What happens when geeks enter a movie rental store

Scene: BigFlicks, a movie rental store in Punjabi Bagh, Delhi
Three geeky people enter a partially crowded store. First person is wearing kurta, jeans and flip-flops; second is wearing t-shirt and baggy pants; third is wearing creased shirt and jeans. The store starts getting empty - it is hard to say whether it is because of these three people, they looked quite normal.
Geek 1 (to the salesman): Sir, are these movies for sale?
Salesman smells business and whips out a pamphlet and starts walking towards them with a widest grin he could manage.
Salesman (while walking towards them): No sir, I'm afraid not, but we have plans which are impossible to refuse, if you will have a look at... (geek 2 cuts him in between)
Geek 2: Hey do you have a movie 'Gunda'?
Salesman: Ummm...
Geek 2: Hero of the film was Mithun da aka Prabhuji?
Salesman: No, sir
Geek 2: Loha?
Salesman: No sir
Geek 2: Cheetah?
Salesman (desperately wiping his brows): No sir, but we have more titles than any other rental store across India, now if you could look here... (geek 3's turn to speak)
Geek 3: Actually we don't want to look at this, we have a 2 Mbps connection at our house, we download all the movies we need. There is a website from where you can buy the movies cheap for downloading
Geek 2: Of course you understand that they are DRM encrypted, you can't watch it on any other computer
Salesman smiles.
Geek 1: Moreover, I think this is going to be the future of movie rentals, I wonder why you aren't switching over to that mode yourself.
Geek 3: My these two friends are actively working on DRM technologies, soon movie rental is going to become an online game without any threat of piracy.
Salesman: Right sir!
Geek 1: OK see you then
The three gentlemen walk out and the crowd starts trickling back in.

Kapil Bhatia gets slashdotted!

My friend Kapil Bhatia is an avid blogger. He wrote about his lessons at Proto.in and it got Slashdotted. The downside? It was Slashdotted by a Japanese, so no English here!
Go to Japanese Slashdot.

Double Bogey

We are all slaves to technology, except for few who have mastered it. I put myself in the latter category until yesterday. Yesterday, my illusions got shattered as technology gave a nasty shock to tell me who the boss was.
It was Saturday and I was in office doing some fire-fighting. In the late afternoon when I realized that I will be spending my evening too in the office itself, I decided to SMS my two friends. The three of us usually go together every Friday night and have tea in some quite corners of Delhi. I tried to make my SMS as funny as possible and wrote:
“Are we having our weekly night orgy today?” This was supposed to be funny because the word ‘orgy’ is a grossly misunderstood word. It actually means a sacred rite, or a party (detailed meaning is available here), but people usually associate with it extreme sexual activity. I knew my friends will laugh heartily after reading this and patted my own back for such achievement.
I dexterously pressed the buttons of my phone, opened the Recent Contacts list and clicked on the first contact. Message went like a breeze. I then proceeded to command my cell phone to send same message to another of my friend, it is at this point that technology decided to put her foot down and tell who commands whom. Just like last time, I again opened the Recent Contacts list, selected the name of next recipient and casually pressed the send button and immediately gasped for air. I had chosen the wrong recipient! The recipient of was someone from my office and the worst part was that the recipient was a girl! I could imagine Technology rubbing her hands and laughing with glee.
I hurriedly opened the Outbox to stop the message from sending but the damage was done much earlier. Now, the only logical thing was to send another message apologizing for the error, but I come from a family of major over-reactors, so I not only sent one long message apologizing for the error but also, to be doubly sure, sent her the meaning of the word itself!
The story does not end here; it so happened that I had got a message from another friend and I had not replied to him at that time. I decided to answer his message; I did not choose the Reply option and instead composed another message. This time again, the buttons played their part well and the message was again sent to her.
I wonder what she might be thinking now. Damned double bogey!

