A March from the Past

Remember those army ads that they've been showing before the movies? The ones where there’s a doctor parachuting down a hill to save lives, or a woman is doing rock-climbing type adrenaline junkie stuff, all as part of their everyday jobs? The ones that go on to tell you that if you want to live a life less ordinary, the army is the place to be? I guess one of the reasons why the army puts out ads like these is to appeal to the privileged, bungee jumping, skydiving, river rafting, zip lining, swimming with the dolphins, maxing every moment, thrill seeking yuppie millenials bored with the humdrum state of everyday life. The sort who would share life-affirming travel quotes about how it broadens your mind and makes you a better person and teaches you life-lessons you’d never learn otherwise and why everyone should quit their jobs and spend their lives traveling because that’s the only way you can really be a complete person and yes it has nothing to do with privilege or the fact that travel is the new social currency for a generation that’s generally had it easier and therefore isn’t so hung up on that house or that car and likes to consider itself less materialistic.

Sure, there is all that, but the other reason for these ads is to undo years of damage that school education does to the ordinary child’s perception of army life. Seventeen-odd years of school life teaches you that you’ll be solving parabolic equations if you’re an engineer, balancing equations if you’re a scientist and marching all the time if you join the army. Of course there is a lot more to army life than marching, but that’s not what the schools would like you to believe. The only bit of army life that you were exposed to in school was the march past, which, to me, was among the most mind-numbingly boring and pointless things one could ever do. You’d spend hours toiling in the sun, getting yelled all manner of abuse because your arms weren’t stiff enough or rising up and down in unison with the rest of the group. And to what end? So that parents and a chief guest would land up on sports day and spend an afternoon that was equal parts mild tedium, gentle boredom and humdrum monotony. I mean, if there was some grander purpose to the march past, I may still have taken it more seriously. But to practice relentlessly for weeks on end, striving for pointless perfection, all for the purpose of 20 minutes of marching around a field that your parents couldn’t really care less about? It isn’t like they ever told me I marched brilliantly and would take me out for a special dinner, or would forgive other transgressions like low marks or getting into trouble. “Even though you flunked Maths and sneaked a cigarette into the bathroom, we’re willing to overlook that because by God, your marching skills are simply divine!”

The best that you can do through great marching skills, the absolute pinnacle of marching achievement, is to march during the republic day parade. In theory, this sounds like a big deal, but if you think about it, it really isn’t. It’s just a grander, adult version of sports day where you’ll be marching past a bored president and an even more bored visiting head of state. Yes, the whole country may be watching on TV, but really everyone’s just waiting for those motorcycle stuntmen to do their thing. Granted that everyone loves motorcycle stuntmen and there’s no shame in being overshadowed by them, but you’re also overshadowed by all manner of weapon systems and missiles, planes flying in formation, and, worst of all, a never-ending series of eccentric tableaus put up by each of the 29 states!

But coming back to the army, it wasn’t just schools that made the army look bad – it was Hollywood as well. Unfortunately for the army, we were the first generation that was exposed to Hollywood movies, and that didn’t help matters. Until it was just Bollywood, everyone would’ve been scrambling over each other to join the army. Army people were honest, patriotic citizens who fell in love with beautiful women, only to then get called to the border. But the affair continued in the form of long, passionate letters written in the midst of blowing up Pakistani tanks, performing acts of great heroism and forging immense bonds of camaraderie with your fellow army men. Who wouldn't want all that? You could really do no wrong by joining the army, was the general Bollywood consensus. With Hollywood though, the army was an entirely different cup of tea. You could see that your entire lineage would be insulted in highly colourful language while you were getting yelled at and being asked to crawl through a muddy trench and do a hundred push ups in the middle of a heavy downpour simply because an angry superior didn’t like your face and wanted to show you that he was the boss.

What better way, then, to remind you that the army isn’t just march pasts and getting yelled at than just before the start of a Hollywood movie? And if that doesn’t do the trick and get you to join, hopefully the national anthem right after will!

