Technology skeptics

As is usually happens, just before you leave for the day you remember that you have just a ten rupee note in your wallet and the bike is thirsty for petrol. You mentally curse yourself for being careless and move lethargically towards the ATM. Similar careless people have queued up too, and you wish for the people to hurry – but wait, almost everyone who goes in the ATM, gets the money out and coolly proceeds to count each of the 40 notes, right there standing in front of the ATM while it is whistling for you to take the ATM card back and scoot. And the guy (or the gal) would not forget to double-check the count. You’d love to shout, “Move moron move”, but alas a small thing called decency stops you

A lesson for people who do not work on the top floor: there are two buttons when you want to call for an elevator. If you press the button which shows the up-arrow means you want to go up, the button which shows the down-arrow means you want to go down. And if you want go down, why the f*** are you pressing the up button? And if you have no idea what button to use, wait for someone who knows or better – use the stairs, will be good for your cholesterol.

Why the hell do people doubt technology – the ATM will always dispense the right amount, and the elevator will surely come to take you down irrespective of whether you press the up button or not.

Book Review: A Dirty Job – Christopher Moore

Death and Humour – seems such an unlikely combination; but Christopher Moore weaves these two bizarrely different threads into a brilliant book: A Dirty Job. The book starts with the protagonist Charlie Asher losing his wife to a sudden death. At her deathbed he sees a guy, who nobody else is able to see. Weird things keep happening to Asher and later he realizes he has been given the job of death. Well, not exactly death – but a person who helps the souls of the dying people find their rightful new owner, a soul collector.

This book presents the concept that a person’s soul is attached to something inanimate, Asher has to find the thing and pass it to its next owner. The concept is bizarre, and we the readers with Asher learn the nitty-gritty’s of this dirty job. Through the book Asher fights with the dark side to protect the collected souls and to keep his daughter safe. The book serves generous helpings of humour throughout the narration. Death is not shown as something to be afraid of, but a method to move on.

Strange concept, and even stranger characters inhabit the book. Asher’s two helpers Lily (who dreams of being death herself and finds that immensely cool) and Ray (an ex-cop who believes Asher is a serial killer), his neighbours (one from China, one from Russia), the living-on-the-streets Emperor of San Francisco and his dogs, the two hellhounds who are at beck-and-call of his daughter Sophie, and another death merchant named after mints – Minty Fresh. It is an ensemble of strange, varied characters and still they evoke empathy and are believable.

This book is surely a very different read, but nonetheless an enjoyable one.

Technorati: Review, Book Review, Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job

Rains, Roads and Hyderabad

I now understand the 80-20 rule perfectly, thanks to the Hyderabad roads. My 20% of commute time covers the 80% of the route, and the rest 20% of distance takes 80% of the time. I would be driving along at 50 kmph, and suddenly a stretch would come that would force me to single digits. And I repeat this cycle till I reach my destination.

These days Hyderabad is under a deluge of incessant rainfalls. The Rain Gods seem to be benevolent, but the same cannot be said for the Gods of Hyderabad Roads and Infrastructure. Bangalore was under water for few days, the drainage system being the culprit. In Hyderabad the drainage is actually quite good, you would not find any waterlogging on most of the major streets few minutes after the rains abate. But the culprit is digging of the roads. Almost all major Hyderabad roads have a part that is either dug up, or some manhole is malfunctioning (and so water-logging), or being repaired. Generally the two lanes of any road are as same (or different?) as the faces of Aishwarya Rai and Om Puri – one lane is smooth, the other full of potholes.

Be it Madhapur, or Masab Tank, or Banjara Hills, or Lakdikapul – no road had been spared the wrath of Gods of Hyderabad Roads and Infrastructure. The worst road that I have encountered is the Durgam Cheruvu road. Yesterday evening I was stuck in the traffic jam there (thankfully the road has been made a one-way these days, and hence the traffic jams are not as massive as they used to be) and saw that a one-meter part of the road was under water, and surprisingly no motorists had ventured there. Now a part of road that is not filled by vehicles would ring danger bells in any sane mind especially in Hyderabad, but I can be exempted from the sane-mind assumption as I was returning after a day that resembled banging your head on one wall to break open the wall on the other side of the room. As I was going towards that one-meter opening in the road, I saw something black floating in water. I stopped, and seconds later a fully-grown buffalo emerged from the water – and no I am not kidding. People who have driven around Madhapur would know that buffaloes and cows are rulers of the roads here. After all in all office addresses “Madhapur village” is written as the area name.

The Durgam Cheruvu road is under construction, so a meter deep and a meter wide trench has been dug up through the length of the road, the rains have filled the trench and the trench has been overflowing, and yet there are no signs placed anywhere near showing the danger. There used to be logic of laying the railway tracks in summer (heat expands…), the telephone and electric wires in winter (same logic); is there any logic to repairing and constructing roads during rains? I am unable to find any reason…

Technorati: Hyderabad, Hyderabad Roads, Hyderabad Infrastructure

Book Review: Q & A – Vikas Swarup

Yesterday night I completed Q & A by Vikas Swarup. I had bought this book on a whim around a year back, and got around to reading it just few days back. I had no idea what a treat was sitting on my bookshelf untouched.

This is the story of an orphaned 18-year-old boy who is currently a waiter at a bar in Mumbai, and has just won a Billion rupees (yes, you read it right – a billion) in a game show. The people behind the show think he has cheated, and Ram Mohammad Thomas finds himself in the jail. The whole book is about him proving his innocence. He recounts episodes from his life in Mumbai, Delhi and Agra, and how each incident helped him find the correct answer to the question being posed to him. At the outset, Ram Mohammad Thomas says he got lucky. He did did get very lucky – he was asked a question about some actress, he had worked for her; he was asked about some diplomatic term, he had worked for an Australian diplomat; he was asked an English literature question, he had helped a English teacher and called him up for help, and so on. But the quiz show is largely in the background. Mainly this book narrates the life of Ram Mohammad Thomas from his birth to the present; each chapter deals with a different phase of his life.

The coincidences, which help Ram Mohammad Thomas to win the quiz, are nothing short of colossal, but then we are forewarned about this in the initial few pages itself. So I was actually looking forward to how each incident in the protagonist’s life helps him answer the question. Though sometimes the book does read like a movie-script and at few places it drags along.

On the whole a very enjoyable read. I would strongly recommend this book, although I have doubts if this book is in the market now. I bought it a year back and it was the last copy in the store that time. Since then in my umpteen visits to the bookstores I have never seen this book.

But if you lay your hands on it, don’t let it go without reading.

Technorati: Review, Book Review, Q&A, Q & A, Vikas Swarup