Underwear Shopping

Let me make it clear in the very beginning, I don’t like shopping and when it comes to buying something as mundane as underwear then I ask someone else to do it for me. Usually an easy target is my brother. The problem is that such shops have assortment of items and most of the items are are for girls. It is most embarrassing for me to walk down in a shop full of girls and ask for my stuff. It has happened to me once - the girls passed sly glances at me and then giggled in chorus. I came out without buying anything.
I was forced to go into one of these shops this time because my friend, who equally abhors such shopping orgies, had to buy one of these necessities for himself. Faced with no choice, I accompanied him to what looked like one of the more respectable stores where shopkeepers and sales people don’t make you feel like a sinner who has come to atone for a murder one has just committed.
Just as I dreadfully entered the shop my brilliant mind popped out an idea. It happens so many times that the best of the ideas come to you in most unexpected fashion. It happens that you are walking down the road and you see a passer-by crossing the road and an idea hits you, which is potent enough to transform human lives forever. It happened to Newton when he saw an apple falling down. It happened to somebody called Archimedes - the idea was so powerful that it made him run naked on streets of Rome. The next person in queue after Archimedes and Newton was me – the idea came to me the very moment I had crossed the threshold of the shop, like a shutter which has just opened.
It occurred to me how I could make it one of the better experiences in life, so along with my friend I decided to buy one for myself too, and suddenly I transformed myself to one of the most enthusiastic underwear shoppers. I first asked the salesman to give me some floral patterned underwear which, as expected, he did not have for men. Then I asked him to show me one with animals on it which again, as expected, he did not have for men. I then asked him for one with butterflies print, again the answer was in negative.
My friend, all this while had been looking, nay, gaping at me with his mouth open. And before I forget to mention, he had turned scarlet as well. I, meanwhile, continued with my shopping and asked the salesman for a mauve coloured variety. He did not even know what mauve colour was, nor did I, but it does not matter. Next I asked him for orange colour, which surprisingly, he did have and I purchased it.
I confess that I liked them. The colour was different, bold and extravagant. Since then, I have been resisting the temptation of wearing them over my pants.

Simple pleasures of life...

1· Waking up on a winter morning and realizing you have five more minutes of sleep and rolling back into the warm comforts of bed.
2· A warm shower.
3· Flushing a roll of tissue paper down the toilet and watching the roll struggle crazily for escape.*
4· Watching old episodes of The Popeye Show.
5· Humming “Jingle bells” to yourself at Christmas time.
6· Singing aloud your favourite song at top of your voice.
7· Hearing the sound of rain from your room.
8· Listening to your old favourite songs after a long time.
9. Listening to sound of ocean in a conch-shell.

* By this, I mean the entire roll. Put an end of tissue in the clean toilet and then flush. It's quite a fun to see roll unwind itself

Trying to fall in love

“Ahem”, asked the foreigner sitting next to me, “why is he constantly on phone?” The lady was from America on a client visit to our company. She was referring to my colleague who called up his fiancé at the slightest provocation.

“Uh, umm, he is trying to fall in love”, I answered. I knew that she won’t understand the answer and the frown followed by wiggling of her nose proved that I was right. Before giving her any opportunity to ask another question I continued, “Actually, he has just got engaged to a girl. He is trying to fall in love with her before they get married”. I felt I had given a satisfactory answer and started to resume me work, but the lady was still confused.

“Why did he get engaged to a girl whom he did not love?” asked our client.

“His parents arranged the marriage for him, so he did not get any chance to meet her before their engagement. He is doing all he can to fall in love with her and going by the number of conversations he is having, I think he is doing a good job! He will be in love with her well before their wedding day.”

“But the idea of parents finding a girl for you is preposterous!” her voice almost trembled with shock.

“No it is not” I protested, “it is so much better in life to marry first and fall in love later with your wife or husband, far easier and a lot simpler!”

“But dear, you don’t realize one problem, what if they don’t fall in love even after marriage?” she said with an air of a class teacher who has just stumped a second class boy.

“Not falling in love is not an option for them” I said with a concluding tone in my voice.

