Data Feminism - The Importance of Being Earnest

Statistics and economics are two sciences which are adept at explaining the past than predicting the future. While Nobel Laureates of all science streams are awarded for their studies that transform the future, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences invariably goes to an economist who explains the past. Statistics is definitely not as vast as economics and, therefore, could be diagnosed with a lesser effort for the maladies that plague it. Data Feminism is a delightful step in this direction. Authored by two American academics, Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein, this book is eminently readable and shorn of the intimidating academic-style writing. Books written by academics are a semantic nightmare. Their convoluted jargon compulsively prioritise the writers’ erudition over readers’ understanding.  This book is more a passionate plea for action than a lofty intellectual pursuit.

At the outset, the choice of the title is thoughtful and suggestive. Feminism is used as a metaphor for fair opportunities and treatment. The book, like feminism, is both a problem-statement and a potential response. The allegories don’t end there. The book begins with story of Christine Darden, the famed black NASA Aeronautical Scientist, who broke the barriers of race and gender through the American race for space supremacy. In an era where computers were still in their infancy, most complex mathematical problems were solved by humans. Particularly, women. More particularly, three black women - Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson.  It might look incredulous but these human computers were termed as unskilled manpower and were refused higher positions. Their arresting yet inspiring journey, is subject of a bestseller and a blockbuster, The Hidden Figures. The authors state that, “It is because of both her contributions to data science and her advocacy for women that we have chosen to begin our book, Data Feminism, with Darden’s story”

A decade ago, data sets that lacked integrity were primarily a problem concerning the Government. More precisely, the welfare state. The quintessential welfare state desperately sought cues from data to formulate policies that could maximise the impact of its alleviation initiatives. But the increase in the power of computation and decrease in the cost of computation, both exponentially, made Artificial Intelligence a ubiquitous presence in less than a decade. Not just the Government, but corporations and commoners are nibbling the fruit which is longer forbidden. Falling costs and easy access will soon ensure that AI would be as essential as electricity. As AI seeks to play crucial role in both decision making and service delivery, faulty data set trained AIs are contagions that could get unleashed in the most unsuspecting manner.

Sample this. A father discovered his teenage daughter’s pregnancy when he found a drab promotional discount coupon from a Fortune 500 retail-chain behemoth in his letterbox. The fiasco was an unintended result of an innocuous request from the marketing team to identify customers who are pregnant. The team was guided by another piece of research, most probably from another data set, which revealed that pregnancy is a major life event to convert a casual shopper into a life-time customer. The data scientist working for the Company devised pregnancy detection model which gave a pregnancy prediction score to each customer based on the purchasing patterns. The young lady’s purchasing patterns ticked off the pregnancy detection model and the marketing division religiously courted her with discount coupons.

The entire episode, needless to say, swirled into PR tornado that caught the corporation completely unawares. While most look at such incidents as a privacy breach, a closer scrutiny would reveal a latent gender angle to it. Would such triggers be set off if an underage boy bought liquor or contraceptives? What we see is a data collection system that adversely affects the privacy of a particular gender. These are the issues that Data Feminism explores. The inequality in privileges and oppression that data sets create, perpetuate and accentuate. The result is a sub-standard data set that neither serves the purpose of the corporation or its customer.

The book studies the pitfalls of the current data sets through the framework of Intersectional Studies and explores actionable solutions. Coined in 1989 by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, an American civil rights advocate and a scholar of critical race theory, Intersectional Studies analyze how different combinations of social and political identities result in varying levels of oppression and privileges. Intersection Studies look at not just the data, but the intent, context and process embedded in it. Are the right questions asked for collecting data? For example, it is common to find surveys asking women the kind of contraception they prefer. But they are seldom asked if they have access to abortion. A bad data set leads to flawed policy response. It neither wins the Government votes nor improves the lives of citizens.

The good thing about bad data sets is that they can be improved. What is worse is data sets that don’t exist. In a democracy, if you don’t get counted, you don’t exist. Governments are biggest collectors of data and in democracies it is natural that such efforts are driven by electoral prospects. Missing data threaten to leave vulnerable sections of people out, particularly in the first-past-pole system. For example, which one would take precedence? Data on child abuse or data on unemployment? It wouldn't be surprising if the unemployment count be done by Government while child abuse data be left to an NGO.

While I would reserve the reasons for the bad data sets and other related stuff for the next post, I would leave you with the wonderful work of a Nigerian-American artist Mimi Ọnụọha which has been highlighted in this book. She created The Library of Missing Datasets which contains files with compelling titles such as “Public list of citizens on domestic surveillance lists", “People excluded from public housing because of criminal records”, “Poverty and employment statistics that include people who are behind bars” etc. Just that when you open the file, it is just empty.

Simple yet profound.

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Humankind : A New Wine from an Old Bottle

 In 1993, two motivational speakers, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, decided to publish a book that was a compilation of inspirational true-life stories. After being rejected by all major publishers, it was picked up by a small publisher from Florida who specialized in self-help books. When the book came out, it was a success that breached both the imagination and expectation of the authors. The massive popularity of the book nudged the creators to start a series and it continued to top the New York Times Bestseller list for the next five years. Since then, Chicken Soup for the Soul evolved into a separate company with varied interests from publishing and pet foods to philanthropy.

As a young adolescent, I did give some of my time to a couple of these books. They were a good and easy read. But they were just that. Their stories altered my worldview only as much as a well-made biopic. In this age, most of those stories will pass as an early morning whatsapp forward. I often wondered if anecdotes from the lives of others really inspire us? Chicken Soup for the Soul probably thought that stories from ordinary folks could inspire people for their relatability quotient. We may think that emulating Mohandas is easier than Mahatma. But anecdotes are just what they are. Stories that linger in your consciousness just a little longer than the smile they bring on your visage.

Rutger Bregman’s Humankind doesn’t inspire and that is the best thing about it. The best inspirations last only as long as the goosebumps they arouse. For stories to trigger a change, they need to set you on a thinking trail. Have relook on the truths you lived with. Show you a flicker of possibilities that were dormant. Humankind tries this with a different set of anecdotes, studies and experiments. But these are not about persons. They are about communities. Communities ravaged by war. Communities convicted for crimes. Communities condemned by the Ice Age. And what does he try to say with all these examples? “That most people, deep down, are pretty decent.”

Is that all? You don’t need 400 odd pages to say this. This is something we all know. In the first chapter, Bregman even declares that this is a radical idea which could turn the world on its head. You will be forgiven if you find him bombastic. But as you flip through the pages, it will dawn upon you that it is an axiom that you knew but never believed. No, not because you lock your home or you don’t leave a wad of cash on a park bench. It is because we believe that it is stupid to give a power saw to a murder convict during his time at the penitentiary. Humankind introduces you to the thought that not giving a power saw to the convict is stupid.

Throughout the book, Bregman challenges such self-fulfilling prophecies. Truths that appear true because you want to believe that they are true. You may not be convinced, but you definitely will be shepherded into thought experiments to simulate his postulates. That is where Humankind succeeds. And the best part of the ride is that there are no heroes in the book whom you can emulate. No character who makes you a lesser mortal. Look at the story of a murder convict with a power saw. It took one convict, a few prison officials and an entire town, into which the convict was released upon the completion of his sentence, for the idea to succeed. Humankind is about communities that believed in a thought and miracles created by that communal belief.

