Home on a Holiday (Part 1) - Midnight Mango

Right. It's been precisely 2 months, 2 weeks and 6 days since I came home. Gosh! Can't believe it's been so long! And I precisely have 2 weeks left. After all the procrastination of 'blogging regularly', here goes my first entry (of hopefully at least a few) in the series.

I have an insomniac aunt staying with us for some time now. Every night, she keeps a banana on her bedside. When it's past midnight and she still hasn't fallen asleep, which is all the time, she gets up, walks around a bit, eats the banana and tries to sleep again. Today, there were no bananas at home.

I was lying down in bed, like just a while ago (it's 1 AM now, if you must know), chatting, facebooking, solitairing and all those useless things, when I finally felt sleepy and closed the laptop.

"Sweetheart, if it's not too much trouble, can you please get me some cut mango from the fridge? There were no bananas today."

Oh sure.

I felt like a darling Indian daughter-in-law. I quickly walked into the kitchen, imagining I'd put the mango pieces on a nice plate and get a nice fork and make it look so delicious that my aunt would fall asleep instantly. Except I couldn't find any cut mango in the refrigerator.

Of course. Mom doesn't like keeping cut mango in the fridge. No worries.

I saw my mom effortlessly peel and cut mangoes everyday every summer since time immemorial. At this point, I am compelled to say, at the risk of diluting the suspense in the story, how the hell does she do it??

So I took the mango, the peeler, the knife and the plate, told myself, piece of cake. Or mango, whatever suits you, and started to peel. The first two tries, the peeler just slipped off without much incident. To the mango. But since I'm human and humans apparently by default have this built-in capability thing of learning or some such, I managed to peel once. And twice. And a few more times after that.

When I was half done (PHEW!), I thought that would do. Half a mango is a lot. And I cut it. The mango looked so yum I had to eat a couple of pieces myself. The plate looked very empty so I was spreading the pieces around a bit when my aunt came looking for me.

Really? Been that long?

"Oh honey I'm so sorry, weren't there mango pieces in the fridge? You could've just told me!"

"No problem, it was nothing atha! Here", and a big darling Indian daughter-in-law smile. Oh I've been watching too much Kyon Ki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi type stuff on TV these days. Damn.

So gist of the story is, cutting mangoes is not as easy as it looks! Especially at midnight. Try it yourself if you don't believe me. Seriously.

Ramblings

Is not expecting, pessimism? That was AmChak’s gtalk status and well, all it takes is a little cue to start wondering... This is a pointless post. As are all of them anyway.

The little joys of life are not such big a deal from a different perspective. Age is not just a number. There is no point “sighing like a furnace” because if we turned back time, we’d all make the same choices all over again. If you’re not smart, you can still get away with creative. Your best friends may always have something more exciting or someone more important in their lives. Love may not be blind. The most dependable person in your life, your anchor, mentor and role model, may not understand or not care so much after all. Things fall apart. God is possibly not fair, and you might not even be the one he’s unfair to. All the sacrifices you made may not even be worth it. You can never tell if you’re popular, or infamous, or plain irksome. Is it confidence or over-optimism? Or simple showing off? Money could buy you everything. And yet, life goes on. It’s easy to delude oneself into believing one is happy. And loved. And wanted. Because for most, life is what happens from an outsider’s point of view, and the self doesn’t really care so much.

Oh well, pessimism can be a highly rewarding way of life.

Exams and Taxes

In an efficient closed university without barriers to entry and barriers to learning, the Exam-Preparation Curve is backward-bending and exams, in general, lead to inefficient outcomes.

There are very few instances in life when you actually get to apply what you learn in the classroom to pressing practical problems. At least in mine. So it is not absolutely nonsense when I write in all my applications and cover letters and about-me passages that my sole purpose in life is to apply classroom theories to real-life problems. I just wish sometimes that I could be more creative at least..

But anyway, the reason for this sudden enthusiasm is that one of those few instances occurred very recently in my life (Amen), thanks to an amazingly theoretical course called Public Economics (or rather, the end of it). If you are able to simplify life to two people (easy if you're in love) and two commodities (easy if you're Gandhi) and selfish motive (easy if you're not Gandhi) and free communication (easy if you're not me), you have aced the course. Sometimes you might have to include the government for tax collection and dissipation purposes. But all this is irrelevant. If you want to understand what I'm saying, you need to understand two rules first:

1. Labour Supply Curve is "backward-bending" - as wage rate reduces, the workers work more to earn the same total wage. But as per-hour wages reduce further, they actually work less since they value an hour's leisure more than the wage they receive by working.