Love for Wodehouse

I was hooked to P.G. Wodehouse’s books from the third book onwards. It took me some time to get acquainted with his writing style, use of words and long sentences. Since then I have been acting as an unpaid marketing manager of Wodehouse, I certainly would have earned a commission from him had he been alive.
I love Wodehouse for a simple reason, that if such an attempt of creating humour with virtually non-existent story line were done by somebody else it would have been a plain disaster. Wodehouse did something to the words, which other authors could not even dream of - something called magic.
When someone asks me to summarize the stories of Wodehouse, it hardly takes me more than two minutes to do so. People then wonder whether it is worth reading two hundred plus pages just for that story, which is hardly sounded funny. I give them this reason: In fast-paced novels one does not get to notice the language, the objective is to turn pages as quickly as possible and get to the end. The meat, as Wodehouse would have put it, lies in the story, not language. Whereas in books of Wodehouse stories proceed at leisurely pace, the story line is humorous, but the true humour is generated by the language. One should read to books of Wodehouse to enjoy the language, appreciate the genius of the man who created magic with words.
If you are reading his books for getting a good story, you will be terribly disappointed but if you are reading them to ease the tension off your mind, to see the lighter side of life, to see how extraordinarily funny even any vapid situation can get then you will be in for a very pleasant surprise. Go ahead, surprise yourself!

Quote from Trial of Tilak

Bal Gangadhar Tilak is known for his call "Swarajya is my birthright, I will have it."

Little is known of another of his memorable quotes, these are inscribed on a tablet outside Central Court room of Bombay High Court. He was tried and sentenced guilty for sedition and in the end he said these unforgettable words:

"All I wish to say is that in spite of the verdict of the Jury I maintain that I am innocent. There are higher Powers that rule the destiny of things and it may be the will of the Providence that the cause which I represent may prosper more by my suffering than by my remaining free."

Dressing Sense

Some people have an impeccable dressing sense. I wonder if it is their personality, their choice of clothes or they are just plain lucky, but whatever they wear they look good in them.
One of my friends is a lawyer by profession and a super model by looks. Every time I see him he appears dressed perfectly. This is true even when he about to retire to bed, he dresses in a manner as if he is giving demonstration for sleeping tutorial classes. “There”, the instructor might say “is the manner, in which one should dress for sleep, look at this person, he has managed to match the colour of his bed sheet and with the pyjama”. I wonder if he manages to impress the judges with his attires, unlikely, but I wouldn’t be shocked to learn if it were true.
Same is the case of a girl who I have seen only in photographs but never met personally. I have known her only because another of my friend has so many photographs of her that now he gives the count in kilograms, the latest score being 3 kilograms of her photographs. Imagine the survival rate of people who are forced to watch each and every of those photographs. Fortunately, the girl is a beauty and she is another one of those lucky people who manage to choose the clothes just right for them. Watch an average girl with good dressing sense and you give an appreciative nod, for face is given by God but dressing is chosen by mortals. Whereas if you see a pretty girl dressed shabbily, you have to fight down the impulse of calling the police to remove the eyesore. The third category, the one in which this girl falls into, are rare species of those having good face and good brains to pick out clothes. When placed in company of such finer sex a man can hardly be blamed for behaving like a clown. It is in such company that a man’s caveman instincts compete with his medieval chivalry and present before the general public a spectacle of never seen before buffoonery.
I can be shown in stark contrast with above two examples. I have been handed over ultimatums by many people about my dressing sense. Some of my friends just look up and curse heavens for sending me down, while the others have given up trying to train me – they have learnt that one has to face disappointments in life. After much introspection, I have found out what is wrong with me or my dressing sense. The reason is simple, I am plain lazy to go and buy new clothes for me. Nay, buying is an understatement, I am plain lazy to even dig out clothes from wardrobe, I just wear anything which is lying in front of me. So, for all those atrocities I have committed and will continue to commit in the name of poor dressing sense, my friends, I ask for forgiveness.

What is my IQ?

