Swindler's List

Now there are a couple of situations in life that warrant an inquisition into the deeper mechanics of chance. Is it possible there might be some divine being..whose sole pastime is playing dice, and subjecting us humans to the random foibles of that game? Or is it just some sort of ticker counter that counts a sort of pseudo luck score, and when you run out, decides to work in reverse. Either way, I landed at the airport here with little more than 800 rupees cash, after having succumbed to parvenu's syndrome, and blown all my hard earned cash on haleem and hash in Hyderabad(alliterations anyone?). And I proceeded to part with a majority of the aforementioned cash (to the gentleman at the prepaid taxi booth), I noticed a foreigner who was, well ,in the process of being swindled. Or, that's what I thought at the time.

You see, most Banarasis here know a smattering of English, something like, "You go..hundred rupees" and so on and so forth. This aids them to a great extent in the swindling process, as most foreigners have neither the need nor the vocabulary required for bargaining. However, this foreigner seemed different, she managed to wriggle out of a (rather obvious) setup, and get into some sort of a bargain. This bargain involved setting up with a taxi for 300 bucks, and as I was paying 680, you can understand me feeling a bit envious. The idea here was, that she had a much shorter distance to cover, than I did, as I had to get to the university which was at the other end of town. Little did I know that the taxi wallahs had come up with a nefarious scheme to maximise their profits.

Now this scheme, rather deviously involved the both of us sharing a taxi, until she got off, and me being, well roughly okay with that. Now the thing is, no such scheme can succeed without melodrama, platitudes, and an inevitable caving in a short while later. So, inevitably, she protested, and what not, most of it falling on deaf years, and after a while was bundled in with me. After taking in the finality of her plight, she decided nothing more was to be done, and smiled sweetly at me as if to say, " Don't take it personally, I just don't like sharing a taxi".

After a short while we got to chatting, and I found out she was not here for recreation, indeed very few single Iranian women are. She was here, more specifically, for a master's law degree. This was strange, and to compound it all, her law degree, the one you get at first, I don't think the term bachelor's applies to single women, was also from India. Osmania University, no less. I think she had made a bold choice coming to BHU, after all, it is in Varanasi, and Varanasi, as anyone will tell you, is no Hyderabad. Her choice, however, was motivated more along the lines of parsimony. Turns out, getting a degree here is far cheaper than in Hyderabad. The fees, the living expenses, are all taken care of here.

Now, this reaffirmed my opinion of most foreigners who come to Benaras not being, well shall we say, well heeled. But what intrigued me was that she would chance coming here all alone, in order to get a degree from a university with a turbulent past. But then again, Iran is not regarded as being the most placid of countries. So it made sense, in a very convoluted sort of way. In any case, foreigners, especially the more financially desperate ones, are made of sterner stuff. And as for swindlers, they had best improve their English, if they are to be as effective as they intend to be.

Murders and Accusations

It's merger time again. Some of the world's biggest companies get on the financial merry go round, and buy some companies that really should have been left well alone, and to themselves. The acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google and Skype by Microsoft has sparked off a whole new series of buyoffs, selloffs and general pandemonium. HP now wants to sell off its hardware business and get into software. It is prepared to pay 10 billion dollars to achieve the same. And this is from the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world, with over $130 billion in sales. Perhaps this is due to the higher margins available in software, and this has even been hinted by the top brass at HP. Assuming this to be true, we may conclude that companies invested heavily in software must be a lot more profitable than those invested in hardware or associated services.

And this is where we come into the tale of the two behemoths, Google and Microsoft.

There is a reason why Apple isn't even in on the picture, you see, for Apple is older, and currently bigger than either of the two. Apple has now become tremendously successful, after expanding its portfolio from the niche iMac, to the proletarian ipod. The battle now, is in between Microsoft and Google, lets say, and even here, it is David vs Goliath. For no matter what detractors say, Microsoft is clearly the larger of the two. Microsoft has a profit of $23 billion on revenues of 69 billion. Google comes a distant second, with an 8.5 billion profit on revenues of 26 bill. And google, is a software company looking to foray into hardware, which makes companies like HP look all the more tentative about their policies. Plus, Steve Jobs seems nowhere among the runners right now, and this translates to a certain Tim Cook, who did not have the best of first days at the helm of apple, struggling to find some flimsy thread of innovation in his company.

In truth, the highest form of work is intellectual work now, and while the great country of America has a tendency to reward truck drivers and construction workers, in India, we love our software engineers. This is where google scores, you see, for man to man Google has more creative, more inventive engineers. However, it ran out of its own creative solutions, especially in the Smartphone Space. What google has done now, is buy up as many patents as it can, with the acquisition of Motorola Mobility. It has acquired 2500 patents, at a cost of around $500,000 per patent. Which is only interesting because when Microsoft and Apple had bid for Nortel and Novell's patents..they managed to acquire them at $750,000 apiece.

While the Motorola Mobility deal was sealed at $12.5 bn, and guarantees Google access to mobile phone and smartphone markets, Microsoft have paid $8.5 bn for Skype, for software technology that is fast becoming redundant.

