To Update or Not to Update?

Every second day, like clockwork, a little notification dutifully pops up somewhere around the bottom corner of my laptop screen, solemnly announcing the need for new updates that cant wait to be installed; all I had to do was say yes. For those of you who still don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s the little notification that, when clicked, says something along the lines below:

Now, I’m never quite sure exactly how to feel about these updates. It’s a bit like the weather in Bangalore right now – you cant decide whether it’s the winter part of spring, spring itself or summer already. The mornings make you feel like it’s still cold, that uniquely pale-shadow-of-winter type weather so characteristic of Bangalore winters. It’s weather that warrants the use of a light jacket and the exercise of a modicum of caution when it comes to consuming all things cold. Yet by mid afternoon the sun is beating down on you so fiercely that you’re cursing global warming and once again dreading that the upcoming summer is going to be the worst ever. You can’t quite decide whether you should be having cold water or simply having a cold, and you end up having both and promptly falling ill. In short, you’re utterly confused and don’t quite know which way to go with weather like this.

Coming back to the updates, on the one side it warms the cockles of your heart to know that there are thousands and thousands of programmers slaving away over their computers day and night so they can improve your experience every two days in ways you’ll absolutely never ever notice. While you go about your everyday life, they’re busy fixing bugs you didn’t know existed and making infinitesimally small improvements all the time in case you thought they just went off to hide under rocks once the software or application was created. But hey, it’s the thought that matters, so even though I never feel the need for an update, I should be grateful for it. And I always was.

Until.

This one occasion, back in younger, more innocent times when I would blindly let the system install all the updates it ever wished to, the laptop just crashed without explanation in the middle of one of these updates. I mean, sure, a laptop never crashes and then offers you an explanation for it, but the system updation, with its alluring promise of a smoother experience and fixed bugs and eradication of all problems big and small, had instead gone and done the opposite – crashed and made me lose everything.

So I have every reason to stiffen into a state of suspicion each time that notification for updates pops up. And while I would like nothing better than to simply ignore it and forget about it, it just doesn’t pan out that way. The first few times you’re able to dismiss that notification with a spirit of reckless abandon, but slowly it starts worming its way into your consciousness. Each time you fire up the laptop, it’s just there; this little red circle gnawing away at the back of your mind like the time you’re not quite sure if you’ve switched the gas off. Sure, you can ignore it for a while, but it’ll keep coming back. It’s like switching your phone off in a flight during take off – you know that it probably won’t really interfere with the plane’s signals and cause it to crash into the ground, but just in the one-in-a-million chance that it does, why risk it? It’s the same with the updates – you’re quite sure it’s probably useless and wont make any difference, but what if there’s a new super mega virus or Trojan horse or other similarly devious malware created by an evil Eastern European computer hacker that will cause your laptop to crash while everyone else stays safe because they’d installed their updates and you didn’t?

And this is only the laptop that I’m talking about – on the phone it’s almost impossible to ignore these updates beyond a while because it’s always there until you haven’t installed it, and the list keeps piling up the longer you put it off. Straightforward game apps where you cant, for the life of you, see any avenue for improvements are constantly hankering for updates. Even things I didn’t know my phone had, like a plug-in for a Korean keyboard, something I’ve never used and never will use, conscientiously needs to be updated every few days. And while the updates haven’t caused my phone to crash yet, I know that they keep eating into the storage space until a day will finally come that everything is so updated that my phone has no space left to perform any other function.

That, if nothing else, might finally get me to buy a new phone!

Mmmm...Cookies!

Those of you lucky enough to be staying in Europe might be getting a notification related to cookies on this blog. It seems that while I was away, a new EU ruling has come into effect that requires me to tell everyone what my cookie policy is, where I stand on the use of cookies and also give an additional disclosure in case I’m employing any third party cookies. The blog dashboard goes on to state that Google has been nice enough to put out a cookie notification for me already, but not being in Europe, it’s impossible for me to see what this is. Still, Google somewhat unfairly insists that I will be held responsible in case it isn’t visible or is inaccurate in any way and, god forbid, an EU resident is left in the dark as to the exact nature of my relationship with these cookies.

So yes, cookies. At the risk of over simplification, my cookie policy is to eat it. I don’t really know what else to do with cookies. I’m not quite sure what sort of an employee a cookie would make (would probably crumble under pressure!), so I haven’t employed any cookies, leave alone third party ones. I wish that I could say technologically advanced, big-brotherly things like I’m using cookies so that I can track your browsing preferences and customize the blog experience to better meet your needs, even though I’m secretly selling all this data to advertisers in exchange for money or to help them manipulate your online behaviour in sinister ways, but I honestly couldn’t be bothered.

In fact, I’m not even much of a cookie person – I’m really more of a chips person. Now, I know cookies have a lot going for them – melt in your mouth butter, choicest flour that’s baked to perfection, and, if you were to believe the old Parle Milano ad, bodily fluids exchanged between Hrithik Roshan and a woman with a fake Italian accent. But I’m a chips junkie through and through. If I had a dietary kryptonite it would probably be chips, but then again it isn’t as if I’m strong enough in the nutritional intake department to warrant a kryptonite. If I was blessed with unshakeable willpower or had a dietary regime of unparalleled Spartan-ness, it would be fair to say that chips is my kryptonite – but for someone with a fairly unhealthy track record of junk food consumption it would just sound absurd. Still, I’m one of the few people that would try out any new chips that happened to make its way on to a store shelf – from brands large and obscure to the hot chip shops, there isn’t any kind of chips I haven’t partaken of. Even if a brand came out with a flavour that sounded downright disgusting like ‘Toothpaste & Orange Juice’, that I know will taste utterly vile, I’ll give it a gander just to be sure. Special edition flavours to commemorate random occasions like world cups or the changing of the seasons, short-lived experiments on the chips front that sank without a trace – I’ve tried them all!

