Innocence Lost??

I always wondered what differentiates the offspring of Indian diaspora who opt to make a living in such far flung places as the Middle East; countries in unstable but oil rich countries in Africa such as Nigeria and Sierra Leone. I suspect one of the subconscious goals of expatriate Indians is to secure the future of their children.
Who else, but the son of an expatriate NRI can boast of driving an imported car by the time he is just out of his teens, or secure a prized seat in a prestigious college?
But what are the long term effects on the children? I don't think their parents gave much thought to this when they opted to fly off to alien lands.
The children confined to the airconditioned rooms of their flats miss out on the innocent pleasures of childhood. I know of children reared up in the middle east afraid of letting their feet touch sand! It is anathema to them, used as they are to the smooth floors of their dwellings, the carpeted cars that transport them to wherever they wish to and the marbled schooling institutions where they spend much of their time.
No playing with sand, no experiments with water and clay, no breath of fresh air outside their confined spaces!
Innocence lost!
Everyman poses an interesting observation - one he made on his sojourn to Saudi Arabia a few years back-
<quote>
The times arent changing, we are just getting smarter at an earlier age. But would that make us duller at an earlier age too? I wonder...
</quote>
The full post here
http://everymansdiary.blogspot.com/2007/02/just-kidding.html

Validating the sex field- FUN at work

It was a boring day at the office. We were doing some validation stuff on a couple of web pages. The team clown was doing some UI work on a page that had a textfield asking the user to enter his/ her sex. The valid options were Male, Female, Not Applicable.
The validation stuff done, the clown was trying to come up with an error message to display to the user on invalid entry.
"Sex is required", he muttered to himself.
The team wit laughed out loud and repeated, "Of course, SEX is required!".
The clown then said, how about "Sex is mandatory?"
"Yeah", echoed the wit, "SEX is mandatory."
Now we were all in splits.
Suddenly the team whiz came running into the cubicle with breaking news. "The requirements have changed. Sex is no longer mandatory, it is optional."
We all cried out loud in unision. "Of course, SEX is not required, it is optional."
So much for boring work hours.

Passport to Gaol

It was during my last month at my gig in Germany that I got an urgent mail from my brother saying that my father wanted to talk to me on an important issue.
A bit puzzled, I called India after work, from the office phone (the money for phone calls was deducted from my salary by the shrewd German overseer).
The first thing my father wanted to know was whether I had applied for my passport twice. I was bewildered. No, I replied. My father went on to inform me that the local police had come a-visting twice to my home in Kerala wanting to know whether I had committed the crime of applying twice for a passport.
I didn't take the matter too seriously at that moment. I was convinced it was a routine blunder by the police which they are so bound to make. I told my father I was sure this was some bureaucratic blunder and would sort itself out.
When I returned home to India, the police came visiting again. I was not at home. They informed my father that I had applied for a passport twice and they wanted to investigate. My father called me on my mobile and I talked to the police person who quizzed me on my passport number and other details. With a straight face I told him all I could. Then, a bit annoyed, I retorted, saying they were the people who had my passport details on their records and that I found it strange them asking me about it.
The policeperson was not impressed.
A few weeks later I got a letter from the regional passport office saying that they would have to confiscate my existing passport since I had committed the crime of applying for a passport twice. I made two trips all the way to the passport office at the State headquarters and met the passport officer in charge who said that the police had reported that two attempts were made to secure passports and the law would follow course. I even showed him a copy of the application letter that I had written out for the passport and tried to make him understand that I had no interest and no valid reason for filling out a second application. All this fell on deaf ears.
The next time the police came a hunting (again I was out) my Dad shelled out a couple of hundred rupees. The policeman realising that nothing more could be gained from this venerable looking gentleman quietly took the money and left.
There ended the mystery of the double passport applications.
The strange tale did not end there.
While waiting for my train home at Kochi railway station I found myself sitting next to a middle aged man. He was just on his way back from the regional passport office at Kochi. And he had a tale to tell similar to mine. He had been in the middle east for a good many years and when his passport was about to expire, applied for a fresh one. But he was now charged with illegally applying for a passport twice. And he faced the same punishment - confiscation of his passport.
But he said with determination - "I am ready to go to court on this matter, but I shall not bribe a policeman to get things sorted out." Brave words from an Indian, in a land where court cases are prolonged to no end and are a waste of both time energy and will power.
what other ways would these goons come up with, I wondered, to make a few extra bucks?

Never Say Die.....

Smoking Hypochondriac: Doctor! How do I begin? You know the graphics the damned Minister Ramadoss promised to put on cigarette packets ($#@#$%#& ... )?
Doctor: Yeah! I know. He did promise. But they have not appeared so far have they?
Smoking Hypochondriac: I don't need to! Coz I have already seen them! And the graphics on the package if they ever come will be too late!
Doctor: How come? That's strange!
Smoking Hypochondriac: I had a chest pain and a severe bout of coughing so I saw a chest specialist.
Doctor: And?
Smoking Hypochondriac: Well, he told me to have a chest X ray taken. And I did!
Doctor: Then?
Smoking Hypochondriac: The lungs! It was all rotten- I swear! Though the X rays were too hazy for me. And I fear I have ulcers in my mouth!
Doctor: Really? We need to do a check up and run some tests pronto! (Praise Ramadoss!) On the lighter side if what you say is correct we could send your chest x rays to the cigarette people so they could put it on their cigarette covers. The best graphics ever, I bet. You could even make some money that way! (Praise Ramadoss!)
Smoking Hypochondriac: Doctor, I also fear I have a stroke coming! I am dying, Doctor! Please help me!
Doctor: Now, now, be calm. Let us run those tests first. (Praise Ramadoss!) Don't get so excited. We are there to help you out.
Smoking Hypochondriac: And doctor, I am out of breath. The cigarettes did that to me. And I never suspected!
Doctor: OK... Let's put you on oxygen for half an hour. And I shall add an expectorant to it, so breathe easy. (Praise Ramadoss)
Doctor: Why don't you give up cigarettes, by the way? That's the best option you have right?
Smoking Hypochondriac: It's too late Doctor. Every time I think about my afflictions I reach out for a cigarette!
Doctor: Ok. First things first! First the chest x rays. Then oxygen and the decongestant; after that maybe some oral application for your mouth, and maybe we could do put you on some medicine to prevent that stroke you said was coming. (Praise Ramadoss!)