A New Low

This weekend, for absolutely no fault of mine, I got added to a What’s App group called the ‘UPS Battery Group’. In general, I treat with suspicion any What’s App group that has more than 10 members. These are the sort of groups that start with great fanfare and enthusiasm only to slowly degenerate into a junkyard for inane forwards and tired jokes. This one was different though – from the beginning itself it seemed to have no point to it. It was created out of the blue by someone that nobody knew, and everyone was flummoxed as to why they were added to the group.  However tenuous the link may be, most What’s App groups at least have a basis for formation that is more real – a group of old friends, batch mates from college, a tuition group or even ex-colleagues that used to go for lunch together. But here was one group where no one knew anybody, or had any lingering ties to UPS Batteries.

So all that was happening on the group was people were enquiring as to its purpose, and on not receiving any reply, quitting the group. One person was even polite enough to offer that he was open to being added back to the group if it so emerged that there was a point to it, but until such a stage he would stay out. So yes, everyone was either quitting the group or staying on it simply because they hadn’t found the time to quit the group. The sort of thing any sensible person would do in today’s hectic, fast-paced lifestyle.

But not me.

Why I didn’t quit the group right away, like I usually would, I do not know. Perhaps it was some sort of idle curiosity. I mean, a group for UPS batteries? Sure, people form artificial affiliations around football clubs or music bands or film stars – a What’s App group in their name would not have piqued my curiosity in the least. But what could one possibly discuss about UPS Batteries? Perhaps if it was a group on battery technologies in general, it may have been a little more understandable, although still perplexing (and just a little bit creepy). But something as specific as UPS Batteries? Sure, there may be other specific things, like say, toast, where you can imagine people forming a What’s App group and witnessing active participation and passionate arguments. But UPS batteries? Yes, they take care of voltage fluctuations and sudden power outages and we’re all thankful for that, but what more can you say? It’s like forming a What’s App group on water taps or door handles – move along folks, there’s really nothing to be discussed here.

After a while, though, even the idle curiosity began to die down. Much as I wanted to know the possible talking points around UPS Batteries, there were no answers forthcoming. A few hours later, with everyone still in the dark, I decided to take matters into my own hands and provide some direction to all the lost souls out there. Armed with the good sense that a couple of beers can knock into any respectable citizen, I jumped right in, attempting to make this a What’s App group that was full of lively banter and hectic activity.

And then the unthinkable happened – I got thrown out of the What’s App group! Imagine – getting unceremoniously removed from a What’s App group, of all things! And that too one that everyone was voluntarily leaving anyway. Even for someone without a great track record on social media, this was a new low. I’m sure I’m the first person ever to achieve this dubious distinction – people either leave What’s App groups of their own accord, or stay on simply so that others don’t speculate as to why they left. And I was only getting started – I was all set to initiate a discussion around everyone’s top 5 UPS Battery moments, where UPS Batteries would rank among things you’d rescue if your house was burning down, romantic moments that would’ve been ruined were it not for UPS Batteries, and so on.

In hindsight, I suppose it’s better off to not be part of a What’s App group that lacks a sense of humour and doesn’t allow for dissent. Still, from Groucho Marx proudly proclaiming that he wouldn’t want to be part of any club that would accept him as a member, to me getting thrown out of a What’s App group that NO ONE wanted to be part of – there’s quite a bit of work to be done on the social front!

Absolutely Jargonned!

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the Tajikistan government’s decision to fine journalists for using incomprehensible words in their article. While governmental interference in matters related to grammar did not seem like a good idea at the time, something happened last morning that made me reconsider my stance. It was one of those jargon-filled emails that plague modern-day business correspondence and make you want to punch a nearby soft board in anger. If the Tajikistan government is going to get into the business of regulating language, I strongly advocate that it takes charge of all business communication around the world, and ban all incomprehensible words and jargon.

