Tandarin

I'm not good at buying gifts.

I start worrying about it in April, and by the time October rolls around I'm in full panic mode. Call me spontaneous, but I prefer when my failures surprise me, not when they are scheduled for October 27th every year. By this time of year I feel as if I'm tied to the railroad tracks, I hear a whistle in the distance, and it probably isn't a bullet train.

When it comes to gifts, they say it's the thought that counts, but I can't even get that part right. Whatever the hell I'm doing is more like the Dalai Lama clearing his mind and meditating, but without the relaxing part.

When I try to think of an appropriate gift for my wife, all I see is nothingness. The problem might have something to do with my own view of material goods. I can walk through a shopping mall for hours without seeing anything I'd want to own more than I'd want to lug it back to the car.

For example, if I see a shirt that looks nice, I can't imagine why I'd want to own it. I already have shirts that keep me warm. It won't make me look more attractive, unless I wrap it around my face, and I buy two more to stuff in my shoes so I'm taller. For some reason my wife prefers it when I have new shirts, which is exactly why I get shirts for my birthday, shirts for Diwali, and shirts for my anniversary. And I have been led to believe there is a holiday called National Shirt Day.

I am guessing that some of you have the same gift-buying problem that I do, minus the crazy parts. I propose that we stick together and come up with some sure-fire gift ideas to make our own lives easier. I will prime the pump with this suggestion, and you can thank me later. It's a company that sells sterling silver necklaces, gold plated and hand-stamped with (wait for it...) the names of a woman's children: Allukas Designs.

Aside from the obvious brilliance that jewelry is always a correct gift for women, when you add the names of her children, it takes it to another level. That's the "thought" part you keep hearing about. I am told that gold works for just about every woman and goes with just about every casual outfit.

Plus, unlike a ring or clothing, there are no sizing issues. I already got this gift for my wife last year, so I can't use it again. (Full disclosure: Shaila told me to buy it for her.)

Okay, now it is your turn. Leave your gift ideas in my mail box or in the comment area, with links if you have them. The ideal gift idea should show some sort of thought, have no sizing issues, and be priced in the spouse-gift range.

Put some thinking into it because in all likelihood you're deciding what my wife will get for her birthdays for the next ten years.

One way of imagining the future is that you and I, the so-called current generation, will selfishly party until we die, leaving to our children nothing but crushing debt, a boiling turd of a planet, and various Apple products.

The problem with this analysis is that young adults have most of the guns and muscles. So isn't the younger generation complicit in stealing from itself? Think about it......

Imagine a 20-something, muscular thug on the street, with a loaded gun in his waistband. A 60-year old banker with a bad back waddles up to him and says, "Give me your wallet!" The thug reaches past his gun and hands over his wallet. That's how our society is organized. I'm not complaining, since I have more in common with the banker than the thug.

In theory, the young soldiers in any country could collectively decide that they deserve most of the national wealth and then simply take it. If you think that sounds like a crime, assume that the first thing the soldiers could do is force lawmakers to rewrite the laws.

If you think that sounds unethical, I would argue that the people who take the most physical and mental risks for the benefit of society should get the most pay. That seems perfectly reasonable and moral to me. And let's assume the soldiers are smart enough to leave enough money in the capitalist system that it still works.

Perhaps the CEO of a major corporation would only earn $250K per year. If he wants more, he can surely join the Navy.

I only bring this up because I'm fascinated by the degree to which brains have evolved to become more powerful than guns. Society's founding geniuses engineered a social system that encourages the young people who have guns to shoot at each other instead of robbing old people.

Forgive me for calling that awesome.

Arguably, the most important function of human language is to protect the smart from the strong. Humans use words to create sentences, and sentences to create concepts, such as our notions of duty and honor.

Powerful concepts control behavior. Without our language and concepts, the strong would kill the smart, and humans wouldn't evolve to be any smarter. I think you could say that human evolution is being guided at least partly by the power of ideas.

I can't remember if I had a point.

This is the kind of post that would either have you in splits or have you thinking that the positions of my brain and something else have somehow interchanged.

I started shaving (my beard) when I was in Std. IX (13 years of age) but I would usually go to the barber once in 3 or 4 months to get the job done. After joining college I bought my own shaving kit but I would use it only in case of an "emergency" or when it just caught my fancy to shave - just for fun.

I still continued going to the barber and would get shaved only once in 2 or 3 or 4 months (usually tied the job with a haircut).

My friends never got that. They would repeatedly ask me whether I was inconvenienced by the bushy beard. It never troubled me, though, and I never got why they all thought so.

Apparently, stubbles itch may probably make one feel awkward. Somehow, I never felt that way.

I thought that whole thing about regular shaving making one's skin and beard hard were hogwash and I was special and everyone else was just going crazy setting a lot of store by urban legend.

Then a barber told me one day that it was *very* easy to shave off my beard (I told him it was around 3 months old). That got me thinking. After all, here was a guy with experience, and he ought to be right.

And then I got married, and thereby lost the freedom to "maintain" my beard as I would really have liked to.