I took an IQ test few years back, my IQ was measured around 145 at that time. Then, after four years, came an application on Facebook, which measured my IQ at 124. My brain cells must have took a severe beating because I distinctly remember that the first IQ test was a lot tougher than this frivolous widget on Facebook. Since then, I have been asking people whether they know of any particular site, paid or unpaid, which can accurately tell me my IQ. There is one High IQ Society on the internet, which allows you to take very accurate tests to measure your IQ, but the catch is that you need to be a member of that society. I will be crossing the fine line between foolishness and lunacy if I start hoping to join that society. I am content to be on the side of foolishness; at least I can roam about freely without posing any danger to the society.
Coming back to the IQ thingy, yesterday, my friend confirmed that all the IQ tests are wrong, at least in my case. It came after my chance remark that I regularly read Dilbert blog and I just love XKCD comics; he said that it is a proof enough that my IQ is way below 60 and refused to quantify the exact measurement. Case is closed.
PS: Should I tell him that I am trying to solve problems on Project Euler? Maximum that can happen is that he will rate my IQ below zero…

Mayawati and Black clothes

This is what I love about her, the sheer power she wields. Hate her with all your might, but black clothes are not being allowed at Kanpur for the latest Indo-Pak match. The reason, ostensibly because she does not want her opponents to wave black flags at her while she enjoys the match but for all you know, she might have had a nightmare involving black clothes.

While policemen are taking all care to check socks, handkerchiefs, scarves, t-shirts, shirts, pants and other clothing are they taking due care to check the underwear as well? If I were one of the spectators, I would have worn big black underwear (twice the size I could fit in) and then after I gain entry, I would go to the rest rooms, pull out the underwear and wave it right in front of Maya Memsaab. At the most, I will be fined for breaking the laws; a small price to pay for getting the District Collector getting transferred, Kanpur SP to be suspended and the local police inspector dismissed for negligence. This will also remind the world that my underwear alone is far more powerful than any other person in UP.

The authorities, who are on their toes when Madam gets into town, must be edgy to the point of having nervous breakdown. Imagine sneaking behind them and shouting at the top of your voice “Black” and then before they get to you, complete the sentence with “Sanjay Leela Bhansali”.

This brings me to “Sawariya”, well done Shahrukh!

The Orkut Crush

I have that feeling again, of being in love. It is pretty usual for me – merely a routine work, people say it’s because of the positioning of Venus in my birth-chart. The only unusualness in this whole affair is that I have seen my ladylove on Orkut.com and never ever seen her in real life. For all I know, she could be an impostor – a boy posing as a girl, though I am sure that this is not possible because I have been tracking her photo albums for some time and it does look like a genuine profile of a girl studying in Indian Institute of Technology – Kanpur, India.
I came across her while browsing through scrapbooks of one of my friend’s friend. I saw her photograph and the first thing which came to my mind was that this can’t be any real person – no one can be so beautiful and I was proven right. It was just a trick of light in that photograph, the extra shine which made her appearance completely divine. Yet, I have to admit that the girl was pretty, and the fact that she had so many photographs in her profile made me visit her profile many times and before I knew it, she became my first ever online crush. The only sad part is that I don’t even exist for her, and I am not one of those desperados who instantly scrap every girl they come across ostensibly to have “friendship” with them but covertly hoping to have sex with them at the first chance they get.
Such social networking sites can come out as a strong alternative to matrimony sites because people are being more “natural” while putting their personal information and not trying to “sell” themselves to prospective brides and grooms so the information is genuine and more extensive. The other factor is the list of common acquaintances which are listed out when you visit a profile, so your background searching also becomes easier.
I wonder if Google is pondering launch of “Google Matrimony (Powered by Orkut)”...

Public’s First Servant

Pratibha Patil, our newly sworn-in president, calls herself public’s first servant. The signs are clear; by public’s first servant she of course means that she is seeking to become Sonia Gandhi’s first servant; and Manmohan Singh, who so far had occupied the coveted position, should start seeing red.

The question is whether she will be able to cross the sycophantic standards set by Zail Singh, he said that he will mop the floor if Indira Gandhi asks him to do so. I wonder what Pratibha Patil will do? I think Sonia Gandhi will ask her to cook some food, and probably may even reward her by asking Madam President to accompany her for her next trip to beauty parlour – after all, presidents do make good companions for trips to beauty parlour.

