ever solved any cases, but they did keep the nasty 2-wheel road cruisers in check by fining them constantly for everything from helmet tensile strength to inaccuracies in the insurance coverage amounts at the 4th decimal place.

Let me explain, Guna said.

Haliocentrica Asininus (H.A for short) and Pathotropius Thupuli (Patthu for short) are two of the most deadly pseudomicrobes known to mankind. The most deadly one, Varnus Manusmritus, has fortunately been exterminated from this part of the world. It is still rumoured to exist in the wilder parts of Bovinia (also known as “The Cow Belt”) but we do not have to worry about it here. Coming back to H.A and Patthu, H.A is present in human saliva, and spreads through reckless practices such as Water-bottle-sharing and Joint-Romantic-Sipping. But more dangerously for us, it also has the ability to spread through stainless steel plates. So if the plate you are eating from makes contact with another vessel, contamination occurs, and we have a level-3 minor breach, which is what occurred at 06.51 today morning at Devanathan Parkway. But it didn’t stop there. The perpetrator wasn’t satisfied with just releasing H.A to the unsuspecting world, but he had to unlock the prison doors of its evil cousin, Pathotropius Thupuli. Paathu has a more complex infection pattern. It is generally an inactive pseudopathogen, but comes alive when one or more of the following (not exhaustive) happen

• Rice is boiled
• Sambar is prepared
• Aloo Podimaas is cooked

This is when extreme precaution is required. Patthu has a pathological hunger for non-patthu items, like milk or curd. It is absolutely necessary to detoxify and irradiate any and all items that have come into contact with patthu-containing items. But our perpetrator from the morning could not have done any worse. Here is what he did.

He woke up in the morning, went to the nearby laser barber, had a haircut, and then, without having a bath, raided the fridge, took rice that was boiled yesterday, and with the same hands, poured curd on top of it, and with these very toxic hands, opened the bottle of Maavadu pickle, and horror of horrors, placed all the containers back in the fridge, touching each other!! As an icing on this toxic cake, he then proceeded to Nageswara Rao Sky Garden and had a romantic Joint-Curd-Rice-Eating-From-Same-Plate rendezvous with his girlfriend.

Oh. My. Gawd, exclaimed the cop. Sriharikota. We have a problem.

Glossary

A.U.T.O - Aerial Unmetered Transportation Orbs - Black and yellow Urban public transport vehicles that use a combination of non-linear algebra and chaos theory to determine fare.

FTL Coach - Faster than Light coach

Pansolaric Coffeeblaster - The greatest drink in the Milky way.

Pandegree Coffeeblaster - Available only in Kumbakonam sector, this is the only drink greater than the Pansolaric Coffeeblaster.

Sambaria - Formed in 3392 A.D, when the erstwhile southern states of India (and Sri Lanka) seceded from the rest of the subcontinent to form a country that was entirely filled with Engineering colleges and IT consultants. Originally named Srikartamkeldhra by taking syllables from each of the constituent members, after several died from aneurysms trying to pronounce that name. Eventually, after many years of intense debate, they decided to name the country after the most ubiquitous dish in the region.

The first ever video game I ever played was a small, handheld thingie involving driving away hungry wolves from sheep grazing peacefully in a farm. When the first PC arrived at home, a mighty 386 with a whopping 4 MB RAM, I was introduced to Prince of Persia, an scrolling arcade type rescue-princess-from-evil-vizier adventure, which came on a couple of floppies from a neighbour who also gave us our first virus. After the customary reformatting and re-installation of DOS, which sort of became almost a monthly ritual till I eventually realized, thanks to my younger brother, that the trifecta of restart, reformat and reinstall as problem resolution methods was something unique to the world of Microsoft, and that there existed a world (mostly involving penguins and apples) where OS crashes and viruses were actually rarer and problems usually had logical methods of resolution. Now wait, where was I? Yeah, Prince of Persia. I wasn’t too great at playing that game. I liked to delude myself that mastering keystrokes to kill dungeon guards was not worth it. The real truth of course was that my younger siblings were much better at gaming, and at that age, having them be better than you at anything tends to rankle, and therefore, I made a tactical decision to consider video games not worth my time.