It is remarkable that in his ode to humanity Bregman doesn’t shy away from talking about holocaust and terrorism – the most visible challenges to our faith in the goodness of others. For some, his endorsement of Hannah Arendt’s controversial hypothesis, Banality of Evil, may appear to be a red flag. But wait, he is not done yet. Bregman finds love even among terrorists. In the chapter, “How Empathy Blinds”, he quotes the American Anthropologist, Scott Atran, who has studied the anthropology of religion and terrorism. “Terrorists don’t kill and die just for a cause. They kill and die for each other.” Bregman argues that most terrorists join their organizations due to fraternal love rather than a belief in an ideology or cause.

Bregman studies people across ages and of various ages. From Neanderthal to the modern man; From six-month old infant to a sixty-year-old man. And everywhere, he finds that they are innately good. Humankind takes you through a fascinating journey of human nature. How evolution favoured a weaker and naïve Homo Sapien over a stronger and smarter Neanderthal? Why humans who are capable of immense love are also adept in mind-numbing cruelty? Through answers to these questions, we discover a man who was always around us but never seen in the light that Bregman sheds. And through that man, we see the society in a different light. Of course, like any other radical thesis, the assertions, reasons and the adjunct interpretations may be questioned. But the final conclusion of Bregman definitely deserves a consideration. Not because of his persuasion or the allurement of his thought. But because of the endless answers it could provide to the questions we encounter as we navigate the maze of the modern world.

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Inheritance of Looks

The regular reflex of a rational man on receiving the news of a new born is to congratulate. But even before he is done with it, he pops up the question which creates an identity crisis. Literally. "Whom does the baby resemble?" To me, infancy is the closest that anything can get to Communism. Like puppies and Iphones, I find all the babies same. They may vary in size and shade, but they all look alike to me. It also my firm belief that they appear same to everyone. How else would you explain couples with infants changing their whatsapp DP on a daily basis. The picture is always that of the baby. Just the color of the baby's shirt changes. The only motive behind this mundane ritual is to help the parents identify their baby in case he chooses to join a melee of his friends in a mall or at a park. This anecdotal evidence saves me from being embarrassed about my personal disability.

Amongst my innumerable cerebral handicaps is my inability to identify people. The best I can get to is to categorize the faces as "familiar" and "unfamiliar". While people solve crosswords or Sodukus for intellectual stimulus, my favorite pastime is to recollect the name of the person who greeted me in the lift as I entered the office. Such puzzles often keep me engaged for days. Even a smartphone without a camera will do a better job at facial recognition than me. With such acute problem, it is too onerous a task to trace the ancestry of a baby's facial features.

It is also not always the case that a child would exactly resemble the parents. As a kid, I vividly recollect my parents telling nosy guests that I resemble my paternal grandmother while my brother got his looks from our maternal grandfather. The guests never met either of my grandparents and the conversation soon moved to other equally pointless subjects like politics and neighbours. While both of us do have certain features of our respective progenitors, I still doubt if the answer was entirely true. We would, probably, know only when we grow as old as them. However, an astute analysis of the answer reveals that it maintains the delicate balance of between patriarchy and matriarchy. An apocryphal theory is that the incessant wars between my parents on my resemblance came to an end with the arrival of my brother and the subsequent equitable settlement on the claims over the genetic propagation of their respective families. 

In my case, however, there is no such fight for supremacy. I am more than willing to let my better half take the credit for my newborn's looks for I know the horrors that lurk in the future if he takes after me. The ordeal of living with a visage that neither inspires confidence nor invokes sympathy would be the running theme of my autobiography, if I ever write one. But such self-effacing doesn't come to my rescue because people want an answer.

It took me a few falters before I discovered a bureaucratic way out of the conundrum. Pass the buck. So now, when people ask me about the looks of my son, my cheeky repartee is, "You tell me". While it has provided me some respite, it failed to throw up an answer. Well, it is stupid to expect solutions from bureaucratic processes. In the instant case, the result of the exercise reeked of participant bias. Respondents from my phonebook unanimously declared that he looks like me while those from my wife's bet their life that he resembled her.

At this point, it is only fair that a few facts be disclosed for a correct understanding of the results. It happens that the arresting feature of my little one is his nose. Broad and flat, like both his parents have. Just that it looks cute on him and functional on us. For my wife, it isn't her best feature; for me, it isn't the worst. We have made peace with ours. But our maid, who gives the boy his daily massage, unfailingly nudges his nose upwards. My mother, who has been there and done that, smirks at both her effort and my wife's hope. I, however, have no qualms with it. Long ago, somewhere around the time I realized the finality of my nasal aesthetics,  I irretrievably concluded that sharpness of nose is inversely related to that of the mind. I cite our only Prime Minister without a majority to successfully complete his term as the best testimony to my hypothesis.

So when people take his nose as the clinching evidence to settle the issue of his resemblance, it is only natural that it would throw up mixed results. The whole process further reinforced my indifference on the subject. No matter how far I look back into the genealogy of either of my son's parents, I hardly find anything that is even remotely remarkable. But what amuses me is that before he learned to talk, he managed to polarize an entire bunch of mature educated adults within a fortnight of his arrival into this world. Probably, it is the telltale sign of the times we live in.

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The Real Cattle Class

Just when I was beginning to feel happy about the Air India turnaround, their guy at the check-in counter told me something that totally pissed me off. “Sir, you need to pay extra for the front row seats.” I wanted to ask him if I could pay him in kind. Like return the complimentary sandwich which they give in flights of duration less than 90 minutes. But I was sure that it wouldn’t work. Even he knew it was not worth even fifty bucks. I just asked him for any aisle seat other than the ones at the last row.  Those are the most terrible ones where everyone who is waiting to use the loo , and that is almost everybody on board on an early morning flight, leans on. Often the derriere of the person standing and the temples of the person sitting are on the same horizontal axis usually separated by a few nanometres. It appears that Indians have a special fascination for aircraft loos. Everybody checks-in atleast an hour before the take-off. But no one uses the washroom at the departure gates. The moment the safety belt sign is off half the plane rushes to the loo.  It is like a trial room in a mall on a Sunday at the peak of season’s sale. I could never understand the mass hysteria to relieve oneself in the claustrophobic confines whose suction mechanism is so embarrassingly loud that everyone on the plane knows when you are done.

 I was, mercifully, spared of the ordeal that day. I was given a seat on the emergency exit row. The ones that cannot be pushed back and you sit straight through the entire flight as if you were an infant fastened to the baby seat in the car. These seats come with a complimentary sermon from the most disinterested member of the cabin crew who explains how the emergency door should be operated. I once asked at the end of the special briefing if I could try it once. Unfortunately, the lady was not amused. It was just like the Indian education system. Only theory; No practice.

As I fastened my seatbelt, I started thinking about the meanness of the low-cost airlines. They set out with the idea that the passengers would pay less and get minimal services. Today, their fares match their full service counterparts, or at times even more, but the services are bare minimum. Even a zen monastery would appear luxurious in comparison. If you ask for water, they would serve you in shot glasses. Unless you are buying some of their tasteless over priced stuff, you don’t exist for them. When they found that people were not buying their food, they started selling the seats. As soon as the plane is airborne, a lady would announce that she is glad to offer the front row seats for an additional charge. Offer for an additional charge? Why can’t you cut the crap and say that you are selling. Corporate communications, I guess. After all, there should be some pretence of b-school education.  Who is going to pay for the extra measly 4 inches of leg space? Thanks, lady. You can keep the four inches for yourself. Strictly no pun intended. Whom are you trying to sell space. We Indians can squeeze in anywhere. An entire joint family panning three generations will comfortably live in a room measuring 10 feet by 10 feet in Mumbai. I am just waiting for the day when the begin charging for even looking out of the window. “Sir, 100 bucks for the city view and 50 bucks for the wing view”.