Ironically, Skype is being replaced by Google voice and video chat.

Abhorrence and the Social Network

"Nature abhors a vacuum" -English Proverb

Narendra Modi is at it again. And now its cops who have to bear the brunt. For everyone who has ever submitted evidence against him, and still had the temerity to continue in his police force. Make no mistake, in Gujarat, he is God,and like every other politician/godman in this country, he has ego issues. Godhra was a side effect, and Gujarat, despite its newfound prosperity still finds it difficult to forget that notable communal scarring of its subaltern proletariat.

Communality, which is very different from communism, is an example of atavistic tradition gone horribly wrong. For you see, just like religion and bullock carts, communality was also useful, in its own time. Before it grew into a highly dichotomous and very fractious bone of contention between people. You see, nature abhors a vaccuum, and this leads all human beings to seek the company of other human beings. And while the dudes and dudettes of today may have upto a 1000 friends on their Facebook profiles, the people of yesteryear were limited to 150 or less. Their social circles were considerably constricted by their inability to commute long distances.

And as befits humans of a certain social standing, these people treated anyone outside their community to be a threat. And this lead to the formation of many rules, which, archaic as they may seem today, are still allowed to define the lives of people. Rules whose significance has been lost but still form the cornerstone of the lives of millions of people, and in some cases the reasons for their death. If consenting adults were not allowed to marry outside their community, it was to preserve the sanctity of their community. To preserve the gene pool that they evidently go into their heads was superior to that of all other communities. Homogeneity of religion, in order to preserve their cultural identity, and an inherent xenophobia in order to prevent cultural dilution.

What's important to keep in mind, is that while all this might have been culturally and socially relevant a few centuries ago, it is no longer feasible to have communities divided on cultural political or theosophical lines. It is not possible for us to ostracise or segregate other cultures based on the presumptuous belief that we are superior to others. Our social network is wider than it has ever been, and so is our global footprint. RIght wing parties in france want to halt the import of any materials that may be produced indigenously. This view is shared by most right wing parties across the world, as well as certain left wing parties and moderates. And while this may seem easy in theory, it is nearly impossible to implement.

For you see, the phone that you will answer in a little while may have been designed in Finland, or California or Japan, might have been assembled in China or Korea, or may, shockingly even, have been assembled in India. Our global is no longer global.

We are now glocal. And communities are no longer isolated. And(hopefully) religion will no longer exist.

Studious sycophants and why lack of mental exercise is highly important

College life is full of examples that you would feel obliged to tear your hair out at or (preferably) kick someone in the balls for. These examples are usually cooked up by some of those no good dilettantes sitting around in one large circle in a dingy room rapt in their rather pointless conversations on absolutely pointless topics. These people, who I must admit, are now some of my closest friends and well wishers, are brilliant, because they possess a myriad of talents, chief among which is NOT STUDYING.

Yes, NOT STUDYING, those two magical words form the epitome of the zenith of the apogee of the height of talent that collegiates seem to (mostly not) possess in abundance. In short, it is something laudable and concomitantly rare in most college students. At least in my college. Not studying is something that no one in my college seems to be able to accomplish successfully. Which makes those who can, something akin to living legends. Mostly, such people enjoy the respect and adulation of the mob, as well as rather limited successes which are magnified by the degree of (lack of ) effort they might have put in. TO put an end to any digressions, and get to the most elusive of all topics, the point. As such, this is a LIST post, and is one of the easiest to write about, because lists just write themselves don't they??

Here's why NOT STUDYING makes so much more sense than...well,everything else:

1. Not studying makes people believe that you have other mysterious, and very impressive talents. Such people are in awe of your prowess at almost anything, this might include being able to drink water through your nose, or being able to unfasten a bra with just one hand...

2. If perchance, you lack abovementioned talents, then people naturally assume you're cool, a dude, or equivalent euphemism...just because you don't study means you must be.

3. You can laugh in the face of danger, your HOD, your PhD mentor, your (highly successful) peers, a buffalo (if you're high enough on ganja) or a laughing hyena (if you're low enough), or a 16 wheeled TATA ZX-1 truck (if you're suicidal enough or high enough on ganja).

4.You have enough time to blog on absolutely any topic, this including the insect who met his tragic end one day while scaling your LAN cable or that weird M.Tech. student across the hall..

5. You get better grades than the guy next to you, even though you only studied for an hour, and he was up till 4 drinking coffee and working out solved examples and bugging you with doubts like,"DUDE,What's the square root of pi?"

6. You can play stupid ass computer games, and pretend they are real, and debate on them with a gusto reserved for oil price hikes and attendance shortages.

7. If you decide, one day, to hang yourself no one would notice until some guy says,"Abe, khana khaane chale?" to your corpse.

8. While in a fit of alcohol induced soporific ramblings, you stumble upon the secret to life, and forget all about it two hours later..only to remember it two years later while you drink yourself to death after no company would recruit you because they called you for a series of interviews, and you didn't study for any of it.

9. Most people would envy you, and those who didn't would be too busy studying to care anyway.

10. You can make lists out of absolutely anything. Yes, that means anything.