The Curious Case of a 'Smart'phone

There is a reason why we are referred to as smartphones and it has got nothing to do with the humans who use us or even the apps which are available in the myriad appstores for us. There is something much more than that within us and it is that which makes us truly 'smart'!!! Humans don't really know that as yet and to tell you frankly it is better that way. There are some things which are better shielded from them so that they continue on their merry ways in 'wonderland'.

Now that you have got me talking let me narrate this case, a curious case if I may add which took place with me not too long ago. The more I think of it, the more I feel that it is not only a case or an incident but a fable. You know the stories which have a moral at the end of it only if you can see it for yourself.

Our fable begins in that place which can be both bright and murky at the same time – in the human mind!

Anuj was a happy boy, contented with the life he had carved for himself. While people around him flashed and waved their latest gizmos, he was happy changing the stations on his Sirius XM, more often than not stopping on the 'Chill Station'. Thus was his demeanor – chilled, until one fine day as it happens in most of the fables an idea hit him. The idea seemed so innocuous to start with that he had to go through with it. There was simply no downside and the upside was he was to end up with a 'smart'phone!!!

So off he went onto Craigslist and bought himself a 'smart'phone to set things rolling. He made sure before buying the phone that it was working as expected. Rishi, the guy who sold him that phone seemed a decent enough bloke. The next step was acquiring the SIM card, which was shipped without much delay by Walmart. Though the SIM had to be cut to be converted into a micro SIM to fit the latest smartphone, Anuj had no problem doing that. Ohh and yeah, and as if to get a pat on his back, Anuj did verify that the SIM he received was working fine by using his friend's cellphone. Now it is a different thing that even this charade was not easily accomplished, but then that is the thing with Anuj, there is nothing like a simple thing, each and everything has to be convoluted into something so complex that as time passes it is converted to a memory worth remembering!

  When he put the newly created micro SIM into his new smartphone, he was greeted with a message 'Not registered on network'. Without batting an eyelid, Anuj took Walmart to task and they 'meekly' agreed to ship another SIM. In a few days, the new SIM arrived. It was cut and put in the smartphone, again the same message was encountered. This time Walmart got the drift and said that the issue was not with the SIM but with the phone!!!! – Strike 1

Commonsense at this time, and I am sure you would agree, would have dictated that Anuj get in touch with Rishi and sort the matter out with him. But then if he would have done that we would not have had the fable in the first place, right??!! Anuj trusting his gut schedules a same day buy and sell on Craigslist. Sells the 'faulty' smartphone and with that money buys another smartphone. The sell comes crashing down within no time, as the guy who buys the 'faulty' smartphone comes to know the bug the moment he puts his SIM in the smartphone. Poor Anuj, who set out to just get one 'smart'phone, ends up with two and none of them any better!!!

If there is one thing you would have realized by now about Anuj is that he is never the one to back off from a challenge. 'If life gives me lemons, I will make lemon sherbet out of it' – is his motto and true to this, Anuj puts up the 'faulty' cellphone up for sale again. You ask why doesn't Anuj try and contact Rishi this time? Well, in his pursuit of having his Gmail inbox neat and tidy, Anuj by now had deleted all emails which would have given him the contact information needed to get in touch with Rishi!!! – Strike 2

I think at this time God wanted Anuj to realize that he is not the only one unfortunate soul on this planet and as luck would have it, Jonathan, whom Anuj dubbed as the 'Nigerian Ninja' without an iota of malice, took the bait and offered to buy the 'faulty' smartphone. Ofcourse this smartphone was not advertised as 'faulty' the way I am doing in quotes as I write this fable. But the Ninja was not to be fooled, within hours he saw through the ruse and wanted the trade reversed. Anuj tried his now famous 'cold shoulder' treatment, but the Ninja was not to be denied. He went on a spree of what Anuj terms to be threatening emails and as is the case when it comes to submissiveness - the desi relented!!! – Strike 3 and Anuj was out!!!!

I am sure you guys want to know more. You want to know answers to the obvious questions, as to what happened to the 'faulty' smartphone after that. Was Anuj finally able to get rid of it? Or has he resigned himself to the fact that this is the limit of 'smart'ness he will ever want to go to in his life?

