What the Duck?

The grass is always greener on the other side, and it’s about time somebody blamed Monsanto and genetic modification for it.

Or the Japanese.

Wherever highly advanced technology is used in pursuit of the absurd, expect the Japanese to be there. Back when I was a kid, I’d seen a picture of square watermelons in the newspapers, and it turned out it was a Japanese thing. Since that day, I’d always been suspicious of the Japanese when it came to technology. If a country with the latest, greatest, state-of-the-art, cutting edge technology at its disposal could use it to come up with square watermelons, you wouldn’t put anything past them. Over the years, the Japanese have gone on to repeatedly demonstrate beyond a shadow of doubt that my fears were well founded. A vending machine that dispenses underwear? Check. A toilet with controls more complicated than an airline cockpit? Check. A robotic pet with all the trouble of a real pet but without the fun? Check. A device worn around your face that makes you look like a cartoon lion, to prevent your hair from falling into your bowl of soupy ramen? Check. While corporations use technology in pursuit of profit and Governments use it to make bombs, the Japanese use technology to create ridiculous vending machines.

While it can deliver dubious benefits when in the wrong hands, there is a lot of good that technology has done – it’s cured a lot of diseases, given us access to so much information and allowed us to watch Game of Thrones on the same day as it’s released in the US. Not being Amish, I’m by and large pro technology – I use smart phones, order groceries online and, thanks to Google Maps, am finally not in the embarrassing position of refusing to ask for directions and getting lost. I think Google Maps has done a great favour to all men – we finally don’t need to ask for directions, something that we hated doing in the first place.

Another example of good technology is predictive texting, although that’s probably the wrong term for it. Whatever it’s called officially, I’m impressed that my phone is able to predict the word I’m trying to form in the middle of typing, and suggesting options that would save me time. Of course, sometimes it’ll lead to massive gaffes, with auto correct deciding, in its infinite wisdom, that large bosoms are a more plausible reason for disconnecting a client’s call than being busy, and therefore changing “I’m busy” to “I’m busty”. Still, I can live with the occasional faux pas in exchange for the overall benefit this technology provides. What has utterly baffled me, though, is that the same predictive technology can also detect when you’re trying to use swear words, and then simply refuse to type them out. Ever. It’s as if there is some technological moral police coded into that software that’s decided that swearing is bad for you. I could understand if they had a child mode that enabled the phone to do this – but why have it on all phones? We’re swearing all the time anyway, so why does the phone have to step in and decide it’s not right? We get enough lessons in morality from religion, the censor board, assorted busybodies and the government. To compound the issue, the phone refuses to save any swear word even after I’ve used it repeatedly. Fuck is always changed to duck, bastard is changed to batter, bitch is changed to botch and asshole is changed to the mystifying ‘Anole’. Why?

But coming back to good technology, while I don’t care much for drones delivering pizzas or any other packages, I am excited about driverless cars. But while driverless cars are perfect for those Western countries where traffic rules are taken seriously and good driving skills are enough to get by on the roads, what happens in a country like India where you’ll often land up in trouble or cause a traffic jam if you’re following traffic rules? More crucially, what happens when a driverless car gets into an accident with a human-driven car on a busy Delhi road? Can the car start abusing in chaste Hindi, to create the right aura of menace and intimidation? Will the driverless car be able to threaten the guy in the other car by claiming to know the police commissioner or a local politician? And what about the human in the other car – how does he go about hurling abuses at a car or beating up a car?

It’s the sort of oversight that could result in driverless cars failing in India. Just like it happened with vending machines – I think the reason they didn’t succeed in India is that they don’t allow you to bargain. In a country that boasts a proud tradition of bargaining, that’s suicide. It deprives one of the sweet satisfaction of a well-earned bargain, that proud glow of vanquishing the shopkeeper in his own game and getting a deal that someone of a weaker disposition would not have obtained, which makes the purchase worth savouring. Perhaps with the advent of artificial intelligence, they could come up with a vending machine that could bargain – it would be just the sort of vending machine that would work in India.