2. Taxes, in general, are inefficient. Because they are distortionary. Because they change one's behavior. That is theory. Add to it the Ramsay Rule - well if you have to tax, do it as efficiently as possible. Tax the ones whose behavior cannot be changed, more.

By analogy, consider a student (Stud) studying for an exam. The more there is for Stud to study, the more he studies. But beyond a threshold amount of study Stud has to study, he will give up and not study. Thus Exam-Preparation Curve (EPC) is backward-bending.

Secondly, if there was no exam, Stud would study even less. So the exam is changing Stud's study patterns. Thus, the exam is distortionary. Implies, exams are inefficient. Apply to this the Ramsay rule (very apt since Ram is what we repeatedly say when the EPC begins to bend backward). Assume there is another student (Very-stud) who is always prepared for the exam. The efficiency rule dictates that Very-stud should have more exams than Stud.

However, just like how the efficiency-vs-equity conflict makes it imperative to have distortionary taxes, the learning for learning's sake-vs-learning for earning's sake conflict makes exams indispensable. The real world has more than two people (you can't be blindly in love for very long) and more than two commodities (well, one has one's needs) and selfish motive and no free communication (I get charged to call you, thank you very much dear Vodafone, now you even ask me for identity proof). But again, all this is irrelevant. The two rules above still hold. Thus, distortionary taxes are still inefficient, as are exams.

I am Stud, therefore I need no exams.

If I were Very-stud, I would still need no exams.

Two Pretty Syllables

This is just so amazing I had to share it!

Pretty - Katie Makkai

Hungry at 5 AM

"It's 4 AM. No point going to sleep now"

"4:40 AM, precisely"

It was early Monday morning. We had just finished submitting a pointless report for a course from the previous term. Don't ask me why we're still at it. That deserves a separate post.

"Okay let's watch a movie and go directly for 8 AM class"

"Makes sense. We can sleep in class"

We spent the next 15 minutes finding and deciding on a movie to watch. And we simultaneously realized - we were super hungry. It was Sunday night (technically Monday morning) so Amul was closed, which meant no room delivery. I went downstairs to find Athicas closed. The Javagreen guy was sleeping. I was warned that trying to wake him up on a Sunday night might result in your being subject to comatose profanities. With not a single source of food available, I decided to go back.

Now Sunday night is that time of the week when one last desperate attempt is made by almost everyone on campus to set their sleep cycle right. Almost everyone. So it was not surprising that when I was walking back, I realized there was not a single human soul anywhere near me. Or even a dog! It was okay, I told myself, it's not a big deal. Just breathe slowly, no need to change the speed at which you're walking, because if something's out there to get you, it'll get you by the time you reach your room anyway. But after I climbed two flights of stairs, I realized that my horizontal displacement was zero. I closed my eyes and thought of all the people I loved. Imagine you're doing this for them, I thought. And ran. And stopped right in front of Deepthi's room and walked in casually. "Nothing's open dude"

There were exactly four people who were not idle in my gtalk list. Ping 1: My3 - "No food babes. Me off to bed!". Ping 2: Ishira - "Sorry, no food :-( ". Ping 3: Nishant - "I have biscuits. Come over" I finally found the will to live again! Yes Nishant, I'll be there right away. But we decided to be comprehensive. Ping 4: Hari sweetheart (coz honey, sugar, sweetheart, baby work very well with Hari) - "I have Goodday".

"Hey Deeps, me going to E block to get food. Why don't you fill the water bottles, look at the beautiful L-square from the B block balcony and wait there for me to come back.."

I took biscuits and namkeen from E 201 and Goodday from E 315 (may the good God bless Nishant and Hari sweetheart and E block in general) and walked back towards B block. I couldn't see anyone in the balcony overlooking L-square.

"Deepthi?"

"Yes baby I'm waiting. Come quickly!"

I did not have to run this time. I walked casually back to the room.

And thus, it was Casablanca time!

Nandi Hills

I had a bad cold. Some people would not like the way I started this post. They would say I was just faking it and trying to get all the attention. It's a sad world! Except for Nandi Hills..