The pain of low cost airlines begins right at the check-in counters. They weigh your luggage like cocaine. Every gram matters. If they find you have exceeded the limit, even by a trifle, they cant contain their excitement at the prospect of billing you. They adhere to their rule book more sincerely than Pope adheres to the Bible. What amazes me more is that some smart women manage to break even these hardcore believers. I have seen women carry in their hand baggage, a hand bag, a laptop case and two carry bags (one with shoes and other with groceries and condiments). Their totes begin a little below their shoulders and, in most cases, easily reach their knees. Thet would easily take in three duffel bags like mine. My check-in baggage for a 15 day trip would be half their hand baggage for a day’s trip. Apparently, their handbags would have a world of things. Energy bars, hand towels, scarves, umbrellas and even gas masks that can withstand a nuclear biological chemical (NBC) situation. They actually carry food, cloth and shelter along with them and can survive for 24 hours in the event of a nuclear holocaust. On a usual day, these ladies freak me out. But I like them when they beat the crap out of the Shylocks sitting at the check-in counters.

After you land, the trauma continues in their buses that are used to ferry the passengers from the aircraft to the terminal. The buses wouldn’t budge till every inch of the bus is occupied. The last guy who gets in has his face plastered to the glass doors after it is shut. I strongly suspect that the drivers get some productivity linked incentive in transporting a planeload of passengers in the least number of trips. May be they get promoted as pilots. When I finally reach the terminal, I direly want to swear that I will never travel by a low-cost airline again. But for obvious reasons, I know that I cannot. So I silently exit the airport and take up my next challenge - Identify my vehicle among the scores of cars.

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Before Sunrise

The existence and location of hell may vary according to one’s religious beliefs. But the closest secular and acceptable definition of it could be our Greenfield airports which are usually located in the neighbouring districts. There could be nothing crueler than catching an early morning flight. It is worse if it is from Bengaluru where the travel to the airport takes longer than the flight to your destination.  And sometimes it could be costlier too. Just another one in the long list of innumerable ironies of urban life.  If the bard was still alive, he would have reserved his grammatically incorrect phrase, the most unkindest cut, for this. People have already begun to report jet lag when they travel out of Benguluru early in the morning. It gets more arduous if you are travelling a few days before 15^th August or 26^th January. Baggage screening at the entry, strip searches at the security check,  menacing sniffer dogs looking hungrily at your calves, SMSs threatening early closure of check-in – you are sure that the trinity of Gods in the heaven above and thirty odd public and private service providers on earth are colluding to ensure that you miss your flight. The serpentine queues at entry gate, check-in counters, security check, washrooms and just about everywhere have grim-looking, sleep-deprived, despondent zombies moving at a pace slower than the Hindu growth rate. The sight is reminiscent of the job seekers’ queues during the Great Depression. If you manage to board the aircraft without getting into an argument with anyone, you could earn yourself a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.

That Monday morning I too joined one of those queues. I chose to stay silent and keep my prayers going. Just the previous evening, I missed my train to Bengaluru. I almost never miss trains and flights. And absolutely never when I am sober. But there is always a first time for everything and it was the previous evening. Knowing that luck was not entirely with me, I fervently prayed that I should land in my seat before the menacing matron shuts the plane door.

Fortunately, I managed to check-in within time. Those who checked-in before me were busy doing the next most important check-in - Facebook check-in. It doesn't matter even if you are flying out from an obscure airport like Raja Bhoj International Airport. You have to notify on social media with the same pride as if you were undertaking space travel from the Houston Space Centre. And if you are a lady, an accompanying selfie with a pout is not just desirable but expected. Whenever, I see these pouted ladies, I remember the cute protagonist of the award-winning Australian movie, Babe. How prophetic was it to call the proud owner of the most prominent pout as Babe! Nevertheless, I marvelled at their dedication to land up early in the morning with copious amounts of cosmetics creatively spread across their faces. They deserved a Shram Ratna for their hardwork. Each and every one of them. So many layers and so many shades they had that I wondered if they were auditioning for the B-grade Bhojpuri remake of "Memoirs of a Geisha". I could understand the case of the cabin crew since gaudy make up is a professional hazard for them and a personal hazard for the passengers. But, why on earth would anybody wake up at wee hours in the night to paint their faces like they are going to a Halloween party? I wanted to go and ask the security personnel if it wasn't a security threat that these ladies are looking nowhere close to their photos in their photo IDs. Would they allow me to go if I painted my face like a Batman or Spiderman? But women have their privileges and it is considered impolite for men to question them.

However, it is not just the fairer sex. In the age of the metrosexual man, the obsession with looks has transcended the boundaries of gender. Not very far from these ladies, were two gentlemen into serious photoshoot. These new airports have such elegant wall panels that they serve as a wonderful backdrop for photographs. Any guy who can flex his biceps through his muscle fit t-shirt starts getting himself clicked. I could understand selfies, but what I witnessed was a serious photoshoot with a DSLR. The guy who was posing looked like those anchors who sell aphrodisiacs on teleshopping channels. He looked at the other end of the airport with a sigh as if it stretched into the horizon. He had that trademark John Abraham look which the famed actor uses to convey sadness, guilt, fear, pain, despair, diarrhea, constipation and 56 other emotions. You actually understand what he is trying to convey from the background score. So watching this guy pose was like watching a muted John Abraham movie.

I thought I should sleep to shut myself from these visual atrocities and headed towards the sofas. There were barely any seats available. The slimmer ones slept in sitting position and the fatter ones stretched themselves across the sofas. I thought it was something to do with their centres of gravity. The brazenness of posture was directly proportional to the body mass. To add to the grossness of the mise en scène, some of these portly hibernators were clad in low waist jeans. I managed to squeeze myself between two middle aged potbellied men who slept with such indulgence as if they were on a poster bed. But I could not stay there for long. They were deafeningly snoring right under the signage that said that it was a silent airport.

Amidst this madness, I realised that I felt a little queasy in my stomach. The rush to catch the flight left both my sleep and ablutions incomplete. My delirious mental faculties were trying to ascertain the current digestive state of the previous night’s Ambur Biryani. While I fervently hoped that it would take its peaceful natural exit at an appropriate time, there was an undeniable probability that it would beat the gravity to rise up my esophagus and make a virulent exit from where it entered. I thought of visiting the restroom but I knew that the queues there would be longer than those before the government liquor shops in Kerala. May be coffee could be of some help.

I headed to the kiosk that was selling coffee. Before me was a man who was animatedly questioning the guy at the cash counter. His interrogation skills matched with those at Guantanamo. I never knew so many questions could be asked about idly, which is the simplest of all the foods. He wanted to know about the sambhar and chutney, their ingredients, colour, texture and the entire facts concerning the matter. He just stopped short of asking for a 3D simulation of their molecular structure. The length of the queue behind him exceeded those before the washrooms. Some muttered, some cursed, some prayed and some even left. But no one dared to request him to end his search for truth in Idly. Probably, they were scared that they could become his next subject for inquest.  Finally, he ordered for a plate of idly and two coffee. The cashier sensed the end of his ordeal. He looked like a man who got out of the gas chamber just when he thought that he would die.