And yes, now Madam Gandhi will not need to nag our defence minister to request for Indian Air Force planes to carry her, she will simply ask Mrs Patil to take her to different locations in presidential luxuries.

Good move Mrs. Gandhi – I suggest you even try teaching her Italian so that you can give instructions to her in public without degrading the dignity and sovereignty of the highest office of the country.

Electricity through Gymnasiums

I started going to gym around 2 weeks back, which is pretty cool. It has everything including power backup but I am particularly intrigued by those self-powered machines. They get powered on after someone starts doing exercises on for few seconds. They convert mechanical energy to electricity and these machines gave me this idea…

Most of the power generation converts mechanical energy to electric energy, if we could harness the mechanical energy wasted during exercises then some energy problems of India could be solved. I am not talking about them at large scale, though the solution is very much scalable.
For example, my own gymnasium must be consuming around a hundred units of power daily, with 5 AC to run and 3 high power amplified speakers, not to speak of the electricity consumed by light bulbs and treadmills. The cross-trainers and the bicycles we work on are self powered, cycle them once or twice and the display on them comes to life. I am sure the display consumes far less power than is generated at the time of exercising, if that extra power could be fed into a system for charging batteries and that power could be used when batteries are charged fully then a considerable amount could be saved on electricity and hence greenhouse emission.

Talking about electricity, in my housing society there are 300 flats, on an average one person per two household goes to gym which makes for around 150 persons. Each of them burn around 1000 calories per day which comes to around 150,000 calories which is 150,000 X 4.184= 627,600 joules (1 calorie = 4.184 joules) and 627,600 joules = 627,600/3,600,000 units of electricity = 0.174 units of electricity. This amount may look like too little but here is how to look at it, we have a power backup through a 0.5MW generator which translates to 0.138 units of power generation, get the picture now? We are talking of considerably higher power generation for free and all that while people improve their health!
If my own society had gym, which was free for its society members, which could harness this power, we would never need that generator! And the picture gets even better; because the gym will be free more people will join the facility which means more power generation. It does mean using humans as rats on wheels, but who cares, people will do it willingly.
Is anyone listening?!!

Does Senior Management Ever Use Rest Rooms?

It is more than 2 months since I joined my new company, it’s an amazing place. Of all the amazing things I have noticed so far the most amazing one is that I have not seen any of the senior management ever in any toilet so far. Even though my seat is very near to our COO’s seat and I see him going in and coming out of his cabin so many times, I have never ever seen him going to toilet even once, which has kept me wondering for a long time now. There could be many possibilities for this:
a. They have separate toilets, which are probably camouflaged as meeting rooms or restricted areas and can be opened only by special access cards or finger print scanning.
b. They take some sort of medicines to control their bladders or have got them removed altogether.
c. Possibly they do go the toilets meant for lesser mortals but at the right time, when no one is able to see them. Having toilets under camera surveillance is a preposterous thought, having toilet gates is not. There could be someone monitoring the people going in and coming out and then letting the COO or others in senior management know (by turning-on the 'all clear' light in their cabin) the precise movement at which coast is clear.
d. Another possibility is that they have done some trend analysis based on the peak traffic and avoid those rush hours. In the unlikely event of being seen by a lowly employee it is very easy for them to pretend that they are on inspection and checking if everything is all right because they belong to, well…senior management.
e. Another advantage of being in the echelon of management is that you can go anywhere you wish and you need not answer anyone. A sentence like ‘oh, I’m entertaining a client’, when you are actually answering nature’s call at your home, would mean that people should not dare call you for next hour – enough time to go back to your home (which is again hardly a kilometre away, another advantage) do your ‘client entertainment’ and to come back. And frankly, who will dare question them even if they are late by 15-20 minutes?

Ciao!

A new blog

I had been giving serious thoughts about the focus of my blog, on one part I wanted to write about defence technology, military strategy, and weapon systems and on the other hand I also wanted to write about lighter aspects of life. Having both the types of writing on a single page would mean losing the focus of the blog and letting the visitors essentially scrape through the entire contents to find relevant posts. Hence, I have decided to start another blog for military strategy.