But eventually, temptation struck, and I just had to mow down aliens as Duke Nukem and shoot Nazis in Castle Wolfenstein, although I had to swallow my pride and finish these games in God mode, while my brothers were kicking gluteus maximi in “Bring em on” mode. Once I was out of my teens, and realized that beating up pedestrians and stealing cars while evading the police was more important to my life than the need to maintain a facade of disinterest in gaming, I took to Grand Theft Auto like Sehwag takes to short balls outside off stump. Ok, I mostly kept edging to the keeper, but you get my drift, right? I just liked driving around town, crushing the occasional pedestrian, trying out cheat codes, all while listening to the in-game radio stations. Brilliant stuff, especially the host of the Western classical station who jokes - “Now we have some music from the 60s……the 1760s hahaha”.

And so it continued, this on and off interest in gaming, till a few months ago, when my brother forced me to sit down and watch him play Half Life 2. The unique and immersive storyline and innovative game play convinced me that it is not a coincidence that the gaming industry is now bigger than Hollywood. Thus began a crazed attempt to catch up on all the games I had missed over the last few years. I spent a full 5 days completing Call of Duty, and for the first time, I realized what a powerful learning mechanism games can be. There is a level in the first CoD, where, as a Russian soldier being sent to war for the first time, you are instructed by your Commissar that you will be provided with ample food, weapons and ammunition. The moment you step out of the boat docking at Stalingrad, with artillery pounding away in every direction, you are handed a round of ammunition, and no gun. You need to make a mad run towards your superior officer, while suffering from shell shock and having bullets flying all around. Short of actually being at Stalingrad in 1943, this is the best possible first person WW2 experience one can go through. You may have read in your history books that the Russians were the underdogs against the more disciplined, and better equipped German army, but it’s not until I was (albeit virtually) forced to run, with 1 round ammunition and 0 gun, through the docks of Stalingrad in CoD that I truly realized what being the underdog in WW2 really meant. So please stop reading history books and start shooting Nazis with a Logitech mouse instead. It’s way more fun.

Anyway, first person shooters aside, what I am really excited about is Will Wright’s upcoming “Spore”, a highly anticipated game that promises to explore evolution in all its diverse glory using a unique engine that allows players to literally play the FSM in designing and controlling creatures and eventually building societies and entire civilizations. While I wait for the game to come out, EA has released the Creature Creator, and it seemed like a good idea to design Spore versions of different creatures we find commonly in the Indian subcontinent.

1. Medievalwarrius Hindumakkalcatchicus

This creature has a small brain, which explains its narrow minded interpretation of Indian culture, and has eyes that face backward, which explains why it has an almost unholy obsession with the past, and steadfastly refuses to look forward.

Mob behavior: As individuals, generally safe, although annoying to no end. Can be dangerous in mobs though. Possesses little or no capability for individual thinking.

Habitat: South India, especially near areas of pointless controversy, short skirts and other non-issues, that seem to attract these in large numbers.

Front view: Note the suction pad legs, designed to help it stick to non-issues.

Back view - Note the eyes on stalks, firmly facing backward. No looking forward for these guys,

And the moment it finds an actress wearing a short skirt, the typical response is something like this

2. Yetchwonbeeus Fanaticus

With 3 pairs of hands, all perfectly designed for typing code, email and spreadsheets, and one pair of vestigial legs, because it has little or no use for them, this creature possesses a ravenous and addictive desire for the rare fruit Yetchwonbee Visae and will go to any end to obtain one.

Mob behavior: Several members of this species gather everyday in long lines, come hell or high Cooum water, around trees that bear the Yetchwonbee fruit.

Habitat: Predominantly Andhra and TN, with smaller populations found everywhere else.

Front view - Note the 3 pairs of hands in perfect position to hit alt-tab 10,000 times a day, and the single third eye completely focussed on onsite opportunities

Side view - Note the regular pair of eyes aimed directly at the sky at all times, in constant prayer to acquire the juicy Yetchwonbee fruit.

And this is what happens when it finds the fruit

3. Bureaucratus Underthetabli

With a specially evolved 2nd pair of hands perfectly designed to collect items (usually of the currency kind) from under pieces of furniture, this slothful scavenger species is widespread in the subcontinent.

Mob behavior: In large concentrations, this species leaves behind a sticky residue known as redtapea that has the unfortunately side effect of slowing down every other species in the neighbourhood.

Front view - Note the upper pair of hands in a permanent “I’m so busy, come later” pose. Also, the large mouth that indicates a voracious appetite for bribes.