He printed the bill and told him, "That would be Rs 290, sir".

He extended the money and said with an air of authority, "210".

The cashier, who still did not recover from his near-death experience, whimpered like a puppy in the rain, “Sir, 290.”

“210”

“290”

“210”

“290”

 “I am saying that you need to return 210”

The cashier's tired glance dropped slowly from the argumentative customer's face to his hand which was holding a 500 rupee note. For a split second, he would have considered to insert his head into the adjacent microwave oven. It is during such weak moments the ideologues of terrorism conduct their recruitment drive for suicide bombers. Suddenly, I understood what strategic thinkers mean when they say that those who fight terrorism are those who create it. I saw the conundrum manifesting itself before me.

I took my coffee, sat in a corner and silently began sipping it. In front of me there was a line of stores. I wonder if anyone ever buys anything from these stores. I haven’t seen anybody till date. These stores seem to exist purely for window shopping purpose. I could see a young salesman passionately explaining about a scarf to a lady. All three of us, the salesman, the lady and me, knew that she wasn’t going to buy anything. But the young man had to appear as excited as if she was going to purchase the entire stock and as an incentive he would be promoted as a Manager. I finished my coffee and headed towards my boarding gate. As I settled in my seat and turned off my mobile, the images of the men selling scarves and coffee flashed before me for a moment. I wouldn’t be catching an early morning flight everyday. But everyday, they would begin their day not very different from what I witnessed. May be I shouldn’t be complaining about catching flights before sunrise.    

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A Trip to Nowhere

Sometimes, you go just to come back.  Absurdity of life cannot get more explicit. One such meaningless journey was taken by me couple of months ago. I was nominated for a training programme in Delhi and had to go in a day’s notice. There was no seat on Air India’s flight to Delhi. An Air India flight got fully booked when other private carriers on the same day had ample seats. I wondered what the world was coming to. Incredulity seems to be the flavour of the season. Bangladesh beat India. Twice. All we could manage was to beat a fragile kid jay walking on the pitch. But for his country’s flannels, he could have passed off as poster boy for sub-tropical poverty. It seems their Acche Din had arrived. I was happy because if fortunes of Air India and Bangladesh cricket can turn around, so can mine.

I went back to the aam aadmi’s carrier. Indian Railways. If Indian Railways had a frequent traveller programme, I would have had enough credits to get a return ticket to moon. I contribute to five percent of the million odd hits IRCTC website gets everyday. It too hits me back with equal verve with its perpetual rotating circular cursor that could potentially leave you hypnotised or disoriented or both. The cursor has been known to have induced sleep amongst insomniacs and suicidal tendencies amongst Zen monks. Periodic regular systematic exposure to the cursor has, however, strengthened my mental immunity. Among the trains displayed in response to my query, I zeroed on Bangalore Rajdhani. It left Nagpur at 15 35 hours and reached Delhi next day at 05 55 hours. It looked perfect for my training which was scheduled to commence at 10 00 hours. I have had the same luck with women and berth on trains. I never get the one I desire. Due to the constraints of my lifelong affiliation with misfortune, the best the portal could offer me was a ticket wait listed at 1. Thanks to friends in railways and my pleading skills, I managed to get it confirmed.  

I reached the station the next day. The scheduled halt of the train at Nagpur station was 15 minutes. And just one family took 14 minutes to alight. I could see the descent of an entire genealogical tree. An infant who incessantly fluttered his hands with such intensity that if he had wings, he could be Icarus. A teenage girl who was more interested in fishing for her sunglasses than getting out. And a couple whose favourite pastime was one-upmanship in assigning each other tasks. If the wife asked husband whether he informed the driver regarding the pick-up, the husband would reply asking her if she checked that none of the infants accessories were left behind. Amidst their rally of questions, their old man just forgot whether they were alighting or boarding. The rest of family exuded such leisure that made me wonder if the train terminated at Nagpur. If the alighting of family in itself was not a task ardous enough, what followed was even more amusing. The family travelled with luggage of every genre. Suitcases, duffel bags, backpacks, hand bags, cartons and even a gunny sack. Only if Kingfisher had one such family travelling on each of its planes, Mallya would have repaid his entire debt with fare collected from excess baggage. A swarm of lecherous porters suddenly descended looking at their potential high value customer who could catapult them into the Forbes list of porters.

As I was contemplating to use the emergency exit to board the train, the last baggage got off loaded and I managed to board the train. I was surprised to be greeted by a half-empty coach. So what was the waiting list all about? The ways of railway reservation system are like that of God. It is beyond the grasp of the ordinary human intellect. Whether you get confirmed ticket or not doesn’t depend upon the time you log into the IRCTC portal or the number of days in advance you try. It is purely a trigonometric function of the alignment of Jupiter’s largest moon with Saturn’s outer ring and your birthstar. Gemmologists have suggested stones which would improve your chances at the IRCTC portal. Rings with these stones have to be worn on a specific finger which alone must be used while keying the captcha characters. For the best results, the finger should abstain from any ablutionary activity for atleast three days prior to the date of booking.

I was shaken out my meditation on the mysteries of reservation system by a jolt. The train started moving and I began looking for the attendant for my bedroll. After a massive manhunt that spread across four coaches on either side of my coach, I found my bestower of comfort seriously engaged in an animated discussion with his counterparts from other coaches. They were in midst of their Annual Bangalore Rajdhani Attendants conference discussing what they should petition the Seventh Pay Commission. He looked at me disapprovingly for disturbing their conference and tossed me a packet. When I opened, I found that the hand towel was missing.

Like Oliver Twist, I went again and I stretched my thin trembling hands asking for a hand towel.  He looked at me as if I asked for one of his kidneys. He did give me a hand towel but not before muttering the choicest curses on the passengers who stole hand towels and how he was penalised for their theft. The colour of hand towel matched the sheets - pale yellow. They entire linen looked like those white cloths which appear in television commercials before the use of the advertised detergent. He removed the blanket used by the passengers who alighted at Nagpur and diligently folded it. While doing so, lower end of the blanket swept the entire floor clean. Despite the blatant nauseating act, upon folding, he handed over the blanket as if it was the robe of coronation. Regular use of such blankets is definitely going to do wonders for one’s immunity. In fact, travel by train must be seriously considered for inclusion in immunization schedule.

And not just microbes, the other ticketless travellers included lizards, cockroaches, rodents and every living organism which perfected the art of living with you yet invisible to you. There would be many equal opportunity employers, but Railways is equal opportunity service provider too. It does not discriminate between the species or their hierarchy in the evolution ladder.

It was soon dinner time. I was served something that was christened rasam. It tasted like the left over tomato soup from the previous journey that was organically fermented by the in-house microbes which were cultivated on the blankets. I got two pieces in my chicken curry. And both were necks. I always wondered why my chicken curries on trains had pieces with maximum bone and minimal flesh. The uncanny proximity of the bone-flesh ratio to my own body always appeared to be a cruel joke that the pantry staff played on me. The fleshier part, which I would not name here lest I offend feminists who could see lascivious intents in my gastronomic pursuits, never favoured my luck.

While I was grappling with miseries of food and bed, a greater misery was brewing elsewhere. Nine hours before I boarded the train at Nagpur, a fire broke out at the signalling system in Itarsi. The closer we got to Itarsi, the slower the train moved. There was a traffic jam of trains. We woke up at the same latitude and longitude coordinates where we went to sleep. I forgot about my training and started worrying about existential concerns like water at the toilets, charge in the electrical points etc. The journey that was to be completed in 14 hours stretched to 26 hours. When the train finally chugged into Hazrat Nizamuddin station, the training I was supposed to attend was over. I went to Delhi just to catch a flight back home. But what remained in my memory when I alighted the train was the way the pantry staff managed to cook two additional meals with a smile and without adequate supplies.