You might very well argue that there has to be a happy ending to this tale? As I jot this down, I see that Anuj's other 'smart'phone is working fine and that he also has a phone number to go with it. If that is not a happy ending then what is!!!??

Now that the fable has ended I will go back to my 'Airplane' mode. There is only so much a 'faulty' smartphone can do I guess.

Novels to Movies to Me!!!

Watched the Life of Pi today. Another movie which has been adapted from a best-selling, award winning novel. If you ask me to describe the movie in a single word, then the word I choose would be 'spectacle'. But this post is not about the movie, so I will stop myself here and change track.

Each time I walk out of a movie theater after watching such a movie (an adaption of a bestseller), I try to relate to whatever I saw on the screen with the images I drew up whilst I was reading the novel and each time I come away feeling a bit wanting when it comes to the depiction on the screen. I understand that when it comes to the medium of the cinema, you are actually surrendering your senses to the creative whims of the director and his crew and even after knowing this I watch the next adaption hoping that the views (images) which will be shown on the screen will blow me away. It is synonymous to the fact that each time I head to a 3D movie I go in with a hope that at least this movie will be an out an out 3D experience.

Quite contrary to this is the event where I read the novel after watching the movie. The prime example of this is the LOTR trilogy. After giving up multiple times on LOTR-1 (The Fellowship of the Ring), due to time constraints, yes there was a time in my life where time was of essence more so in my PL's :), I finally shelved the book until the first movie released. After watching the movie, with renewed interest I took up the first book and as I rifled through the pages, I couldn't but stop the images I had seen in the movie flashing right across my mind. I even tried re-reading passages, trying to conjure up an alternate setting, but it was just not possible. Alternately, for the remaining 2 parts, I had read the book before-hand and had my own set of imaginations to pit against what was going to be shown on the big screen. However the faces of the characters forever remained the same as that of the actors I had seen in the first part of the movie, which I couldn't help.

There has to be a very simple psychological reasoning for this I am sure. Even a fancy name coined for this exact phenomenon which I write about here. Just because I do not want to take home images of locales which somebody else has thought off, I think I will be reading the books before watching their 'soon to be made into' major motion pictures.

Note for Tom Cruise fans: If at all you like watching Tom Cruise (let me confess that I do), we are going to see him next in JACK REACHER. Jack Reacher is a character developed by the author Lee Child. Pick any Jack Reacher novel and you will understand why Tom Cruise is just not an ideal pick to play Jack Reacher. Even if that be I am going to watch the movie. But just something for you to think about if at all you do end up reading Lee Child ever :) I dig Lee Child!!!

Let me leave you with an image I bumped into about how hollywood converts novels into movies. Not that I subscribe to this view per se but its funny nonetheless.

P.S: Now Tom Cruise is out defending his selection as Jack Reacher :P
http://music.yahoo.com/news/tom-cruise-defends-role-jack-reacher-031110277--finance.html

Balasaheb Thackeray (1926-2012)

Mumbai will never be the same again...Maharashtra will never be the same again, for He is no more. A one man army, the man with the iron fist, epithets galore.

(this picture says a lot. That vacant space to the right just behind Balasaheb was where not long ago Raj was. In what will be the next chapter of the Sena, it only remains to be a seen how much Raj's absence will hurt the organisation)

Balasaheb Thackeray changed the political landscape of the state. A cartoonist who rose to power on the skills of oratory, organisation and above all fearlessness, he arguably was running Mumbai like his personal fiefdom. Not many have held such sway over popular sentiment in a single region of the country. 

There are theories that Balasaheb was helped in the early days of his politicking by the Congress who used him to break the hold the Communists had on the mill trade unions in Mumbai. Vasantrao Naik and later Vasantdada Patil used the newly formed Sena to scotch the growth of the Communist party and the political advantage thus gained helped build the Sena as we know it. The 'sons of the soils' campaign was what catapulted Balasaheb into the limelight and cemented him as a leader of the masses.  Studies at the time showed how Marathi-speaking people were not getting jobs due to migrants and their cause was taken up by the Sena. The ire was against the South Indians to begin with, referred derogatorily to as the 'lungiwalas'. Balasaheb quickly became the messiah of the Marathi speaking fraternity what with the festering roits on the Maharashtra-Karnataka border dispute.