Side view - Note the perfectly arched body and bottom pair of hands ideal positioned perfectly for all forms of under-the-table-acceptance activities.

And here is the typical behavior when potential bribes are sensed in the neighbourhood.

4. Politicus Kaaseythaankadavulus

With one pair hands locked in a permanent “Namaste” gesture overhead, and 2 pairs of highly evolved greedy grabbing pincers, this power-hungry species occupies the upper echelons of the food table. Its complex life cycle involves 4 stages

• Adiyaal larva, where it does menial jobs for other members of the species in higher stages of growth
• Kopaasay pupa, where it prints political posters praising the big boss
• Yumellay caterpillar, when it grows big and slimy and eats everything in sight
• Seeyem butterfly, when it makes promises, sucks the honey of votes in exchange, and then flits away.

Front view - One pair of hands in namaste posture, one pair to beg for votes, and one to greedily grab money where ever it is to be found.

Here is a photo of an alpha male with sidekicks in various stages of growth

Here is a short clip of what happens when a member of this species senses the presence of potential votes nearby

This is not a review. I only view movies once (unless they are made by Hayao Miyazaki).

Warning 1: Spoilers ahead.

Warning 2: If you haven’t seen the movie, this post will make about as much sense as the plot in a Vijay movie.

Warning 3: Please read Warnings 1 & 2 before proceeding

What connects

• Oppressive rule of the Burmese military junta
• Chinese oppression of Tibet

If your answer is that these are pressing, contemporary global issues, you would only be partially right. Because more critically, these are the only topics left unexplored in Kamal’s Dasavathaaram. The rest of the usual suspects, atheism, caste, religion, climate change, Sand mafia, just to name a few, were there in full force.

If I had to present this movie in the form of bullets in an OpenOffice presentation, I would say that Dasavathaaram was fundamentally about

• A US biological weapon that turns people into liquid versions of The Incredible Hulk.
• Global discrimination against Muslims, and the critical role played by mosques as anti-Tsunami bunkers.
• The continuing insistence by the priestly class in India that sculpted pieces of rock placed inside places of religious worship are best handled by saree-clad Keralite actresses speaking in a Dumbram accent (Tambram accent specifically exaggerated and tailored for Kollywood movies)
• Religious fanaticism (especially by saree-clad Keralite actresses holding statuettes of Vishnu) trumping over the common-sense rationality of science.
• The impact of Hiroshima on the Kung-fu skills of Japanese girls who can speak Tamizh.
• Final and conclusive proof that all ex-CIA assassins become either exotic dancers or shorter versions of Steven Segal. (Kamal’s makeup is very impressive but it does kill facial expressions, like Botox injections do. The 7-foot tall Pathan character definitely looked like John Kerry while the ex-CIA hitman looked like Steven Segal’s mini-me)
• Providing the NRA with an incredibly powerful new tagline - Guns don’t kill people, they kill cancer.
• In a fight between Napoleon Iyer and Hassan Iyengar, Napoleon is likely to win.

I loved the movie. Ok. It wasn’t much of a movie. Perhaps, “The Kamalhassan Talent Show Extravaganza Mega Mela” might be more accurate a term to describe this three hour ride, but it was fun. Clearly, the storyline was rather dubious, but Kamal’s brilliance more than made up for it. Obviously Asin was annoying, but Balram Naidu was a masterstroke. Himesh’ music had about as much depth as the river Cauvery in summer, but Kamal’s rendition of “O O Sanam” was rousing. I rarely find George Bush funny, but Kamal’s Dubya sure was. Ah the great tragedy of Kamalhassan! When he makes movies with intelligent stories and works with classy directors, nobody watches them, and when he does a commercial flick like this, he makes the rest of the cast look about as qualified as Darryl Cullinan facing Shane Warne.

I don’t know if any of you noticed this, but the clear-as-day references to the original 10 avatars of Vishnu stood out so clearly that I didn’t even have to try to make them up.