Hasta la vista, Indian Railways!!!! 

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X Files

Long years ago, when internet in India meant 56 kpbs dialup connection from BSNL with a screeching connecting tone, the most frustrating part of surfing was the ubiquitous screen displaying HTTP 404 error - File not found. As years went by, thanks to increased resilience and redundancy in servers and, in recent times, mindless caching by Google, that message has become a thing of past. It was after joining the Government, I started seeing this annoying message again. However, this time it was not on my computer but on the faces of my staff.  Two things that are always required and never found in an office are staff and files. I heard about crucial files going missing, but it is only after I started working I realized that missing of files is a very secular phenomenon that cuts across the barriers of age and importance of the file. Any file can go missing. Even that which was on your table 20 seconds ago can get Houdini-ed*. Such shocking disappearances that often you wonder if the sight of the file moments ago was due to hallucination or hypnotism or hangover. May be that explains why the most famous magician of the land was called Sorcar.

Upon observing the events that followed, I discovered that there was a symbiotic relationship between the disappearances of files and staff. First, the files disappear. Then, the staff disappears under the pretext of searching for them and you are left alone answering threatening calls from your boss about the file. During those hours of distress I deduced that the mathematical probability of a file to disappear is directly proportional to the urgency of its requirement raised to the power of importance assigned to it by the boss. I have also pondered over why these files disappear. While this could easily pass of a topic for JNU research scholars, the most common reason is careless handling. Files get passed around between offices, officers and staff as casually as dishes are passed around in a potluck dinner. A file could be in my office or my boss’ office or even his boss’ office. Everyone who wants to look into it takes it like a book from the shelf of a public library and then discards it on the nearest available table. The only hitch here is that there is no librarian. That is where the file surreptitiously sneaks away from the official glare and thereafter begins to hitchhike its way through the maze of cupboards, compactors, corridors and  sometimes even hops on to cars and goes away to another building altogether. In the meanwhile everybody, and their uncle, in the office of the file have comfortably forgotten about it and in due course most of them would have got transferred. And that is how many a file has attained nirvana from the confines of office.

Then there are cases of partial disappearances. These are what I call as doppelganger files. Since the original file is temporarily unavailable, an interim file gets created, which invariably never gets merged into the main file. So after sometime both files keep going around and keep receiving documents on first-come-first-serve basis. Just that different officers see different versions of the file. Though it might sound like cases of mistaken identity in Bollywood potboilers with hero performing twin roles, in office it is anything but amusing. Such ghost files are more dangerous than missing files since they have selective information on which you invariably end up taking wrong decisions.

For the staff, nothing could be more euphoric than to discover a file to be missing. You would be told that a file is missing only after a week since you first call for it. After that, another week would be spent searching for it. And another week would be spent reconstructing it. So for three whole weeks the no one is working on the file, out of which one week is spent officially outside office on the plea of searching for it. All this would be while you are having nightmares over the approaching deadlines.

It is not that we do not have a File Management System. We have a very sleek, rugged, eco-friendly, portable and cost-effective File Management System which runs even without power. It is called the File Movement Register, a hardbound book whose pages deliriously hang out and which would fly away under the impact of the mildest sneeze from the person holding it. It is supposed to record all inward and outward movement of files. But the ingenious staff ensures that only outward movement is recorded. So that at any given point of time when you call for a file, you will be promptly shown the register as proof of unavailability of the file.  While it would appear as if majority of the files are on a permanent sojourn, some even extending for years, in reality some of them could be acting as the fourth leg of the chair in which your clerk has his daily siesta. Strangely, in due course, the register takes its given name too seriously and self-propels itself to the vast area of nothingness where all the files disappeared. I have thought of having a Meta movement register but gave it up thinking it will also meet the same fate.

The menace of missing files was sought to be contained with the aid of computerized File Management System supported by a powerful search engine. Informed sources told me that the most ambitious project that is currently undertaken by Google is to build a search engine to search for files in a Government office. It was also learnt that the algorithm is structured around the one that is used to search for the largest prime number. It has also a module to predict the possible deviant paths a file might take before it is lost into vacuum for which algorithm was borrowed from those used to simulate the Big Bang Theory. Despite such brilliant cutting computation, when the beta version of the software was actually tested, it failed miserably. After a detailed analysis, it was learnt that tracing of files in a Government office required intuitive fuzzy logic algorithms of the order which could predict the mood swings of women.  That was when the developers concluded they were chasing a mirage in sub Saharan Africa without the aid of a GPS. So that put to rest quietly a project which in the history of computer science could have overshadowed 3D simulation of nuclear explosion and search for extra terrestrial life and we resigned to our fate of living with missing files and moving registers.

*Courtesy Wicked Witch of Worcester

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Five Point Nothing

It is wonderful to be back at the Academy. I have had wonderful memories of this place and consider it to be the best among all the other Academies. As I checked into the room of the guest house allotted to me, the first thing that stuck me was the bedroom. Not that I have not seen these rooms before, but every time I did, I was confounded with the same thought – the shape of the room. The bedrooms of the guesthouse are pentagon in shape.  I have seen square and rectangular rooms. Or even ‘L’ shaped rooms, but pentagon? A room with five corners and five walls where every wall appears running diagonally when seen from the opposite wall. Due to the unusual angles of the wall, the furniture appears to be strewn around. The entire room has a feel of post modernist abstract sculpture. Thankfully, the bed is rectangular. Else I would have spent another lifetime figuring out where to rest my head. The old faithfuls of my blog will know how totally immersed I was into the training during my probation days. Therefore, I could not spare much thought to this mysterious design. However, this time, I decided to find out why was there the extra wall.

Probably they were inspired by the American Defense Headquarters. After all, Defence and Taxation are the two most defining signs of sovereignty.  But that seemed too far stretched. It was constructed at a time when our friendship with the Soviet Union was next only to that of Jai and Veeru. Or maybe it was driven by Vaastu considerations. No matter how secular and scientific we claim ourselves to be, it is a fact that we do allow ourselves such indulgences in an unabashed manner. So I sent a copy of the room plan to an eminent vaastu expert for his expert opinion. His marketing tagline screamed that his structures bought peace and prosperity in life and afterlife. I thought he plagiarised the ad campaign of the leading insurance behemoth. Later, I learnt that more than buildings, he designed tombstones, graveyards and even crematoriums. Of course, those alive cannot certify and those dead could not confirm. After numerous follow-ups, all I got for an opinion was a terse two-worded phrase that we hear every day on the news channels, “No Comments”.

Not the one to be disheartened, I decided to independently examine the possibility of some veiled astronomical significance in the design. I guess, it was a hangover of reading too much of Dan Brown.  I remember seeing such strange structures in Jantar Mantar too. I got the Sky Watchers Handbook from the library and stared through the window wondering if any particular planet, star or constellation would be visible from that angle. All I could see was the flickering sodium vapour street Iamp peeping through the branches of a wilted Gulmohar tree. I waited till the dawn to check where the first rays of sun fell. It fell on that corner of the room where the dustbin was placed.