Will this happen to all of us one day?

In honor of the perpetual net surfer

Birth of a SalesMan

We have all had a brush with salesmen. You find them selling lottery tickets, mobile phone subscriptions, credit cards, bank loans, even safety pins and rubber bands; they promise you everything under the sun.
While travelling by the evening train to my hometown on Saturdays,I happened to come across a very astute salesman selling CDs which he claimed contained every single legal form you would ever need in your life - right from passport application forms to legal documents for your dying will. Presumably he had downloaded the online forms from government sites and burnt them onto CDs and then packaged them neatly in sealed covers with his photograph on it and a blurb saying that he held the patent for the contents within.
He started his promotional address with a challenging question - how many on the train had travelled to the state capital just to get hands on a legal form they needed for some urgent procedure or an application form for a government job?
With his CD, he claimed all that would stop. Every single form under the sun was now available on his CD- his patented product, he repeated. If the customer did not have a personal computer they could visit the nearest DTP center (found at every nook and corner of my home state mostly in the business of printing wedding cards and promotional brochures) where they could get a printed hard copy of the soft version.
Clever move I would say. Lots of people do a lot of unnecessary travel in their lifetime just to procure a necessary legal form - since the government is not yet so tech savvy and printed forms are the norm. If forms are available online, you wouldn't know the site to download it from and even then they were subject to frequent change and get outdated at a whim.
I saw things in a different light.
Procuring the government forms are only 10% of the pain. Forms are subject to frequent changes, almost once every year, as I mentioned earlier.
But the main headache is filling up these forms. The entries on goverment forms have very ambiguous and dubious titles which only the scribes sitting outside the goverment forms can discern and fill. If you attempted filling government forms by yourself, you would have to fill a couple of them until you came up with one which you presumed had all the correct entries. Even then, there was always the risk, that when you got back to the office to submit the form, the clerk in charge would dismiss your application with a shake of his head pointing to some entry which was wrongly filled in your carefully filled up application, and ask you to re-enter the details on a fresh form making you lose your time, money on a new form and more importantly losng your position on the never-ending que where you were. Filling up income tax return forms, filing for a fresh passport or a PAN card are big headaches that most would gladly pay an agent to fill up, paying a king's ransom in the process.
The salesman was playing up on those fears and he did get quite a lot of customers- many of them quite well educated, mostly middle aged gentlemen and old couples. when the salesman added that some young budding entrepreneur could also set up a small business just printing those forms from the CD and selling them to needy people who would otherwise would have to travel to the concerned government office to procure it. Some country bumpkins thought this was a good idea to make a quick buck(you see employment is still a big problem in my native state), and a few more CDs were sold.
I saw this partiucular enterprising salesman every single Saturday evening when I travelled home, for a couple of months, until one fine day, he simply vanished - perhaps sensing his game was up, afraid to face the ire of the more frequent travellers on the train who might have seen through his scheme guaranteed not to fail! These entrepreneurial salesmen!

Five Point Someone- A perfect 10

It seems I have been moving from Chetan Bhagat's (India's most widely read English author according to TIME magazine) less promising books to the better ones. I started off with One Night at the Call Center; on which I commented because I felt I had to, on his take of Indian Call Centers, since I am familiar with the BPO industry; moved on to his latest book, The 3 Mistakes of My Life, which I felt was utter trash and did not deserve comment, but finally discovered a gem in his first book, Five Point Someone - a book which he describes as, what NOT to do at IIT.
This book is well written so I wonder how I missed reading it in the first place. The plot and storyline of his book comes out as pretty realistic which describes life in the IITs but could pretty well be a scenario in any one of our Indian colleges.
The college where I studied in fact had many similarities to what he describes in his book.
Our college principal's daughter, was something of a college starlet and there was not a single desk in our college classrooms that did not have her name inscribed on it with pen or carved out with a blade by some daydreaming Romeo in the middle of a boring college lecture. Chetan Bhagat's character Neha, who is Professor Cherian's daughter in the book could pretty well be her equivalent.
Then I know a close friend of mine who never wrote a single exam without having a nip of whisky in him (just to loosen up his tension as he said!). But unlike our protagonist, Hari, in the book who found that vodka in him before the college vivas was an utter disaster, this friend of mine passed every exam that he wrote with flying colors!
The book pretty well captures how domineering, intimidating and bookish college professors can be, except for the rare one who truly inspires and will go to any lengths to help out a hapless student. He pretty well describes how boring college life, with inane lectures would be, without some of the colorful characters you would find around any campus.
The book is pretty well a mish mash of romance, comedy, dark humor, passion and a lot of laughs and he uses language pretty well to his advantage, sometimes resorting to Indian English. His mastery over description is captivating. For instance there is a scene in which Chetan describes Hari's interest in Neha's bare legs against her car's brake pedals on their first encounter- writing "how erotic a girl's naked feet on metal can be"!.
On the whole, a pretty wholesome book and I can say one of the good books that has come out of an Indian author without being too academic or classic. I would say populist literature without being too cheap. Worth a read, once, maybe twice.