Statue of morality…

Amen! Sitting at my desk, this guy goes well with the book I’m reading these days - O’ Jerusalem by Lapierre and Collins. A tale of how people have killed each other for centuries over that unfortunate patch of land. All under the pretext of religion and some invisible creature called God…

The day is not too far when Bombay (yes, Bombay) will have it own colossal landmark - the statute of Shivaji. The days of liberty aunty are over. Here comes our very own… It worries me.

• Shivaji on a horseback. In the middle of the ocean!

• I always thought French women were supposed to be hot. How come he gets to be 4 feet taller?

• If they don’t find a suitable island or if they don’t have an environmental clearance for one… they might build the statue on the Haji Ali island!

• Marine drive would no longer be a romantic place for lovers. Sitting by the promenade, would we dare hold hands.. The beaming statute would remind us of a namesake terrorist organization!

• Why do we have to compete with them like this? Manhattan has 13 metro lines, Bombay has 3 water clogged ones. NY boasts of a world class airport. We, of a slum ridden one. My flight was once delayed by an hour, as dogs were running loose on the runway at the Bombay airport. No kidding. This happened again two days ago - as my mum tells me.
• Can we not use those 100 crores to build something else? What about the century-old ailing drainage system of this city. Can’t we fix that? Or buy 300 new BEST busses; Get thousands of private cars off our streets. Ah no, thats too boring a way to blow off tax-payers money.

• Remember Michael Jackson and liberty aunty? As a kid I was in awe of that video. Esp for the CG effects where they morph people’s faces towards the end of the song. Is Rajnikant going to do a song-n-dance atop Raje Shivaji?

• Why an icon from the past to inspire us? Why can’t we build something futuristic instead. Like a replica of our PSLV? It saddens me to see how little coverage such items get on our news. We put 10 satallites in space and Khali steals the show!

A few recent books [1] [2] left me with the impression that India and Hinduism has always been more tolerant, argumentative and imaginative. If the recent incidences of intolerance [3] [4] are any indication, we are going backwards…

Finally, this picture adorns my desktop these days. Cute eh!

S(crappy) affairs…

My beloved Shiv Sena is back with rampages and other fun-stuff. In addition to it’s entertainment value, they always instigate me with a fresh reason to blog.

Apparently, this time the Thane police has asked the CERT (huh, emergency response team!!) to block Orkut because there are defamatory communities against the Sena, it’s supremo and Shivaji (no, not ‘The Boss’).

The student wing of the Sena is building a software to monitor and block abusive communities on Orkut. Communities like “I hate California oranges”, “I hate Rajnikant films” and others are also to be targeted due to their intense relevance.

Me thinks, the supremo has taken some personal interest in reading RFCs and has commanded that the IETF adopt Marathi as the official language of publication henceforth. A failure to comply would entice similar rampages against the IETF office. Unfortunately, they could only trace it to http://209.173.57.180/ so far.

The story actually runs like this: They tried talking to google about it - who naturally shooo’ed em’ away. Then they tried convincing the Internet service providers to block it, but it did not work out either. Feeling helpless and itchy (c’mon they had to swing their hockey sticks somewhere) their convenient target was the cyber-cafes. I think Sena workers applied some inverse deduction on Sun’s marketing campaign to conclude that “The cyber cafe is the Internet”. I suspect that the supremo received those RFC’s on April 1?

Abhijit Phanse, president of the Bhartiya Vidhyarthi Sena was quoted:

.. we will track down such people. If that person is even sitting in America we will go and thrash that person. We want to catch hold of such culprits who do such things and thrash them..

Flip, flip… Bzzzt… “The sale of international airline tickets have shot up this week. Ironically many aircrafts are flying near-empty from Chattrapati Shivaji International Terminal as hockey sticks and swords were not permitted as accompanied luggage…”

Speaking of the fact that there indeed are Anti-America communities on Orkut, Abhijit had to say:

It can be their culture to criticise their leaders but it is not our culture to disrespect our idol, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj. He is like God to us. We cannot tolerate insults on him or Balasaheb Thackeray.

From whatever little history I’ve known, I believe the fundamental premise of warrior Shivaji was also tolerance. Guys, don’t you get it?

Disclaimer: The above essay is partly fictitious and (hopefully) intended to be funny. Please validate citations to ascertain facts.

About last weekend and other things…

Thats what my Tee says this monday morning. I bought this one after a rather eventful saturday evening at the Cafe Mondegar with a few close friends…

I will be perpetually living this illusion from now on. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s now official… I’ve finally resolved to quit drinking after about a three year long stint.