2:30 PM: One random afternoon. All of us there did not have classes the next morning. We decide to visit Nandi hills. It's about a 2-hour ride from Bangalore. The peak is closed until 6 o'clock in the morning.

1:30AM: I just did not understand VG's rationale in unilaterally deciding we all start at 2:30 AM. I-ball had a class in the morning which she was not willing to bunk. It made sense to go to Nandi hills some other day. I tried to reason with him. He was adamant. I tried to be. We called each other names in our own minds.

2:00 AM: I left Madhushala with a whatever!-wake-me-up-whenever-you-wanna-leave.

3:15 AM: "LAUNDE! DD! Wake up!!", VG was banging on our doors. I woke up feeling feverish. I opened my door and DD was telling VG, "Dude I have a BAD headache!". Obviously, I said, "And I have fever :(" And not surprisingly, VG said, "Chal chal, no one's backing out now. I-ball is also coming. Get ready! We need to leave by 3:30".

3:45 AM: Over-sized super-warm jacket. Tissues for my running nose. Scarf to keep me warmer (actually more like back-up in case I ran out of tissues). Extra cold cream. Camera. Shoes. I was good to go.

3:50 AM: 3 bikes and 1 car. Optimal decisions on who gets the bikes, the window seats, the driver's seat, etc were made based on constraints like who has car-sickness, who has a cold, who has a driver's license, who has goggles, who needs to catch a flight.. oh hell, we just did an FCFS.

4:30 AM: Sirajuddhin Singh couldn't see the bump on the road in the darkness, again. "DUDEEEE!", we all shouted in unison as the car landed on the road and the non-existent shock-absorbers moaned. And immediately corrected ourselves with, "Hey chill no prob", "Happens dude, no issues", "It's alright, we understand it was dark"..

5:30 AM: After losing our way a couple of times, we were on the ghat. The refreshing smell of the eucalyptus greeted us and lifted our spirits. The mist kept getting thicker and thicker. At times, the tops of the tall trees on either sides of the road got lost in the fog. We spotted some monkeys on the way. Incidentally, Bhanu told us how, as a kid, he used to get slapped by a monkey.

5:45 AM: We reached the top and realized after looking at the long queue, it was Id. Holiday. People here, people there. People everywhere. So much for deciding to go today.

6:00 AM: The best part of a foggy public spot is that you never know how many strangers are there around you. We realized it was not going to be that bad after all. And I also realized, my cold was gone! Just like that, it was gone!

And we start walking up. We took a few pics of Dhal saab with his inside-the-pocket "Yo". There was a notice which said - "No sitting or standing on the walls". We took a few snaps standing and sitting on the wall. And a couple hanging from the stone arches. Bhargav was invariably hiding in all the pics. DD and Bhanu wanted a jumping pic when they were in the air. We took a video instead. And we took more pics. Of trees. Of funny notice boards. Of top-load and bottom-load trash cans. Of random poses. Of the fog condensing on eyelashes. Of creepy draculas. Of wannabes. Of the fog. Of walking into nothing. Of the valley. Of the hills. Of the beautiful beautiful trees. And then when we had enough, we decided to leave. I-ball had a class to attend too! Well that was just a lame reason. We all knew she wouldn't make it.

11:45 AM: Back to where I belonged. I had a long hot shower. And my cold was back. Weird, the way some things work in life..

So the trip that I was so reluctant to go on turned out to be so much fun. Thank you guys for making it so memorable! Especially, in the order of FCCBs owned, I-ball for bunking class to come along with us, VG for completely disregarding the claim that we were unwell and forcing us to come, Sirajuddhin Singh for being awesome behind the wheel, Dhall saab for being the cool dude, DD and Bhanu for the awesome 1-2-3 jumping video (here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RpAqfafI2w), Eda for the car (we so wished you also had come along), Bhargav for disappearing in all the photos and giving a freaky "The Ring" feeling, Kshitiz for being the little boy who slept and Hema for his vision for scripting the future!

Random I

Today, I woke up early for class. I showered, wore a neatly pressed cotton shirt, put my books in my bag, slipped on my new sandals, locked my room and went to the canteen. After breakfast, there was still some more time left. I felt like I was trying too hard, though I didn't know for what. It almost felt claustrophobic. I went back to my room, changed into an over-sized t-shirt, took one class notes in my hand, slipped on my bathroom slippers and went running to class without locking my door. It felt a lot better.