At this point, I must confess that this was not only baffling room I came across. A stranger room was occupied by my erstwhile boss in Hyderabad. The building is probably one of the best governement offices in the country but rooms of the range heads are puzzling to say the least. They are so acutely trapezoidal that they almost border an isosceles triangle. The occupants have found planning the orientation of their office table more challenging than cracking hardcore money laundering. Such assymetry that whichever way you park you table, the opposite walls appear diagonally. The same room makes you feel claustrophobic at one end and agoraphobic at the other. Constant staring at diagonally running walls causes such severe disorientation that you just look into the files and never lift your head. May be that was the intent too. No one should aimless stare at walls. Not even for a second. Not even to look at the calendar or the clock.

I just keep wondering about the brains behind such fantastic designs which have a potential for a doctoral dissertation among the classes and political polarization among the masses. They can pass off as a new age architectural fusion of Pythagoras' Trigonometry with Picasso’s Cubism - an offspring of the holy union between art and science. Just that they fell short of utility and function failed to follow the form. They are no different from the first house allotted to me by the government. By now, I realised that even pondering over the subject was adversely affecting my abilities to judge distances and dimensions. I also began to fear that I am on the threshold of becoming an astigmatic. Since I needed to protect my limited cerebral and sensory abilities, I decided to call off this quest for truth with immediate effect. As I could not find any special reason behind these grotesque geometrics, I concluded, like many other assets of the state, they must be the result of sarkari planning and budgeting. Only in this case, in their zeal to cut corners, they cut a few too dramatically.

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Cocktail - Foreign Made Indian Liquor

Long before the days of Imraan Hashmi and Mallika Sherawat, the only source of titillation for the urban adolescent was the late night show on MTV called Grind. A bunch of scantily clad crowd swayed to some music which, I am sure, no one has ever heard because everyone watched it mute to avoid waking up their parents. But, as Paulo Coelho proclaimed, the entire universe conspired and I finally got to hear that elusive music when I watched Cocktail. The first hour of the movie appeared like a marathon MTV Grind. Seeing DP jumping from one table to another dancing in dimly lit night clubs and prodding men to palm her derriere, I thought she was a bar dancer. Just when I expecting that she would graduate from the table to a pole, she appeared with a camera announcing that she was a photographer. So she belonged to the tribe that goes pub hopping on ladies night when drinks are on the house for the fairer sex.

To give her company we have our very own old retard who wants us to think that he could forever floor females with his facial contortions. They were once funny, but repeated overuse has set in motion law of diminishing returns. The only thing new about his face is the wrinkles. If that wasn’t boring enough, you had a third lady - the new DP. She would consistently keep her gaze to the floor, speak in whispers and trot the streets of London in attires tailored in alleys of Chandini Chowk. While older DP tortured you with her endless prattle, the newer one stimulated the experience with her silence. With a permanent apology plastered all over face, she was just as lost as the remaining two. And so were we, with absolutely no clue where the movie was heading.

While people on screen was desperately trying to entertain, those in the theater showed the same interest reserved for an air hostess demonstrating safety instructions aboard a delayed late night flight. The quick repartees were lost into eerie silence. The funny antics were greeted with sneers and snorts. Even when DP callously striped down to her itsy-bitsy bikini, we just look at our watches wondering how far the interval is.  May be DP forgot that only after we had enough of her as a bikini pinup she got clothed for her bollywood debut which, ironically, had peace in its title but left the audience restless in the theaters.

After what seemed like an eternity, the interval arrived. As I tried to make my way to the aisle, a guy in the adjacent seat lunged towards the knees of his date and pulled them closer to prevent any accidental brush with my calves. In his reflexive concern for the knees, he has, quite literally, scaled new heights of foot fetish. Argh, I had to contend with morons not just on the screen but even before it. I pitied the lady for dating a guy whose knowledge of erogenous zones is entirely erroneous.

The popcorn at the kiosk could have been the best part of the movie. However, I wisely avoided because it was always better to watch a nauseating movie on an empty stomach. I dragged myself back to my seat and got ready for the remaining serving of the drivel. It proved to be worse than the first half. The best props in the movie were alcohol and sex with no strings attached. That gave way to more melodramatic elements like love, relationship, marriage etc. Sudden absence of alcohol started showing withdrawal symptoms in the older DP.  She made a quick crossover from a new age multiplex heroine to a single screen heroine whose dreams were woven around fidelity, family and vermillioned forehead. A lady who invited unknown females to her home and unknown males to her bedroom was suddenly mouthing constitutional rights like right to dignity, right to marry, right to family life etc. The rest of cast was talking about mutual consent, exploitation, social service etc. I never knew that such complicated politics existed in one night stands. The conversations became progressively unbearable. The characters, who wallowed in confusion when the movie began, were now steadily slipping into severe existential identity crisis. Finally, when both the decibels and rationales became unbearable, the younger DP walked out of the house. I too thought of leaving the theater but my masochism came in my way. I was determined to test my limits of endurance.

On screen, our eternally young real life nawab was also was getting his endurance levels tested. The older DP got hit by a speeding car when she staggered on the road and proved that drunken walking could be more dangerous than drunken driving. With one lady untraceably lost and other on crutches, the philanderer who, supposedly, left no skirt, saree and sarong unwrapped, had his libido left in lurch. Even when the lady finally got back on her legs, she declared that she wasn’t going to spread them for him. The mutual consent was withdrawn with immediate effect and until further orders. However, taking pity on his receding hairline and increasing facial lines, she decided to patch him up with the other DP.

Of course, that did not happen before some schmaltzy acts and agonizing songs. But we were spared of the other clichéd ordeals like stopping planes and popping pills. When I came out of the theater, I realized that this Cocktail was actually foreign made Indian Liquor a.k.a Daaru Desi. It left me stirred, shaken and brutally shattered.

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Flights of Fantasy

Ever since they stopped in-flight service of meals, air travel has really become boring. Not that the food was great, but you had a great time guessing which was the starter, entrée and the dessert. After the meal, if the lady who served you was pretty, you could always have an engaging debate with her on whether the hot liquid in your cup was tea or coffee. However, the low-cost airlines changed the rules of the game. These days you have neither meals nor pretty ladies serving them. On an outbound flight last week, I found that the entire cabin crew was male. I was wondering if they were trying to celebrate International Men’s Day or something. All of them appeared supremely irritable. I imagined that it was because they were asked to report for an early morning flight after late night romp over beer and Euro 2012 matches. I did not dare to even ask them water. 

The return flight was equally uneventful. Same aircraft. Same crew. Same irritability. And again I decided to not even ask them water. The extreme depressive state ushered in my mind a list of acts that could make my travel livelier. However, I did not indulge in any of them since my mother was accompanying me. Not that she believes in my genteelness, but she is tired of being embarrassed by my antics. If anyone of you has managed to free himself from the shackles of societal propriety, here are a few tips to make your travel eternally etched in memories of your fellow travelers and cabin crew.

• If you are seated near the emergency exit, after listening to the additional safety instructions, hold the lever of the door and ask if you can have a dry run.

• Ask for drinking water and pour it into the air sicknesses bag to check if it would leak. Promptly hand over the bag and empty bottle to purser who brought you the water.

• Ask the flight attendant to repeat safety instructions in the local language. Wave her a copy of the official gazette notification of three language formula if she refuses.

• After takeoff, pull out the life vest under the seat. Walk up to the cabin crew and ask where the trial room is.

• If you are passing through turbulent weather, offer to read tarot cards free for all the passengers to know who will land alive.