Actually, in a very narcissistic sort of way, I actually liked to grow my beard for long periods of time just to gloat at the look of surprise on people's faces when I got it shaved off.

And I can't do this any more now. I'm now like any average Joe, shaving my beard on my own. Ah, the drudgery! You know, it's quite a pleasurable experience sitting down on a reclining chair, all tucked up, listening to some olde worlde music and getting royal treatment.

And to top it all, most supermarkets do not stock the kind of blade that goes on my nearly 10-year old razor, a Gillette SensorExcel World Cup Edition (1998 vintage with the blue-coloured grip strips rather than the standard-issue grey strips). They would rather have me spend a few hundred bucks and get a new razor and a new set of blades.

So much for the backward compatibility we pathetic little enterprise software designers and engineers have to ensure with every freakin' piece of code we write. Luckily, I ultimately found a set of blades that would work with my razor and I was all set to go.

So these days I'm doing the job on my own, religiously, five times a week. And horror of horrors, my stubble now starts to itch!

What have I done to myself?! I've absolutely managed to spoil something so pure and innocent and made it into this irritating monster, and it is definitely *not* going to change for the better.

Oh!!! What a life......

Often times I've heard the argument that one must appear "neat" before visiting a place of worship (this could also include sitting down for prayer at home in front of a deity).

I have been - on many an occasion years ago- rapped on the knuckles for "neglecting" to, for example, take a head-bath before sitting down for prayer.

First of all, I do not particularly relish prayer/worship of any kind (i.e. at home or at the temple). I will not say I am an atheist. It is just that I do not think that there is a designated time and place for worship. The fundamental tenet of any religion is that a person should first be a good human being and his/her actions should not hurt those around him/her.

I do not have any illusions that regular prayer and worship will automatically absolve me of all my sins and wrongdoings. For all those words and deeds of mine that may have hurt others (I am pretty sure no human being is perfect in that sense and everyone, including me, must have hurt someone or the other albeit unintentionally), I repent regularly.

I also have a lot to be thankful for, and this is another of the reasons why people are urged to worship God - to express their gratitude for their daily bread etc. I do this in a different way. I respect the power that made the Universe (and by extension - Nature and Life).

In this light, I believe that cleanliness should not be limited just to the physical, in that it is not sufficient to be neat and prim and proper physically. One should be clean in terms of the mind and soul too during a prayer session.

Often times, it hurts me to see people carry the baggage of hate, scorn, derision and all the other vile emotions to their respective places of worship. At the same time, it is not uncommon to see instances of cheating and mistrust manifest themselves at these same places.

I wonder how this can be changed. I ask myself how it might be possible to tell those self-professed religious, God-fearing people that the show they put on is hollow, and without inner cleanliness, there can be no true Godliness.

Eleven outages of various lengths in the space of 13 hours that has left the pathetic UPS of my friend absolutely bone-dry and totally incapable of riding even something as small as a single voltage blip!

What a life..?

What's a guy to do? Especially one who has seen no outages abroad since 2006.

It's very difficult to think about working from home these days here in India, as the power backup offered by the generators in the apartment complex in question here in South India is abysmal (just one light each in the hall and the kitchen) given the kind of erratic power supply we are fortunate enough to have been bestowed upon ourselves. God... please HELP us.

One option for my dear friend is to work on a laptop. It's time to get a new battery for that aging office ThinkPad he uses. The damn thing doesn't even last 45 minutes now, and not even that much if there is lots of disk activity such as during boot-up.

However, I see no reason in spending roughly 2 to 3k INR on a battery for a laptop that won't even fetch him a few hundred bucks. Anyway, the machine belongs to the office so he probably does not have to worry too much about this aspect, although I'd rather use a newer machine with faster hardware.

Secondly, I simply do not enjoy programming on a pathetic 1024x768 15" screen, and definitely not with the 1920x1200 I can get from my Dell 24" LCD (back home). However, that LCD needs power, again, and loads of it (at least compared to a laptop screen). With the UPS low on reserve power, hooking up the LCD to the laptop is again not a smooth option for sure.

In the absence of efficient, mature solar panels that can consistently (i.e. irrespective of how bright/cloudy it is) deliver 300W of power and given current battery technology, what's a guy really to do if he wants to work from home? Shift to a different place in town (not very feasible and besides, many other factors come into play)? Use loads and loads of costly, inefficient solar panels and depend on utility power + UPS for the night (if needed)?

The long-term solution really is to have a battery technology that combines the advantages offered by lithium-ion batteries such as low size/weight, easy maintenance, quick charge times (compared to the kind of backup time they offer) and consistent output along with those of lead-acid batteries such as low cost and the ability to support a high power draw for a long time.

Such a technology would make millions here in India leap for joy but we're still a few years away, at best, from getting there. Though I must say, I have access to such technology and hardware in Bahrain.

My friend can probably get an inverter, but I don't know if the apartment owners' association would permit the usage of one, and in any case his main problem is not the rest of the appliances at home but only the computer, and during day time on a few days at that.