I wonder what is so appealing about nonchalance and disorder..

How many consultants does it take to pop a bottle of champagne?

Another consultant gets a PPO. This time I-ball decided to snub the guys and pop the champagne to celebrate her success with us. Yayyy we loveee you Ishira! And long live the consultants :)

Anyone who giggles at the cork lines shall be branded forever as a pervert.

The official photographer aka Baldilocks who happens to be a banker and also happens to be an expert in popping champagne bottles decided to stand back and watch the fun as we tried. We all tried our hand at pulling the cork out, mostly in vain. And when it finally did pop, ran helter skelter to stay away from the spewing white foam. Then of course, we all drank to the health our host.

Ishira - She took the first swig as we all cheered on. "Thank you! Hey what happened to my voice??", she squeaked. And after the bottle did a couple of rounds, she finished it bottoms up. She never stopped complaining about her voice. In her frustration, went and started hugging all the pillars on B-first. She found one near the staircase that seemed to be most comfortable and settled there.

Deepthi - First time, she smelled the bottle, wrinkled her nose and passed it on. Second time, very very carefully, she let one drop of the liquor fall into her mouth. Her entire body tensed and she twisted and nearly dropped the bottle. Third time around, she decided to be bold and took a sip. She writhed in pain. She was choking. She put her hand on her throat and groaned, "My stomach! It burns! Someone gimme some water!"

And we took some more pics. Talked about the alcohol content in champagne. We decided the effects wrought on DD and IBall could be explained. Someone suggested the cork be put back in its place. Everybody remembered CCS and dispersed.

DD found her way to the pillar IBall was stuck to and she too settled down there. You may still be able to find them hugging the pillar together when you come up the stairs.

PS: The blog title is a googly. They just cannot.

Is Facebook the Stupid Idiot?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDHb4wewAIQ

I couldn't help myself. This is in response to all the Facebook-bashing going on out there by the really cool facebookers who think their lives have been made miserable by other "senseless" facebookers. All the creative segmentation of FB users into N hilarious types of users is of course fun, I love it too. But I'd just like to take a step back and remind them all, there are three options that FB provides to all its users, unconditionally and irrevocably, in decreasing order of severity -

Option - 1: Delete

Option - 2: Untag

Option - 3: Ignore

First up, if you don't want to have fun, there is something called LinkedIn. Here's the link: http://www.linkedin.com/. It's becoming really popular, I hear. And it serves the same purpose as FB, sans all the Farmville and the who's-gonna-slap-you-today quizzes and the haha-I-beat-you-in-the-smartest-way-to-sip-your-soup contests. Go for it!

So let's see, what do we always crib about?

Random status updates - I am assuming that if you're adding someone as your "friend", you know that person. If you're adding people randomly (coz it's oh-so-cool to have so many friends on FB) and complaining about someone kicking you with a virtual shoe, you're a moron. Don't even bother reading any further. Now, if you're not interested in knowing that someone ate blueberry pie for breakfast or wore stilettos to last night's party, there is something very simple that you have to do - option 3 - IGNORE. No one is asking you to check your FB wall every half an hour and like/comment on/like someone's comment/comment that you dislike every status update/photo that appears there.

Tagging - Ever heard of people untagging themselves? There are people who add relatives/bosses/colleagues on FB. Fine, your call. But stop whining when someone tagged a pic of you passed out on the footpath or posted a status update on how you threw up on the waiter last night. Please refer to option 2 above. On a more cruel note, if you don't want to be found doing something, don't do it! Simple.

Quizzes - I think they're fun! If you don't agree, see option 3.

Stalkers - Come on now, lets not flatter ourselves. They are just people like everyone with the obsessive compulsive urge to comment on everything FB posts on their wall. And I thought you posted something so that the world knows about it anyway..

Farmville - Somehow, the people who whine the most about getting bugged by this are the ones who check FB for updates every half an hour and are the promptest to reply to posts. Others don't care enough to do a market segmentation of facebook users. I find that puzzling, and even a little disturbing. If someone is your friend, accept (read ignore) the fact that they are obsessed with farmville or random quizzes or whatnot. You got tagged in an app that finds the biggest imbecile on FB? At the cost of sounding repetitive, refer to the three options above.