• Collect boarding cards of all passengers and then invite them for a game of rummy.

• Go to the cockpit and pester the pilot to help you identify cloud number nine.

• When the cabin crew asks if you would like to buy anything onboard, ask how much the trolley would cost. Don't try on Kingfisher. They might actually sell you.

• If you buy any stuff onboard, pay in one rupee coins.

• When they come to collect trash, throw in the in-flight magazine. Tell them this is your way of writing letters to the editor.

• And finally, before landing, request the captain to talk to the ATC and find out what offers are available on car rentals.

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In Pursuit of Better Times

Most people attribute drinking to their problems. I am no different from others. I have got so many problems to ponder upon that I find seven nights a week absolutely insufficient to give each problem its due contemplation. Some problems are so complex that I have a problem in understanding the problem. Nevertheless, I try to strike a healthy balance between the sensibilities of my heart and the capabilities of my liver.

One such problem that has been troubling me for quite sometime is the fate of a dying airline. I have never understood why the King of Good Times got into aviation. The only thing that is common between liquor and aviation is that both promise you to get a high. But the similarity ends there. Liquor is an easy business. Just like Cigarette, Pan Masala, Beedi, Ghutka etc. They are all built on weakness of men. You don’t need to try too hard to convince them buy your product. Just make someone feel that he is jobless, worthless or useless, he would pick one or all of the above. And we have one billion people in this country in the guise of parents, teachers, bosses, leaders, friends, neighbours, journalists, TV anchors etc to make every other person feel guilty about his biological existence. No wonder you find half the population at a pan shop, wine shop or at a bar and the other half searching for one. Therefore, every person from the manufacturer to the retailer invariably makes profit on intoxicants.

But aviation is a serious business, where history tells us that loss making is the norm and profit is an exception. It is a serious business where the likes of self-anointed kings and me shouldn’t be getting into. He was better off making beer and I was better off buying it. He did not stop there. He changed what we saw and redefined what one could show. He made calendars where one looked for everything other than the date. He launched satellite channel that made FTV look like channel for the grannies and taught that Bikini was the new blouse. He made dropping cloths not just fashionable but a way of life.  In fact, at times, some of the brand ambassadors started to even forget wearing them. He empowered thousands of women by giving them a career which provided them with mindboggling salaries with negligible expenses since they lived on minimal food and cloth and often slept on beaches. They were singularly responsible for increasing the savings rate and the healthy CASA ratios boasted by our banks.

After the success of such a revolutionary business model which generated wealth by selling wine and women, the obvious way to grow would be on the same lines. An astute move in this direction would be to go for a forward integration by starting a chain of premium dance bars. With both liquor and ladies already in place, all that would have been needed was the real estate, which is definitely much cheaper than those Airbuses that are as helplessly grounded as the passengers they ought to been carrying. Unfortunately, instead of a gradual progression into a related sector, there was a tectonic shift whose tremors are yet to subside. I feel really sad at the thought that the beer which gave me, and an entire generation, its first sip of forbidden pleasure would no longer be available. Life wouldn’t be same if we allow the group to collapse. We will be forced to go back to the grey hues of FTV and stay contended with the sepulchral marches of anorexic women with deadpan expressions. Calendars would be back as sheets of paper that record your missed deadlines and miserable appointments. Bikini will be a chapter in South Pacific Handbook and Bagpiper will be a member of the ceremonial music bands. A socio-economic revolutionary who redefined Roti, Kapda aur Makan as Beer, Bikini and Beach would be a martyr on the altar of stupidity.

With recession and inflation already looming large, tragedy of such epic propositions would be too cruel for a generation which is as clueless as the Deccan Chargers team. However, I still think that all is not lost. The forward integration can still be pursued. All those planes which stranded in the hangars could be converted into Flamenco Lounges. Well, “dance bars” sound so Udipi restaurant-ish, which our King of Good Times wouldn’t like even in his not-so-good times. The svelte flight attendants, who are wasting time reading morose letters explaining why their salary cannot be credited, could be gainfully reemployed as bartenders. For these poor ladies, whose sizes have gone from zero to sub-zero ever since the in-flight meals got reduced to water and fermented sandwich, this would be the best poverty alleviation scheme they could dream of. Further, for an efficient and competitive service, just announce that the whole thing is actually a part of the reality show, Model Hunt. Considering the scarcity of real estate in metros, having ready 200-seater place is a bonanza. The no-frills Red planes could be parked at non-metros and even district headquarters. Occasionally, if their turbines are still not rusted and the pilots not poached by other airlines, they could take off and you have new product – Sky Bar. Trust me, the airports would be raking in more moolah from parking and valet charges of customers than the UDF.

Please don’t dismiss this as a compulsive rambling of a mind woefully entangled in the affinities of ale. If the same thing was put across by a MNC consulting firm, whose consultants charge millions to state the obvious, it would be treated as a recipe for redemption. The stock values would soar and venture capitalists would appear like the ants after rains. Sadly, it is the natural order that anything that comes unsolicited and without a price tag is never valued. However, it is difficult to rein in your prattles when you find your earliest enchantress slipping away into the mists of oblivion. 

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The Gold Rush

If raids are the most dramatic part of the Income Tax department, then seizing gold is the most melodramatic part of the raid. You may take away crores of cash from a man with an ease of taking shirt off Salman Khan’s back. He would plead for sometime but would soon accept the fait accompli and starts plotting the next plan of action. But making a woman, and may be Bappi Lahiri, part with one milligram of gold is like asking selectors to rest Tendulkar. It would be a malady of misery and misfortune and a demonstration of dishonor and disgrace. A sorrow that finds place next only to grabbing the dress of your dreams in a melee of end-of-season sale but finding it one size larger. I never understood the fatal attraction of women towards jewellery. But then, I never understood women in the first place. In any case, it is not unusual for me to deal with things that I don’t understand. I have been doing it ever since I went to school and have been doing it more confidently ever since I joined the Government of India.

We are quite reasonable and we do allow a reasonable amount of jewellery to be retained. So when you ask them to choose some jewellery from those proposed for seizure for retaining, they face their biggest dilemmas of their existence. It is like asking them to choose between Clooney, Cruise and Cooper. Or like asking them choose between husbands who can cook, clean or take care of babies. Unconsciously, you have triggered off the most complex decision-making ever in history of mankind, or rather womankind. A decision-making process that must consider a billion variables, each of which are a polynomial function consisting of intangibles as variables and invisibles as coefficients. One which would take the best super computer few years to arrive at the solution. The estimation of the utility value of each piece of jewellery has to be calculated with respect to the clothes, shoes, bags, watches and 524 other accessories, some of which could be passed off as a piece of UFO cutlery. So that calls for a massive inventorying of not just what the lady owns but also what she plans to buy and what she dreams to buy in the next five years. The same exercise has to be repeated with her sisters, cousins and friends with whom she has a bilateral jewellery exchange agreement. No spreadsheet and not even pen and a paper. An exercise whose magnitude and complexity is comparable only with that of Wal-mart’s stock taking is accomplished just by looking at the jewellery and staring into thin air.

After three hours, the first piece of jewellery is yet to be decided. If it was cash, I would have seized, deposited in the bank and be on my way to some watering hole. I just hate the notion of working on a weekend. But since we spend most of our weekdays figuring out what to work upon, we end up working on weekends. And here was a lady who has completely disassociated herself from time. I realize that the proposed beer at the sports bar in the afternoon has to be rescheduled to evening. With a heavy heart and heavier hand, I SMS the same to my friends. 