Visit http://manandwar.blogspot.com

A new Myst genre?

I have just finished playing Riven; it belongs to a genre of games where you are required to complete the game objective by exploring, making deductions and solving puzzles which come on your way. You are all alone in the entire game-play and there aren’t many characters in the game who can help you. Needless to say, that it can not be liked by everyone and there are only a handful people who could finish this game entirely on their own without even once looking at some hint or other. It’s too difficult, to the point of absurdity sometimes, to be solved by a single person alone. I feel proud to declare that I looked up for help on only three instances, which I think is quite an accomplishment.
Once I had finished playing, I felt whether it is possible to make an even difficult game – ¬ not in the sense of puzzle solving but puzzle making. If you are familiar with the story-line of Myst/Riven, you know that someone, like Sirrus; Achenar; or Gehn, gets trapped in a surrealistic world and makes devices, machineries, locks and codes to escape that island. The player’s objective then is to decipher the codes and understand the machineries and then come back.
The objective of the new kind of games would be to let the players play the role of Sirrus/Achenar/Gehn or someone else who is initially trapped. With nothing to start they will gradually build the machineries and codes to survive in that island. This should involve understanding the physics of that world and the mathematics behind them. Maybe even involving calculus and differential equations, of course, it is going to be far difficult than the Myst genre and only those having high-IQ and knowledge of advanced mathematics would be able to solve it.
The game should not be available in retail store, instead, I suggest having a qualifying test for users to buy this game; the potential players should be tested for their basic knowledge, their aptitude and IQ and then only be allowed to buy the game. Once they are qualified, the game’s CD/DVD should be sent to their home directly. The media should have a unique ID which should map the media to their respective users, so in case there is a piracy then the company can track the ID with users and hold the user guilty for distributing pirated copies.
The users who demonstrate their exceptional intelligence by successfully completing the game can be listed on Cyan’s website where recruiters and head hunters can view their profile and find candidates who are exceptionally intelligent, highly motivated, and, can work in a challenging situations to get out-of-the-box solutions.

The Mass Murder of Patients

All India Institute of Medical Studies (AIIMS) is one of the premiere institutions of the world in field of medicine. The doctors passing out and the ones employed at AIIMS are considered best in the world, all because of the world-class infrastructure provided by government from the taxpayers’ money. The doctors are good academically and in dexterousness. But, they are not good professionally and ethically. In fact, it seems that all the doctors of AIIMS have forgotten the Hippocratic Oath they once took at the start of their career – or did they take it at all?
The doctors should be treating their patients with all the skills and infrastructure that has been provided to them by the government not only because they are under oath but also because they are serving the very people from whose taxes they get their salaries and from that public money only AIIMS was built through which they received their world-class education in the first place.
These doctors do not understand the agony of people who to travel as much as 3000 km or more in the hope of getting better treatment and then finding out that let alone the treatment they are not even being let-in in the hospital. There have been instances when patients have committed suicide in front of hospital (call it a very painful euthanasia) because they could not endure the hopeless wait in front of hospital while the doctors sat hardly 50 meters away from him happily drinking fruit juices under the banner of ‘Indefinite Strike of AIIMS Doctors’.
The negligence of duty of doctors is a cause of lesser worry when compared to the way media presents the news of strike. The death of patients comes to nothing when it comes it comes to strike by doctors, media glorifies the “cause” of doctors and presents the deaths as a natural part of such process.
The government must put interest of the public before everything else, the doctors may be on strike for a valid reason but it still does not give them right to not to serve their patients. Any more strike and government should immediately dismiss the striking doctors from service, not only that, they should also be blacklisted. The doctors must understand that with government paying lakhs of rupees to train a single doctor, they too have a certain responsibility towards the society and its people.