Now, in most cases advertising tends to make outlandish promises and make a product seem life-changing – think deo ads that’ll have women swarming like flies around you or tea ads that’ll turn you into a conscientious, do-gooder citizen. In truth, you’ll maybe smell a little better (or worse, if it’s the wrong deo) or feel mildly better in the middle of a boring workday. In the case of Lay’s and me, though, it’s the opposite – the tagline ‘No one can eat just one’ is about the most massive understatement you’d ever encounter. Now, if the tagline were changed to “No one can eat a hundred and then feel all sick and nauseated but still do exactly the same thing pretty much every single time”, it would probably be somewhere in the general vicinity of what would constitute ground reality. In fact the wife justifiably worries that she might one day wake up and find herself lying next to a giant potato chip.

Maybe my indifference to cookies and love for chips is rooted in the fact that I pretty much don’t have a sweet tooth at all. All the excitement for dessert and chocolates that drive deleterious food habits for most people is instead channeled into an equally destructive hankering for chips and instant noodles in my case. My meals are always calibrated such that there’s barely any space left for dessert – so I rarely end up having more than a spoon or two of it. That is why, when Pink Floyd sang “You can’t have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat”, I was utterly flummoxed. Sure, I love Pink Floyd and was willing to follow their guidelines on the correct order of food intake, but why would one even want pudding when there was meat? All I could think was “Hey! That’s just perfect, thank you very much. I’ll gladly have all the meat and skip the pudding.”

Grammar For The People

One of life’s simple pleasures is when a little known country that you barely ever hear about or know anything of suddenly pops up in the news, usually for something utterly ridiculous, because no one would really bother reporting about them if they did something completely humdrum like sign a defence agreement or participate in an economic forum. Take Tajikistan, for example. You would think it’s a run of the mill, rugged central Asian country with a rugged landscape, rugged people and even more rugged rulers that suppress all art and culture. It’s so obscure a country that even Narendra Modi would not visit it on his foreign sojourns, and he loves descending upon all manner of countries popular or obscure to sign some new treaty that will boost bilateral trade tenfold and raise India’s profile and stoke the fires of patriotism amongst Indian diaspora there with an elaborate function reminiscent of those pointless opening ceremony extravaganzas they hold at all those multinational sporting events. Coming back to Tajikistan, it sounds like the sort of country where discontented ex-Soviets collude with other unruly elements to foment Jihad and smuggle arms and indulge in the illegal trafficking of narcotics. In short, it’s the sort of country about which if Borat made up something outlandish about people engaging in unnatural acts with their donkeys you’d probably believe it.

One of these slices of life’s simple pleasures did materialize a few months ago, in the form of news that the Tajikistan government would start fining journalists for using ‘incomprehensible’ words in their articles. To impress upon others just how out of hand the whole situation had gotten, Gavhar Sharifzoda, the head of the state language committee and quite possibly the world’s first governmental grammar nazi, said that there were cases where journalists used as many as 10 words in one day that the simple reader could not comprehend. I’m generally one for minimum governance – I don’t see the need for the government to botch up something that can be messed up perfectly well by private enterprise, but 10 words really takes the cake. If it were 3 or 4 one could’ve turned a blind eye to it; maybe even at 5 or 6 a simple slap on the wrists would suffice, but by the time you reach 10 incomprehensible words, it surely calls for government intervention at the highest level!

Now, I know what you’re thinking: If a strange law had to be passed somewhere, Tajikistan sounds like just the country that would do it. It’s the kind of country you can easily imagine passing a law stating that people cannot leave the egg yolk for the end while they’re having a sunny side up, or that a restaurant owner has the right to fire his chef if he breaks more than 15% of the yolks while making eggs sunny side up. Now, I don’t know about you, but I recently got three consecutive sunny side ups messed up – a new low even for someone who doesn’t have a stellar record when it comes to sunny side ups. I probably have a lifetime average of just a little over 50%, which is utterly shit for someone who makes sunny side ups pretty regularly. But it isn’t as easy as it looks, is it? First, you have to crack the egg just right, and even if you do that, you’re immediately under pressure because you then have to gently ease it on to the frying pan, making sure to drop it at just the right height so the yolk stays intact. By now you’re all relaxed and complacent as a perfectly round yolk stares back at you from the frying pan – little aware that another opportunity for peril is just round the corner in the form of the final hurdle of getting it on to the plate without any mishap. It’s just too much pressure!

Daft as the Tajikistan government’s order is when it comes to newspaper articles, one should always be happy when governments are occupied spending all their time coming up with such orders. Closer home, take the order on national anthems, for example. Not only did someone put in a lot of thought to arrive at the conclusion that the best time to make everyone’s heart swell with patriotic pride was just before a movie, they even took the trouble to go to great lengths to arrive at guidelines for how the national anthem should be played, at what angle should the flag be displayed, whether doors needed to be shut while this is happening, and so on.

You’re well entitled to think “Hey, but I’ve paid good money in the form of taxes. I want some roll-up-the-sleeves-and-get-the-hands-dirty governmenting happening, goddamnit, and not guidelines on national anthems, massive PR exercises on cleaner India and bloated rhetoric on self-sacrifice.” The risk though, is that when the government does actual work, it’s probably worse. It’s all fine saying the only thing the Congress government did was corruption, or that the only thing the Modi government does is PR. But when the government actually gets around to work, you’ll land up with the colossal mess that’s demonetization. Or travel bans – look at Donald Trump. Everyone thought that like all other politicians, his election promises would only be that – false promises broken as soon as he came to power. Now that he’s actually implementing it, a horrific apocalypse seems upon us and suddenly even Nixon seemed like he was a fine, upstanding man worthy of public office!