• The muscular Vaishnavite priest who gets hooks pierced through his skin for hoisting purposes and eventually drowns with the idol of his dear deity = Fish, because, fish live in water and get hooked by fisherman in a very similar way. Way too obvious.
• The slow, turtle-like paati (grandmother)
• The incredibly lame and uninteresting Kaifullah, the 7 foot Pathan = a complete Bore
• The Loin from Pnjaab = Avtaar Singh
• The stereotypical small, petty (albeit funny) bureaucrat who just has to assert his authority on more qualified people who literally dwarf him in many ways
• The angry, bad ass ex-CIA assassin with an axe to grind
• A leader with a complete inability to own up to his own faults and hypocrisies
• The dark skinned, yet charismatic Poovaraghan
• The calm, meditative Zen master
• The Scientist, the bringer of the apocalypse of tomorrow (Kal ki Apocalypse)

The best dialogue of the movie

Asin - Are you saying God does not exist?

Kamal - No, I am not saying that at all. I’m just saying that it will be great if he does.

I cannot imagine another commercial film actor saying these words in what is ultimately a LCD masala flick. Kudos to you Kamal. You might not win an Oscar for this film, but you have definitely won an Aascar.

What ho, everybody? I was busy having tea, scones, warm ale and fine cut marmalade all of last week and therefore could not find time to post. Work took me to Peterborough, Cambridgeshire and do not think that the borough (of Peter) is just a sleepy village in East Anglia, because it has something that cannot found anywhere else in the known universe. It has something that even the mighty Hercules could not find as part of his 13th task. It has something that is such an object of international desire, an object that has spawned wars of horrendous magnitude and queues that can only be measured in light years. It felt like Columbus setting foot on the sandy shores of what he thought was India while lush choral music played in the background to indicate that this was a moment of ecstatic joy after a long time of struggle, of many shops visited, raided and being told that the only thing available as a replacement for the object in question was disappointment. Yes, hallelujah and all that. A shop in Peterborough had

The Nintendo Wii in stock.

So now I can play EA Sports’ Kamalhassan Wii Silambu (Think Mortal Kombat using Silambu). Or the cheesy romantic Wii Dandia (where the user has to use two wiimotes and weave his way through complex dance patterns and make synchronized contact with the other virtual dandia dancers, and failure to do so will result in one’s virtual girlfriend (or boyfriend) dumping the user for a better dandia dancer), or the high-adrenalin competitive Wii Mottai, where the wiimote is used as a tonsurer’s knife, and one can compete in multiplayer mode to find out who can shave the most heads in 5 minutes.

Wait. Those games don’t exist, you say? Oh damnation. Ok. I’ll stick to Wii Sports and Mario Kart then.

Back to Peterborough though. The Brits in that part of England pronounce “borough” like a piece of women’s undergarment, and that same rational logic is applied when considering the “w” to be silent in “Norwich”. In fact, the saying goes that while “Foster’s” is Owstrylian for beer, “Foucester’s” is English for ale. I strongly suspect that PG Wodehouse was actually an undisclosed American because no true-blooded, tea-drinking, ale-swigging, jam-loving, umbrella-toting Brit would ever consider spelling the hapless Bertram’s last name “Wooster”. I’m not even British, but years of being enidblytonized and wrenandmartinized causes me to immediately spell that as “Worcester”. A few other rules of conversation in that part of England - Men call each other “Guv”. (”That’ll be 10 quid, guv“). Women call each other “Darling” (”That lipstick looks appalling, darling“), and cross-gender conversation usually ends with “Luv”, ( “Would you like some tea, luv?“).

Apart from the game store where the precious Wii is available in stock, Peterborough has just one landmark worth seeing - a magnificent 12th century Norman cathedral.

After 4 days of work there, I had a Saturday that I had to spend in London, also known as “The city with too many things that remind you of the board games Monopoly and Scotland Yard“. I left my baggage at the cloak room in King’s Cross station, took a customary photo of platform 9 and three-quarters and hopped into a bus going down to Westminster Abbey where I saw the grave of Issac Newton. I expected to see something on the lines of an apple, but it looked more like a semi-peeled orange (photo from Wikipedia)

It was when I was walking across London Bridge (which wasn’t falling at that moment in time) that I heard Big Ben strike 9. Approximately E C D G G D E C (Ga Sa Ri Pa Pa Ri Ga Sa). Possibly Mohanam, but hard to confirm without the presence of Dha. With the ever increasing immigration of of Indians, I think it is only fair that some gamagam be introduced in Big Ben’s trademark chime.

Apparently, England has been getting hotter because of Al Gore’s inconvenient truth, so the good authorities in London have decided to cool things down with Almonard. A really large Almonard industrial man-cooler.