The Secret of Clinking Ruler

The melancholy of the Management Accounting class was broken by a clinking metallic sound. Everybody’s heads turned towards the source of the sound and their stares came to rest in my vicinity. They looked at the stainless-steel scale which had fallen on the floor and then at the offender who had broken their peaceful trance, which unfortunately was me. That was the third day of our two-year long journey of MBA. I sheepishly grinned and picked up my scale, the heads returned to their normal position and soon the class was back to their business of dozing. The class did not realize that this clinking sound was soon to become an integral part Corporate Finance class of section B taken by Ms. Chhavi Mehta.
Criminology, the study of criminals and crime, says that to understand the reason of crime it is necessary to understand the mindset of criminals. The readers should take a cue from this branch of science and ask ‘What made Vinay Pandey drop the metallic scale in each class of Management Accounting?’ and then, as per criminology, the readers should allow the offender to present his point.
The point goes thus, that on the very first day we were asked by Ms. Mehta to reshuffle ourselves and sit according to roll numbers – I was impressed because the seats were neatly labelled with roll numbers and I went in quest of seat marked with roll number ‘99’, the classroom was bustling with activity as everyone was gradually occupying a chair, at the end I was the lone person standing because I could not find the chair with marked roll number. It was amidst the unfriendly stares and amused giggling that it occurred to me that those roll numbers were fake, they were marked earlier and then our lethargic college administration had forgotten to remove them. I was furious, and then I pledged that I will not let those arrantly confusing stickers fool me or any other person again and therefore, ladies and gentleman, I started removing those obnoxious stickers from our desks. I tried doing it by my hands, but my nails were all chewed up, so I could not do it quite efficiently which is why I started using the metallic scale I carried in my pencil-box.
I hadn’t acquired the dexterity to handle scale as a tool for removing stickers because of my newness to the profession of ‘sticker-removing’; this made me drop my tool often. As to the reason why it fell only in Ms. Mehta’s class, it is because it was only in that class that students’ minds left the classroom. As concentrating in that class was tough, so I utilized my time in fulfilling my pledge instead.
I say with some pride that I became extremely capable in the task of removing stickers and frequency of dropping the scaler came down to zero by the end of the first trimester; by the end of first year I could remove any kind of sticker with my bare hands without any tool at all.

Rang De Basanti – Colour it, for no reason at all

The general observation made by a certain gentleman, who called himself a philosopher while others called him a lunatic, is that in life you very often encounter people whom you don’t want to meet but seldom someone whom you really want to meet. It may or may not hold true for people but it holds true for cinemas – at least for me.
I was Mehsana where cinema halls are so primitive that they consider showing colour pictures a major achievement. I was happy that I am away from hustle and bustle of city especially promos of Rang De Basanti, and hardly watched television. It was on a one such hot and lazy evening that my uncle popped into his house with a brand new DVD player and asked me to set it up. Glad I was, because I had been trying hard not to be a parasite in their house, I immediately started on the work. Once the system was set up I grinned in anticipation and said we need some new DVD to “check if the system is all right”, I could see myself in that fancy video store I saw yesterday in the market and choosing my favourite title but my mausaji grinned back and whipped out a copy of Rang De Basanti. The last thing I saw was the wall clock showing 6:10 PM.
When I regained my senses the same wall clock showed 6:30 PM but the date had changed from 20th to 21st of April. They were still keen on “testing” their newly set up DVD player – not wanting to spoil their enthusiasm I put the DVD into the player with shaking hands and pressed the play button as if I am signing my own death warrant but the worst was yet to come, my cousin insisted on me sitting with her and endure that torture.
I thought that it may not be as hard as it was for the first time but this was worse. For, when I watched this cinema for the first time, the excitement of watching a new cinema along with the hype surrounding it had kept me awake till interval but this time I knew that it’s a bad cinema therefore each and every dialogue equal pouring molten lava in my ears. There are few places where director has somehow mistakenly given good scenes but those scenes can be counted on my finger tips of right hand – that too, without including thumb, fore finger, ring finger and small finger.
I give full marks to producer for inventing something which can be used by police and military as a substitute to third-degree torture. I do pity the hardened criminals who will be made to watch this cinema over and over again.