How often has it made you feel that you possess the IQ of a unicellular organism when you receive an email that goes something like this “The U&A study suggests that the 18-24 year old TG with ASL within normal parameters are 10% more likely to turn into zombies by EOD, as per weighted averages assigned post-facto.” All you can think of is “Wow, zombies! But what was the rest of the email all about?” Almost half the mails I get are sprinkled with a generous array of acronyms and jargon like EOD, PFA, scalable, hard stop, synergize and other, more obscure ones that I promptly forget once I find out what they mean. The companies should be help responsible for inflicting such boring language upon us, and it should be deducted from their profit margins as some sort of boredom infliction tax.

My instinct is to reply to such mails saying,

“Dear Corporate Middle Management Type,

Let’s assume that I know that you work in a highly specialized field that requires years of higher education and your job is one that cannot be done by any old nincompoop that you’ve just hired who happened to be walking down the street. Now that it’s out of the way, let’s talk in normal English instead of you ramming that point home all the time through the use of jargon.

Regards

Me”

Now, I know a lot of you might think that hey, this is the professional world and like all things professional, one cannot be anarchic when it comes to the use of language. But think about it – would it not be so much more interesting to receive an email that says “Hey man! Our brand sucks and the consumers don’t seem to give a shit. Hellllp!!!!” instead of the altogether more boring, but commonplace “The brand’s y-o-y sales figures reflect a downturn vis-à-vis the competition, with the brand scoring low on consumer indices of memorability and likeability, while scoring high on don’t-give-a-fuck-ability”?

Now, if the Tajikistan government is unwilling to take on this responsibility, a strong case could be made for the American government to be made in charge of corporate jargon. Not because the American government would make it fun, but it would at least make matters a little more interesting with its affinity for coining bizarre new terms. I mean, this was the same government that came up with the term friendly fire. Now, you might think that friendly fire refers to that warm, welcoming fire that burns away invitingly at a fireplace on a cold winter night, the sort of fire that you can really look forward to. But there’s really nothing friendly about getting killed by your own army, is there? Then of course there’s the more recent ‘Alternative Facts’. Again, like alternative rock, you might that maybe its some cool, different way of looking at facts, that there are two sides to every coin and all that. If you hadn’t known it already, you’d never guess that alternate facts are basically the same thing as outright lies.

The last person to be made in charge of corporate jargon, however, should be the Indian government. Any official, useful communication from the Indian government always sounds downright rude. The Indian government has the officious air of a strict headmaster who treats every student with a deep sense of mistrust and suspicion, knowing that they’re never up to any good. While the law may accept that you’re innocent until proven guilty, for the government you’re always guilty until you pay up. Every communication from the government sounds like the sort of threat the police might make to a hardened criminal, even when there’s no need to resort to threats. Take electricity bills, for example. Whenever I get a text informing me that my electricity bill has been sent, the government makes it sound like I’m some shifty low-life that has zero intention of paying them for electricity, even though I’ve always made it a point to pay on time. It’ll say, “Your bill amount is Rs XXX. Please treat this as 15 days disconnection notice, you lousy, freeloading, mooching, good-for-nothing excuse for a citizen”. I mean, I can understand if this was a follow-up text because I’ve exceeded the due date or something, but to resort to such threats as the very first line of communication seems a tad too aggressive. Periodically, the government will also threaten me because even though I’ve paid my Income Tax, I haven’t filed my acknowledgment of the government’s acknowledgment that I’ve paid my taxes (or some such similarly useless form that needs to be signed and sent only by speed post), and if I fail to do so then my tax returns will be deemed invalid! And if this isn't enough, just to retain the air of menace, the government also sends threatening messages that don’t even apply to me, to reinforce the point that the government is not one to be messed with, “Today is the last date to pay your service tax in case you’re a foodservice business. Heavy penalties and possible imprisonment could apply in case of late payment or non-declaration.”

Now, I don’t quite know how to end this post, so I guess it’ll just have to be a hard stop!

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!