I then walked across to Charing Cross station where I found a pub named “Sherlock Holmes”, and for some reason, it reminded me of the following 3 questions

• What type of school do young kids go to? (Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary)
• What tree bears citrus fruit used to make pickle that goes well with curd rice? (A lemon tree, my dear Watson, a lemon tree)
• What canal that serves a “digestive” purpose are you likely to find inside the human body? (Alimentary, my dear Watson, alimentary)

Interestingly thought, Holmes never actually uses that particular combination of words in any story.

Walking down Northumberland avenue, I happen to land on “Community Chest” which ordered me to advance to Trafalgar square where I found the inscription on this statue rather interesting.

Where is the Hindu Makkal Katchi when we need them? Where is the Shiv Sena? We should immediately demand that this statue be taken down and replaced with one of Aamir Khan in Mangal Pandey garb.

In Trafalgar square, there is a rather nice looking fountain and one of them features dolphins being used as water hoses, which when added to other less than stellar roles such as “Secondary Seaworld attraction to Shamu the killer whale”, “Mine detector for US Navy” and “Mistaken by fish net for tuna”, sort of explains why they eventually decided to say “So long and thanks for all the fish” and leave earth altogether.

After Trafalgar square, I took the underground to Tottenham Court road, where I saw the Rosetta stone in the British museum. The museum also explained how the Sphinx is likely to have lost its nose, but I think they got it wrong. Obelix did it, in “Asterix and Cleopatra”. Leaving the museum behind, I then turned towards Fleet street, and was shocked to see this.

I know outsourcing has had its impact on the job market in the West, but butlers too? Is this what it has come to, Jeevesy boy? Dry cleaning? Sad. Walking down the Strand (and thereby covering the troika of red coloured tiles, Trafalgar Square, Fleet Street and Strand), the magnificent St. Paul’s came into view. It is truly one of the great churches in the world. Designed by Christopher Wren in 1675, the view from the Whisperers gallery is nothing short of astounding. And oh, you can also whisper into the walls from where you stand, and others standing diametrically opposite can hear it through the section of the wall close to them. Holy Telephony!

I then took the underground to Tower hill and did what every self respecting desi does in London. See the Koh-e-noor and claim (not loud enough for the Brits to hear though) that it was stolen from India and therefore rightfully belongs to us. Poor diamond. Ever since it’s been on display in the Jewel house inside the Tower of London, it has had to suffer an untold number of Indians casting “boori nazar” on it. I recommend that the royal family drishti-sutthufy it to ensure that it does not start going pale and unlustrous as a result of all this ownership claiming. As a spoil of war, this diamond has changed hands many times. So if one considers the length of ownership to be an important factor, the Mughals, who were technically foreigners, owned it for the longest known period of time, and therefore the Koh-e-Noor should be returned to modern day Uzbekistan.

The Tower also has funnily dressed storytellers called Yeoman-Warders, some of whom are also Ravenmasters, and they take care of the XXL size ravens that inhabit the tower. Legend has it that London will fall if the ravens leave the tower, and so these supersized crows are utterly and completely pampered. They are so large that one could make 2 plates of Biriyani. For Vivek, i.e

After the 12th century tower, I jumped forward in time and across the Thames to the Tate museum of modern art, where I learnt that a red cardboard box filled with old newspapers can symbolize (with a suitable amount of willing suspension of disbelief) the angst of youth bombarded with mainstream messages of conformism leading to feelings of suppressed violence. Stuff like that. And with that, it was 5 pm and I had to get back to King’s Cross, pick up my luggage and take the underground to Heathrow, where I was picked up for what seems like the thousandth time, a “random” extra security checkup. As usual.

ps: flickr photos here

Hotel Saravana Bhavan (hereinafter referred to as HSB) is a phenomenon. Annachi (occasionally called P Rajagopal) started out in Vadapalani K K Nagar (Thanks, Ravages), Chennai in 1981 and never looked back after that. The rate at which HSB opens new branches is almost bacterial. Now one can enjoy the mini-idlis soaked in divine saambaar even in Atlanta, Georgia.

As an organization, HSB has is a great case study in its own right. It managed, without suit-wearing MBAs needing to draw astronomical salaries, to get most of Business 1.0 right.

• Excellent Supply Chain Management
• Insanely effective Process Standardization - within limits of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle, their saambaar has been measured to have the same molecular structure at every HSB branch.
• And several other pompous sounding management jargon.