As Balasaheb and the Shiv Sena grew from strength to strength, they became an alternative to the hegemony of the Congress at Mumbai. Shiv Sena aligned with the BJP and is now there longest standing ally, however in an attempt to also be nationally relevant the Shiv Sena shed its Marathi image to some extent and adopted a more Hindu nationalist ideology. However the sum total of all this was that the BJP Shiv Sena combine wrested power in the assembly elections in 1995. Balasaheb did not take up any post in the government and famously stated that he had the 'remote control' to the government. Years later, though not so openly Sonia Gandhi was to do the same at the helm of the Central Government. But such was Balasaheb, never mincing any words, calling a spade a spade while himself wielding an axe!!!

His charisma attracted thousands to his rallies. In a recent interview with Arnab Goswami, he said that his father always told him to make a speech that would appeal to the heart more than the head. Balasaheb did just that, he did not play with emotions but he brought them out. 

However I respect Balasaheb there is one qualm which I will harbor. I still feel that his decision to hand over the reins of the Sena to his son Uddhav over his nephew Raj was a mistake. Uddhav lacks his father's demeanor which Raj so effortlessly embodies. The splitting up of the Sena and the subsequent formation of the MNS is only splitting up the Sena votes and is benefitting the Cong-NCP combine. Will Raj in the near future align his forces with the BJP-Sena combine to keep the Cong-NCP away from power in Mumbai remains to be seen. Parting off Raj did seem to affect Balasaheb, whenever asked he always said that he would be more than happy to have Raj back. Frankly speaking after blaming Congress for years to be a 'Gandhi family' controlled party, by selecting Uddhav over Raj, Balasaheb ended up doing the same. 

Balasaheb in jest remarked in Saamna not long ago that sadly he doesnt have the 'remote control' to his age :). Whether Balasaheb's passing on will galvanise the Sena or further weaken it, is a question which only time can answer. With Balasaheb's passing an era in Maharashtra's politics has ended. Whether anybody else will ever rise to the same heights again in Maharashtra is a question better left unanswered!

The GR Reading Challenge and the Fight to the finish!!!

At the start of 2012 I took to GoodReads (GR) in a big way - stacking up my 'Read' book-shelf, rating books, connecting with people on GR and in general just getting used to idea of connecting with people via books. I have always liked to read. Infact 'books n booze' has been my advice to all those forlorn souls as well. It did work for me more than once if may I add so it could work for you. If it doesn't, you would atleast end up reading – a good thing after all.

My inclination to GR was also fueled by the fact that I got a dump of more than 900+ books from Sayantan for my Kindle. So I no longer had to worry about from where my next book was coming. I just had to browse through the Kindle and pick any book which caught my fancy. In the midst of all this I signed up for the GR Reading Challenge 2012.

The GR Reading Challenge 2012 is a challenge you set for yourself that before 2012 (or any year for that matter) draws to a close I would have read 'X' number of books. Thinking highly of myself and in a very jolly mood I put up a figure of 50. Roughly speaking just a book a week and I was good. Naively I thought to myself that this seems to be one challenge, one resolution that I would definitely complete with ease.

The first 8 days of November 2012 have already gone by and my GR Reading Challenge 2012 gadget stares at me with a 'You have read 33 books towards your goal of 50 books'. As if this is not enough, the widget also tells me that at my present rate I am 9 books (19%) behind!!! Now it sure looks like a challenge.

So what is the gameplan? You ask. Here it is:

1)      Get time…READ.

2)      The Classics can wait…looking for page-turners.

3)      Kindle Singles costing $0.00 and under 200pgs are a God sent.

4)      No I am not going to stoop so low as to re-read the 'Hardy Boys' and 'Nancy Drew' J Even readers have ethics!!!

5)      Switch to audibles. I actually tried one and it was free and worth just 2 hours. Didn't like the entire experience as such but atleast it added a book towards my challenge.

You might think that this is not way how reading is supposed to be. But believe me reading with your adrenaline pumping is a totally different experience!!!

Ohh yeah no Thanksgiving getaways and year end bashes for me either. Working towards a much bigger goal you see \m/