Press Help for F1

After Force India finished 2nd in the Belgian Grand Prix, Dr Mallya tried to convince the very obstinate sports minister, Dr Gill about recognizing Formula 1 as a sport. Here's what happened:

Mallya: Good evening Dr Gill. Hope you're having a good times.
Gill: Tell me Dr Mallya, I don't have time. I'm a leader you know, not a cheerleader.
Mallya: Sir, I've come for a request. This is about recognizing Formula 1 as a sport.
Gill: Is this formula some new drink of yours or...
Mallya: No sir, it's racing using specially designed cars in circuits...
Gill: Ah that! But we have already decided no? Then why are you here again, Dr Mallya. Please don't try to Force India.
Mallya: But F1 is a sport! Just like tennis or cricket.
Gill: Sorry to spoil your cheers. But I disagree. It is entertainment.
Mallya: And what about our home-brewed IPL? It's the biggest entertainment event in the country!
Gill: That is cricket baba. It is all about human endeavour and spirit. Not your kind of spirit Dr Mallya, but real, human spirit.
Mallya: But isn't that also entertainment?
Gill: See, we don't mind if sports has entertainment, but entertainment cannot be sports, and that is final. Stop mixing your drinks.
Mallya: *peeved* This is the time to act, minister. My team's performance has taken F1's popularity to a new high...
Gill: You're always talking of highs. I don't know why you are so interested in wasting Fuel. Is it because it's a competing brand? *laughs* Jokes apart, these are the nation's resources, for which two brothers are already fighting. We cannot have one more king fishing in our waters.
Mallya: F1 really is a sport! Look at how much weight these drivers lose after every race! Arjuna Ranatunga had a pot belly even till the end of his career.
Gill: I cannot comment on other country's sportsmen, Dr Mallya. And besides, do you think it's wise for you to talk about beer bellies? Anyway, you know that we are not exactly 'doctors' right? It's only titular.
Mallya: *dreamily* Aahhh titular... good times...
Gill: Snap out of it, Dr Mallya!
Mallya: Sorry about that sir, but all you need to do is recognize it as a sport, you can really help F1 in the country.
Gill: F1 may mean help, Dr Mallya, but helping F1 is going to be a Royal Challenge.
Mallya: Do you mean to say there is absolutely nothing *wink* we can do about it?
Gill: Dr, your black money and White Mischief are getting you nowhere. Stop wining. Our decision is final. Now please leave. I have to go make number 1. Mera number 1.

Original photo location: www.newstrackindia.com/gallery/pictures/3304

Angry and naked

So what do you do when you're 23, angry and run out of laundry? Why, hijack a bus, of course! Looks like some teenagers are going to have early sex-ed classes.

But I don't want to sleep!

I check Twitter. Two tweets about how to better use Google Reader. I check Facebook. I respond to a cool status message. I check Twitter via Tweetdeck. I check GMail. Facebook again. Nothing has changed. I delete the spam from GMail. I retweet some something to keep my Twitter account alive. It's 12:30 AM. What am I doing? Or avoiding? Sleep is overrated. But then so is social networking.

I post my thoughts on my blog.

God help us please - Mr Anderson

Yesterday I was at a great party where among other things, I had my first viewing of Sam Anderson. Although I don't understand Tamil, his acting, emoting and dancing blew me away. I am forever a fan. I post this small sample from his movie 'Yarukku Yaaru' as a tribute to his greatness. Sam plays an automobile engineer who dreams of building a low-cost car, but is so poor that he can only use crayons for his engineering drawings. In this scene, he meets his college girlfriend who has just returned from Canada with his visa, passport and money. She convinces him, fairly easily, that he should go back to Canada. It is also our protagonist's birthday. And yes, Sam Anderson speaks English.

The silence heard around the world

This piece of mine about the recent Twitter outage was published in the Indian Express today.

The silence heard around the world

We mail, we blog, we twitter. Yet, it is on mornings like that of August 6, that we stop taking for granted how dependent we are on technology. I’m talking about the social network meltdown, of course. As several sites were attacked, Twitter went down due to a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack leaving millions of users without the ability to communicate in bite-sized pieces.