But is HSB ready for Web 2.0?

I think not. So I wish to make an unsolicited proposal to the proprietors of HSB, urging them to build Restaurant 2.0, a social, peer to peer experience built on an architecture of participation. A restaurant that taps into the wisdom of crowds in addition to the thanni lorries of summer.

What is Restaurant 2.0?

It starts with Menu 2.0. As a patron, I’d like to know more than just the name and cost of a dish. I need me some Social Interaction data, amigo. So this is what I have in mind.

Yes, give me photos of dishes, and user ratings. I, for one, would have loved to see the Tomato soup rated 1/5 for the unholy amount of pepper it comes with. Capturing this kind of data from your users serves a very userful business purpose as well. It will help you plan supplies in a much more real-time fashion.

So how do you build Menu 2.0? Simple, touch screen monitors embedded in the tables. Saves paper, and that gives you Greenie points (short for Green brownie points, which sounds ridiculous)

When I wish to explore the masala dosa in more detail, I’d love to see what other items go well with it.

And it’ll be nice if I could find out what other customers eventually ordered after looking at this item.

And what about other patrons’ comments on dishes, preferably with some moderation/filtration features

And once I’m done ordering the Special Ghee Masala roast from Menu 2.0, I wait for Dish 2.0.

And once it arrives, I’d like some 2.0 goodness as a sidedish. I’d like to know who else in the restaurant is currenly eating the same dish I am eating, so that I can add them to my facebook friends list later. And I should also be able to save my favourite sequence of Saambaar Vada, Special Ghee Masala roast, small cup sweet Pongal and a filter coffee to my Hoglist that I can share with others. In fact, when I’m in a hurry, I could just pull up my “Heavy Kattufying” hoglist and order it straight without wasting time going through the menu again.

And I also would’t mind an Eating activity feed that my dietician can subscribe to on his RSS reader, and send me warning twitter messages asking me to stay off the extra large Rava kesari.

Elastic Cooking Cloud

And you know what, HSB should take their excellent business model and make it a platform. Yes, I’m talking

They can help budding resturauteurs get a quick start by providing REST APIs (REstaurant State Transfer) that can quickly get a business off the ground. The idea is to provide the machinery or running a restaurant (cooking, serving, billing) for others to use. So I should be able to start a Jalsa Cafe while outsourcing cooking, serving and billing to HSB.

There HSB. I’ve given you the secrets of Restaurant 2.0. Now go do it.

Azhwarkadiyan Nambi and Eesaana Bhattar presumably had descendants. And perhaps they lived in the New Thanjavur Sector of the Pegasus Beta Settlement, and perhaps they went to the same school, and played on the same zero-gravity slide. Perhaps both grew up to be cyberpriests on interstellar spaceships. Perhaps they chilled out at the Galactic Spaceport bar. Wonder what sort of “I am better than you” arguments they had.

EB Jr: Iyers are better

AN Jr: No, Iyengars are better

EB Jr: Iyer sounds like Higher and that’s why we are better

AN Jr: Iyer sounds like Air and that’s exactly what you are full of.

EB Jr: We fly high like Iyerplanes while you still travel using yesterday’s IyenCars

AN Jr: At least we travel in Rolls Royce Iyencars while you suffer from Deep Vein Thrombosis in Economy class Iyerplanes

EB Jr: Iyengar sounds like I-Anger, and that describes you guys pretty well

AN Jr: Iyer sounds like I-Err, and that describes you guys even better

EB Jr: We are also Smartha than you.

AN Jr: Of course you aren’t. How can you be when you follow the Odd Waiter philosophy?

EB Jr: Your naamam looks like a V with an I in between, and reminds me of vi, that useless editor

AN Jr: vi is the best editor in the world, and I can do a s/r/ngar before you can apply your vibhuti

EB Jr: You call yourselves Why Snow White? Ignorance is built into your name

AN Jr: You call yourselves Say White. Painting everything white smacks of a lack of creativity.

EB Jr: Your C-rap (Carnatic Rap) star R.E.A. Goody sucks. His voice should be used as an alternative energy source by carpenters sawing wood.

AN Jr: Your C-rap star MD (Mad Durai) Money sucks even more. He hardly raps words. He keeps pulling out his item girl assistant (Kalpana Swara) to distract the crowd with her gyrations.

And so on.

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.