So all the smartass FB-critics all around, if you're wasting your "precious" time liking comments on FB or getting tagged and becoming scandalous revelations to nosy cousins or bugging yourself over somebody's exploits in mafia/you-are-my-sweetheart-of the-day quizzes, there is only one person to blame - you. Period.

Chronicles of a Lounge Undone

They say all good things come to an end. This one never even fully began. Sigh..

We had wanted to make a lounge between the B and C blocks in our hostel for a long time now. By the end of the summer, I was so excited by it that I even started posting on Facebook that we're going to make the BC Lounge as soon as college starts. For the first 2 weeks after we were back, the only thing on our minds was the lounge. I never saw so much single-minded dedication in such a large group of people. We even had a shared googledoc by the name BC Lounge for keeping track of expenses.

We decided that it was going to be a happy lounge. It was going to be bright and colorful and a place where we could sit and drink coffee while it rains or enjoy the sunshine with a nice book. Some hard-core filter coffee fan (read tam (read DJ)) even suggested a coffee vending machine. It was going to be made from scratch, including the "table". Several trips were made to Jayanagar and hardware stores to get curtains and bedspreads and cushions and what-not. We decided it was going to have transparent blinds which serve the dual purpose of keeping the rain away and making it bright during the day. We used to imagine how awesome it would look with the raindrops on the transparent sheets in the night lights. We were going to have a grand inaugural party with everyone we knew and lotsa cheese-burst pizza (and filter coffee)...

Of course there were pitfalls and idiosyncrasies and idiocies. We couldn't get transparent sheets so we had bought transparent table cloths to stitch them together to make the blinds. We found one friendly tailor who had a lot to talk, could not tell that 6 feet is 72 inches, made it very clear that he thought our idea was ridiculous but nonetheless had a somewhat endearing demeanor and took up the challenge with such determination it re-instilled my faith in the inherent goodness of human nature. He later made a couple of distress calls frantically saying it was impossible to stitch them together to make such a large blind. DD was understanding and suave and persuasive and convinced him to make one anyway. But he was adamant about not stitching the other one. We decided that that window would be left open for the breeze.

We needed curtain rods to hang the blinds. They had to be 12 feet long. We did not think about how to carry them to the campus until after we bought them and were about to hail an auto. I-ball was bold enough to talk to the auto guy, hold the 12-feet curtain rods vertically on the side of the auto, ignore intrusive glances from everyone on the road, not give in to the pain when the rods hit the high branches of the trees by the road (and sent a shower of falling leaves behind us) and all the time converse in the most natural fashion while I tried slinking into one corner of the auto and disappear and cursed the one who came up with the idea of the lounge. Once back on campus, we did not have to take the stairs to carry them upstairs - one of us just went up and took the standing rods from below.

One day, after some serious GD about the lounge, I said something on the lines of "Yayy the BC lounge is going to be ready soon!" which drew a lot of scandalized glares and someone shouted, "For GOD's sake, will you PLEASE stop calling it the BC lounge?!?" It was then that it dawned on us that it was high time we give a name to the lounge. It was the most hilarious discussion I was ever a part of. We came up with names from Caravan to Car to Garage to Beetle to Shoe to Pumpkin to just The Lounge. Other out-of-the-box suggestions worth mentioning - Strapless, Victorious Secret, The Marsh (as home to Schnappy the cute Alligator), How We Met Each Other, Country Bumpkins Lounge (CB Lounge), Harlem (from one uncle), Whats-up lounge and Day-glo. The Burrow came up a little late and was first shot down the way every suggestion was shot down with inexplicable vengeance. It was only when Teju let everyone know that Manasa was going to stand in the middle of the road till a bus hit her unless we make peace that things settled down and we zeroed in on The Burrow, thanks to Johari.

We had to put several night-outs to set things up. We even painted the "table" ourselves. It looks really nice in the pic (inset), but I can't say the same about it in reality. But we hadn't taken into the account the most fatal issue - dogs. We tried everything to keep them away, including naphthalene balls, but settled to keeping everything covered under old flexi banners. We did not want to formally inaugurate the lounge until we found a permanent solution to this problem. We were considering more cruel methods like pepper or DDT to keep them away. But meanwhile, someone complained about lounges in the hostel. There was going to be an inspection. They dismantled everything and locked it up in A-213. That is where everything still lies, undone. Sigh..