DDoS is the technological equivalent of a human brain freeze. A teller at a bank counter can easily process one or two customers’ transactions at a time. Two or three hundred simultaneous customers, however, may lead to extreme confusion. For the sake of analogy let’s say this leads to unconsciousness, making it impossible for any more customers to be served. This essentially is what happened to applications in the online social networking world last Thursday. Malicious attackers bombarded websites from different locations (thus the word distributed) with seemingly legitimate messages causing some of them to slow down, and knocking others like Twitter out cold. Twitterers using the website, their mobiles or other means weren’t able to tweet as well. It was a brief, complete blackout.

The attacks that shook the online world this time around are reported to have political motives. Mashable.com reported that social networking sites including Facebook, Google and Twitter might well have been attacked to silence just one person - a blogger in the republic of Georgia, underscoring the role these sites play as a medium of expression. This wasn’t the first time Twitter was down, either. Earlier this year, a cracker got control of Twitter accounts giving him the ability to impersonate, among others, President Obama. Wonder what would have happened if that attack was politically motivated!

Motives notwithstanding, reactions to the outage were varied. Given the duration of Thursday’s attack, we were far from a Die Hard 4.0 like situation of technology-initiated anarchy. Prem Panicker, a journalist by profession and a twitterer known for his live tweets on cricket says, “I heard about the outage on Twitter and followed it on Twitter. So — what outage?”. For most casual users, it was merely a temporary loss of another source of information. At the other end of the spectrum, for those whose social lives are conducted online in a large part, this was akin to being marooned on an island. Given the entangled nature of the web, India was also affected by the turmoil as ‘tweeple’ from across the country faced issues in logging in to Twitter. Netra Parikh, a popular twitterer, thought at first that her internet connection was down. “When I realised that Twitter was not working, I felt like I ran out of oxygen” she recalls. “I immediately went to Facebook and posted that Twitter is down. I received close to 60 messages within the hour.”

The generation with probably the shortest attention span was left without its newest toy. We didn’t just miss out on opportunities to know what others were doing, browsing or eating. We also got a taste of what we take for granted in the otherwise stable world of technology. As the social web saw cracks erupt that fateful Thursday morning, the blackout of one of the world’s most used services reinforced the reality of the virtual world in our lives. We realised that we have come a long way from a few years ago — a time when social networking websites were the flavours of the season and ‘nice-to-haves’; a time when a new website mushroomed every few weeks and our e-mails reminded us of not having added a stranger as a friend on an unknown social network.

Today, we are at a stage where these networks are an integral part of keeping in touch with friends and family, an effective marketing tool and a way of killing time. Twitter itself isn’t limited to sharing information about the weather or pictures of funny cats. Brick and mortar businesses rely on it to reach their newest consumers. Bloggers, celebrities and politicians have all leveraged Twitter’s enormous reach to rival established modes of communication. In this context, downtime today costs money and service providers are answerable to why even their ‘free’ services are down or slower than usual.

On a lighter note, the outage generated a lot of fodder for humour in the media. Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel said, ‘For two hours this morning (Thursday) no one could find out what breakfast cereal Ashton Kutcher was eating.’ taking a dig at the world’s most popular Twitterer. Another user commented on a CNN website, “Horrors! People will have to communicate face to face!” Hopefully, it won’t come to that just yet.

Doctors in Chennai

I recently visited a 'big' hospital in Chennai, and this is what happened:

Me: I get slightly dizzy these days in the evening, and have a recurring cough that fails to go away.
Doc: So which 'industry' do you work in?
Me: *rolling eyes* The IT industry.
Doc: Hmm... *blood sucking mode on; intelligent look and phony contemplation* Have you hit your head somewhere?
Me: What?! No!
Doc: Do you tend to go towards one side?
Me: Only when I ride the bike.
Doc: So you have a tendency of going to one side? Which side is it?
Me: The left side. That's the side of the road we're supposed to drive on.
Doc: Hmm... ok. Any family history of insanity/ mental problems?
Me: (Wha... motha... fug...) No.
Doc: Hmm.. and what of this cough? Are you spitting blood?
Me: No - although I would be pretty sure to mention it if I was.
Doc: Hmm.. and phlegm?
Me: A little.
Doc: *more contemplation and phony intelligence display* Here, do these battery of tests. (sounding very please to use the word 'battery')
Me: What are these tests?
Doc: Well, you need to go for a brain scan becau...
Me: What what what! A brain scan? What's wrong with me?
Doc: You never know, you could have injured your brain or ...*inchorence*
Me: And what about the cough?
Doc: I suspect Tuberculosis. Very common in Chennai, don't worry.
Me: So you're saying that I have TB and brain problems?
Doc: Most likely, but there is nothing to worry at this stage.

Fortunately, I later found another doc (not affiliated with the hospital) who said I have a mild case of vertigo and gave me something for my cough.

Adding to the really long list of social objectives that this blog fulfils; here's another piece of information - when in Chennai, find a good physician preferably not inside big hospitals.

In the past year, I've had TB, brain problems, blood pressure, back spasms and many other issues for which I've been sucked dry of urine and blood. A doctor at another large hospital where my company has a free Master Health Check tie-up prescribed me 3000 bucks worth of meds for blood pressure when I just mentioned that I had a spike the previous week. And then he told me that these meds would apparently help me lose weight, causing my BP to fall.

And then there's the standard fare when you go in with anything above 98 degrees Fahrenheit. Anitbiotics, vitamin B Complex supplements and paracetomols. Yes, antibiotics are the first thing they write down.

Now not all docs in big hospitals are bad, but one needs to be aware of the pitfalls and the strategies that many of these guys use to screw patients over. I for one, am happy to have found a physician who knows what she's talking about. And happier to not have TB and brain tumors.

Why you shouldn't trust the interwebz

I was linked recently on a website called Pocket Cultures. Trying to imagine a poor sod learning about Kerala through my post. The one-quarter Mallu in me giggles with delight. Mmph.

The ten commandments of a visit to relatives in Kerala...

...esp. for the non-Mallus

1. Thou shalt not deny the booze. There is no excuse to say no to alcohol. Not after the uncle offering you the booze bought five bottles of whiskey on his way back home from a bypass surgery.

2. Thou shalt diversify. No edible item at the table is 'the best'. The moment you start stuffing yourself with fried fish thinking it's the yummiest thing on the menu, you discover the chicken curry. But you might just be a kilo too late.

3. Thou shalt extrapolate. Even if you don't understand the language, you shall do your best to reconstruct a coherent sentence from the 2 words you understand out of every 30.

4. Thou shalt not try fancy, new-fangled technology devices. Mobile signals are weak and the GPS thingy does not even connect to a satellite. Shame on you for fiddling with that fancy phone.

5. Thou shalt never ever, EVER travel by sleeper class. Whether it's the noisy guys on the way to Kerala or the ribald Romeos on the way back, you don't want to have to show your macho moves to save the wife. Mainly because you don't have any.

6. Thou shalt not accept gifts heavier than 1 kg. You now have enough rice flour and bananas to adopt a pet monkey who likes appams. And if it weren't for coolies, you would have lost a shoulder.

7. Thou shalt lose weight BEFORE thou travel(eth?). Because 3 breakfasts and 2 lunches and a smorgasbord for dinner everyday will push you over the quintal.

8. Thou shalt believe in a higher presence. Not because there are a large number of places of worship per area, but because you have travelled on a road not wide enough for two cars at 80 KMPH and lived to tell the tale.

9. Thou shalt respect traditional dress. The mundu is not only airy, but also customizable from long to short at a single flick of the wrist.

10. Thou shalt not state preference of food under any condition. Else thou shalt have to eat thy preference till thou loosen thy mundu, regain thy weight, and manage to speak the two words to communicate that you are done.

But seriously, Kerala is a beautiful place to visit especially if you have relatives there like my wife does. Despite not understanding the language, I really look forward to going because of the copious alcohol, the delectable cuisine, the fresh air and the warm people. What more is there to life, really?