You know the utility evaluation is over when the lady finally begins to touch the jewellery. But what you do not know is that the touch has triggered the second evaluation, the one that is exponentially  more complex, emotional evaluation. The moment she touches the jewellery, you can see her going into flashback. Sepia-tinted images float before her and violins play at the background. Every piece of jewellery, has a story behind it and some even have epics. And all of these relate to those jewellery gifted by her parents. That which are bought by her husband, however, would have to contend with just anecdotes. Anecdotes of his tightfistedness and how she had to settle for less when she could have got something better. Something not very different from the perception about her choice of husband.  So the output of previous decision-making is fed into a new flow chart evaluating the sentimental value of the jewellery.

Even as the process goes on, the lady still thinks that some miracle would happen and she would be spared of this ordeal of separation. At regular intervals, she would come up with new pleas. She would begin to narrate how poor they are. It doesn't matter that there is fleet of luxury cars in their porch and the house is situated in one of the most expensive localities of the town. If they are poor, I wonder what her servants are. Further, what about those who earn less than 30 rupees a day. Anyways, she soon realizes that we-are-poor-strategy is not convincing even to her, let alone us. So now begins the next argument – “Why us? There are so many people richer than us, so why us?” This time her husband, who till now was a silent spectator to the proceedings, too joins and you soon start hearing scores of names. They even start saying that the department goes after poor, hapless people like them and we lack the guts to go behind the high and mighty. I remind them that raids are conducted on suspected tax evaders, not on the basis of Forbes ranking. I offer them an opportunity to file a tax evasion petition before me and assure them of suitable action. And that seals their mouths. So much cooperation from our public minded elite who cry hoarse over corruption, black money and swiss accounts. 

The discussions on politics, power and wealth have metamorphosed into a futile inconclusive philosophical polemic. As the sun goes down, so does my patience. I declare that if they fail to complete their selection within the next 10 minutes, I am going to decide by means of a lucky, or rather, unlucky draw.  The threat works. All decision-making algorithms are suspended with immediate effect and choices are made based on the momentary instincts. Its late evening and I have my doubts about the dinner. However she doesn't have any more doubts on the impending fate of her jewellery. As the jewellery makes its way into the container which would be sealed and stashed away, the lady looks at it with the sigh of a mediaeval explorer having the final glimpse of his homeland at the horizon from the ship. The expression on her face is a concoction of hope, anxiety, fear and misery. Her husband, however, has just one expression - petrifaction at the imminent pestering for new jewellery the moment we leave the premise. It is now that his dilemma begins - whether to first pay taxes or buy jewellery. 

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The Physics of BP

Andhra Pradesh has a strange system of high school called as Junior Colleges. After 10th standard, students join these junior colleges where they do their 11th and 12th grades. In the summer of ‘97, I too joined one such Junior College. The Chairman looked scary and had a flair for expletives. He poached upon four lecturers from a nearby JC and used them to run his JC. BR and RP taught mathematics while BP and VK handled Physics and Chemistry respectively. In addition to teaching, each one was in-charge of a branch. Most JCs had many branches. All they needed was half-a-dozen rooms to start one.  

Among the four, BP was unforgettably bizarre. He wasn’t a great teacher. That was not a problem to us since good teachers, like good students, are a rare commodity. The problem was that he had an unshaken belief that he is an amazing teacher. He would announce his arrival mostly with his abdomen and sometimes with a raucous laughter. He looked as if Vikku Vinayakram buttoned up his shirt with his instrument. A tragicomedy in a state of perpetual motion, we often wondered why no external force was ever applied to disturb his inertia. He fancied himself to be a very engaging teacher and was convinced that his antics would etch the laws of motion forever in our memory. No one mustered courage to tell them that at his best he was plain irritating and at his worst he was self-derisive.

“When you throw a ball”, he would cry, enact and expect us turn our heads to follow the trajectory of the imaginary ball. Ninety percent of the class wouldn’t even bat an eyelid and look at him with a straight face. The rest threw themselves into slumber. Over the next two  years, with two hands, he threw projectiles, lifted weights, dropped masses, accelerated at 9.8 m/s²  , reflected light, refracted rays, heated rods, compressed gases, located centers of masses and gravity, propagated waves, transmitted electricity, inducted magnetism and his histrionics reached acme when he demonstrated dual nature of light. His pantomime had all the ingredients except silence. It was 1998. A good seven years before the Andhra Pradesh State Human Rights Commission would be constituted by the Government of Andhra Pradesh vide GO Ms No. 355, dated 11.08.2005 (General Administration (HRC) Dept.,) as per the provisions laid under Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993.  And BP took the maximum advantage of its absence.

His confidence never waned. His energy never sapped. His voice never mellowed. His jokes never improved. Some of us visited the adjacent Hospital for Mental Health at Erragadda to enquire if they had any preventive medicines / therapies to check mental degeneration amidst such daily doses of planned persecution. They did not meet with any success but one of them claimed to have seen BP’s name in the register that had list of escapees. Though, that increased our fears, we decided to dismiss it as a hallucination borne out of his constant remembrance.  

Those days, unable to bear the misery, I used to bunk the post-lunch classes. The modus operandi was simple. We would confidently walk out of the main gate pretending to get a refill for my pen. Once outside, we would walk to the end of the wall from where my friends would toss my bag over the wall. The rest of the afternoon would be spent at peace in some cinema theater.

During one such escapade, BP spotted us strolling at a street near our college. We got terribly scared. He made us walk back and took us to BR, who was in-charge of our branch. BP explained the whole incident with extreme dramatics.  He would roll his eyes to explain how he spotted us. He would clutch his palms to show how he caught us. He would oscillate his elbows in simple harmonic motion to demonstrate how we tried to run away. Then, there was an encore of the whole performance in every class he took in the post-lunch session that day. The rest of college was thankful to us for causing the only entertaining class of BP ever, while we suffered countless brutal blows with a broken branch of tree. BP continued to showcase the whole episode as an act of immense gallantry. To make the incident more dramatic and thereby raise his heroics, he began to report that we jumped over the wall and were running while he chased us in his car and caught us. That hurt us. We were honorable brats who walked out though the main gate and when caught respectfully walked back. But we couldn’t do much about our character besmirch. I later learnt that, year after year, BP continued to narrate his concocted heroics to every batch of students and finally stopped only when he learnt how the forest brigand Veerappan was nabbed.

Though we cursed him then, we now realize that his contribution to our lives was sizable. The continuous exposure to his daily melodrama had unconsciously strengthened our endurance levels. After those two years, be it university or workplace, India or abroad, none of us found any human being intolerable. Shailendra, who is now a senior software engineer, chuckles “In my very first meeting I laughed so approvingly at my boss’ PPJs (Pathetic PJs) that I got promoted thrice in the next two years. Thanks to BP, while my colleagues struggle to conceal their irritation, I spontaneously break into laughter which makes my boss feel that he is a reincarnation of Chaplain.”

Not just at work, BP’s classes have filled marital lives with pure bliss. Gokul, who is married over two years, chokes with gratitude when he remembers BP. “Thanks to his classes, these days I can effortlessly display poise when my wife animatedly describes for over two hours the saree of her choice. I can even pretend to be naturally excited when she describes the design as a mix of light periwinkle and peachy pink with prints of alternating strokes of honeydew green and cantaloupe orange.”

Hail BP!!!

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