Besides, he would still be affected by the same problem he is facing now - of not enjoying 18 straight hours of uninterrupted power to keep his UPS batteries fully charged and capable of serving his machine's power needs for 1.5+ hours at a stretch (incredible ratio, isn't it?).

Don't ask me the details. I would definitely not do such a miserable setup specification/design. It's just crap when the suppliers here wringle their way through sales talk. I have had my good time designing and overseeing commissioning of in excess of 200KVA UPS's at single sites.

One thing for sure, there is incredible scope for young engineers who would like to take power engineering as a subject in India. That's both at research as well as commercial harware manufacture levels.

Wish I was twenty years younger to take the nation building task, as there is no other place on earth where such opportunities abound. India is the place to be in.

Hope young minds are reading this.....

This is an interesting incident that I witnessed nearly a couple of weeks back at a large store in close proximity to my residence in Mumbai.

I was standing in the queue at one of the billing counters as I had picked up a couple of things. It was a Saturday evening (I should mention that I absolutely hate visiting malls because of the crowds, and Saturday evenings are *really* crowded - but that day was one of those unpalatable exceptions) and the queues were all very long.

I would have chosen a shorter queue, but I stood in the queue for the billing counter nearest to the exit gate because my wife was standing outside.

She did not have a cell phone and hence I did not want her to worry about where I was.

The wife of the gentleman standing in front of me in the queue suddenly came barging in with their two kids and started admonishing the poor man for choosing "the longest queue". She literally dragged him over to another queue which was noticeably shorter.

The elder of the two kids must have been five - maybe six - years old, and as the lady told her husband, "Did you notice that you chose the longest queue?" while they were walking over to the other queue, this kid chimed out, "Which will slowly become the shortest queue."

Perhaps I am underestimating five to six-year old kids, but that moment really struck something in me, and got me thinking. Here was conventional wisdom of one kind against another. The lady employed a greedy algorithm of sorts.

The end result she had in mind was that her family should get out of the queue and the shop as quickly as it could. In a sense, her approach was probably near-sighted. All things (such as the efficiency of the clerk at the billing counter and the average number of billable items per head of customers in a queue) being equal, the shortest queue does guarantee the quickest path to the exit, but in the real world, all things are not always equal.

More often not, a variant of Murphy's law applies where you see that the queue you just moved out of suddenly starts moving a lot faster than the one you just joined (this could sometimes be just imagination and the fickleness that is such a big part of any human being).

However, I was amazed to see a young kid realizing the fact that this kind of a greedy approach to minimize waiting times at queues could actually result in a sub-optimal solution.

That said, one simply cannot just stay put in a certain queue if it is or happens to become the longest and one is short on time.

It is an interesting thing - pitting one form of conventional wisdom or common sense against the other.

Usually, common sense is derived out of fact and/or considerable experience, and here is one situation where neither really counts.

Like they say, 'Common Sense is not too common' .....

They say it comes with age. They all talk about how our grandparents can't understand new-fangled dresses, hairdos, food, jobs, gadgets and what have you. Living in the past is taboo and all they want to hear about is progress and life in the fast lane.

I fell for it all. Till the other day I mentioned "old" people and a propensity to not accept change in the same breath. And then I suddenly realized that I too began harbouring similar tendencies.

Everyone nowadays wants a cellphone that can take photographs, allow them to surf, read mail, play games, watch movies, connect to their computers and transfer stuff, feed their dog, wash their clothes, call others names etc. etc. I say I don't. One, I don't have the patience to scour through reams of specifications to find the one model that I want. Two, I don't want to have this patience. Why should I, when my current cellphone can faithfully do all that I ask it to?

The digital world has moved from categories and classifications and folders to tags. I had no patience for that too, atleast initially. I've begun sucking up to tags very recently; that too in a very limited manner to organize my bookmarks online so that I don't have to worry about corrupted browser profiles and dead sectors on hard disks.

So, am I being obsolete? Perhaps I'm missing out on progress and life in the fast lane. Maybe. Now, is there anything wrong with this? Can one consider obsolescene to really be taboo?

I can only answer by saying that I'm comfortable with what I use to achieve my needs. I don't feel it eats too much into my productivity or efficiency, and more importantly, my budget, to currently do what I want to do with the technology I use at the moment.

Unless I can find a truly great use for any of this new-fangled stuff, it's all useless to me. I don't fancy reading email from my cellphone simply because more often than not I have a computer with internet access available to me most of the time. My commutes are short and infrequent and I can live for an hour a day without having ready access to the internet. After all, who checks mail or reads news online when they're asleep? Just add an hour and nothing is lost.

Such is the case for many other things. There are definitely people who can put the latest technology to the greatest use. Markets, however niche or mainstream, always existed for practically anything that could be designed, produced and sold.

I feel I have to consider how my lot can be improved in a manner corresponding to the investment made on such technology before taking the jump. That's fair, isn't it?

So, my dear granddads and grandmoms, despair thou not. You have led great lives and continue to be shining role models to us despite still living in the past.