And why would I ever do that?

Quitting doesn’t seem like the right thing coz I’ve so many drinking friends to hang out with (Do I win ‘excuse of the year’ trophy?). “Now” doesn’t seem like the right time, coz I’ve haven’t yet earned a beer-belly. Those highs have also been moments of insight and interesting philosophy. It all seems “worth it”. Those have been occassions of visiting places (swanky pubs to quarter-bars) all over the town.

<begin-digression>

I’d shed inhibitions against drinking and smoking a long time ago and conveniently indulged in both for sometime. The no-smoke resolution was taken over a lonely and contemplative new-year’s eve 2007. And I have been true to it so far. It’s not been easy but it has worked out well.

For my IITian readers: No, me quitting has nothing to do with SP shutting down We all painfully share that loss. And trust me, RK doesn’t come close to the SP experience.

For the puzzled rest: SP was the IITian’s beloved drinking-joint (quarter-bar style) situated right across the IIT campus. Today it stands bulldozed due to the road-expansion scheme (Vikroli-Jogeshwari link road) and we suddenly find a part of our lives snatched away; This site shall go-down in our history books…

RK (no, not my initials!) is another cheapo drinking-joint which survived the bulldozing. That’s also the place where I had my last drink two weeks ago.

<end-digression>

There has been no rational reasoning or guilt-feeling that drove me to quit. I guess, it is just the urge to fall-back to a less complicated life. Quitting Orkut, quitting smoking, sleeping on the bare floor at nights, have been a few outcomes of this instinct over the past year or so..

Getting back to where we started. Cafe Mondegar was a great place to hang-out this weekend. It was my first time there; hence this review.

It’s quite a crammed place and you could sometimes find yourself nudging your elbow with the person on the adjacent table. The place has a fairly simple (old) decor with a bar at one end and a mechanical jukebox on the other - They only play english music there. Lotsa classic rock made us drool over the jukebox for the entire time we were there.

So, while my friends gulped pitchers of beer, I spent the evening sipping some mix fruit juice and energy drinks. The cafe closes well past mid-night after which we drove it down marine drive for a while…

Mondegar is reasonably priced - dinner and drinks about 700 bucks per head - and has a fairly good service inspite of being quite crowded. Oh yes, the other nice thing is the unpretentious crowd who minds their own business. I bet, the cafe has a lot of regulars from the town side.

Well, another place on the “must-visit” list has been struck off.

Belong…

Those creatures jumped the barricades
And have headed for the sea
She began to breathe
To breathe at the thought of such freedom
Stood and whispered to her child: belong
She held the child and whispered
With calm, calm: belong

~ Belong, R.E.M., 1991 ~

Quotes on Quota

“Nowhere else in the world do castes classes or communities queue up for the sake of gaining backward status….”

“…Nowhere else in the world is there competition to assert backwardness and then to claim that we are more backward than you.”

~ Two-judge bench of the Supreme Court of India

<Digression>

Hmm… so one thing on my life’s wishlist is to stand in that witness box in a courtroom and do something nasty…

Me: WTF, I don’t believe in this Gita thingy you want me to swear upon.

The Hon’rable Judge: Mind your language my son. I condemn the use of such language in my courtroom…

Me: You told me to… err.. swear!

The Hon’rable Judge: Would you swear upon the Bible or the Quaran instead?

Me: (Some freshly learnt hindi swear words…). Could you perhaps have a copy of  UML Distilled?

The Hon’rable Judge: (Quoting my swear word again; albeit with a different accent, tone and style). I condemn your incorrect use of swear-words in my courtroom. Your pronunciation is a serious threat to national integration…

Seriously, I don’t understand two things:

One, Why does it makes sense to swear like that? Swear on some book? Do they really pull out different scriptures for witnesses of different religions?

Two, Why do people think that my pronunciation of hindi swear words is not upto the national standards.

“Order order… I shall hereby hold you in contempt of the court.” (Scene fades…)

Fresh memories of the movie My Cousin Vinny flash on my mind as I write this. I didn’t enjoy the movie much. The depiction of the Judge, however, was quite funny.

</Digression>

Working in the area of Web Services puts you in compulsive desire to enclose everything within XML tags. Its no different that the way film directors do the camera thingy with their hands…

Well, this verdict is a breather for now. Hopefully the politicians don’t push this again in the parliament. I think they will. So now the parliament passes an amendment which can overrule this verdict of the Supreme court. The court can, again, strike down this amendment. How long does this go on, I fail to understand…

UML Distilled, btw, is a good read…