Picture this – there’s a vending machine that lists the price of a Coke can as Rs 30. A man enters a ten-rupee note and presses the button to dispense the coke.

Vending Machine: Rupees ten? Are you kidding me? That wont even cover the cost of electricity I’m using up in this transaction.

Man: It’s water and sugar, pretty much. I can get the same thing for 20 elsewhere. 30 is too much. I could give you 15, but not a paisa more than that.

Vending Machine: Oh come on, have a heart. I know I don’t, but that’s because I’m a vending machine. Still, everyone has to make a living…you think I’ll be allowed to operate here if I don’t earn money? It’ll be the junkyard for me – rotting away in obscurity alongside old TVs and refrigerators, valued only as scrap metal. Make it 25 at least.

Man: No way, I know all your tricks; I wont fall for that sob story. 20 is the best I can do – I know you’ll still make a neat little profit out of that. Otherwise I’ll walk away.

Man starts walking away.

Vending machine: Fine – see if you can get the Coke for lesser anywhere else. I promise you my Coke is the cheapest.

(Secretly hoping that man will turn around and come back. But man continues to walk away, secretly hoping that vending machine will call out after him.)

Vending machine: All right, all right, 20 rupees it is! Here, come back and take it.

Man walks away glugging the can of Coke, refreshed more by the sweet satisfaction of a perfectly executed bargain than the Coke itself.

Scientific Progress Goes Boink

A couple of months ago, the scientific community, the community of people that get excited about everything, and the larger community in general, were falling over themselves in excitement at the discovery of gravitational waves. It was hailed as the next big scientific discovery, the biggest thing to have happened to science since quantum mechanics. Of course, with the advent of social media, everything seems like the biggest thing since sliced bread, the iPhone & the season finale of Game of Thrones put together, so it’s sometimes hard to distinguish between real news and something trivial that just happens to be trending on social media. Still, it all seemed like a terribly big deal and made me curious enough to know what gravitational waves were, and how it would make a difference to my life. While every news article seemed supremely thrilled about gravitational waves and kept stressing that it was a huge, game-changing discovery, most descriptions of gravitational waves made absolutely no sense to me, no matter how hard I tried to pay attention. Then I came across one site that claimed to explain it in layman’s terms, promising that it was so simple that even a 5 year old, or a person with the IQ of Donald Trump, would understand it. It promptly proceeded to use big words like space-time continuum (I know 5-year-olds these days are a lot smarter than I was as 5, but which 5 year old will understand space time continuum?) that perplexed me even further. Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not complaining that I couldn’t understand what gravitational waves were – in fact it was quite the opposite. I was satisfied that here, at last, was some legitimate science.

I’ve always had a strange equation with science – from afar, it’s been fascinating, but when science gets really serious, I don’t understand a thing. When science is watered down and made into popular science with books like The Brief History of Nearly Everything, I’m utterly fascinated and captivated by it. Sometimes I even think that if this is how science was taught in school, I’d perhaps not have been so hopeless at it. But deep in my heart, I know that this is rubbish. Sure, one may enjoy Bill Bryson’s fascinating stories about science or Carl Sagan talking about the Pale Blue Dot or Morgan Freeman narrating about the Cosmos (somehow, since the Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman has emerged as a universal narrator for all manner of movies and shows, so much so that most people will listen in awestruck fascination even if Morgan Freeman narrated about watching paint dry). But serious science still involves solving complex equations on projectile motion or mastering calculus and all manner of complex formulae – something I never got the hang of when I was 16, and that’s certainly not going to change now.

So my thrill when I couldn’t understand gravitational waves was derived from the satisfaction that it was actual science, as opposed to what you mostly come across as science in the papers these days, with headlines like “Teenage Boys Most Likely To Watch Porn”. Most of these scientific studies feel like science that’s not just watered down, but also positively dumbed down to remove any shred of intelligence. They’ll often be backed by august universities or institutions, but that doesn’t make them any less daft. That’s why most of what passes off as science in the newspapers looks like this:

“Staying Alone Can Make You Lonely”

Scientists at the Institute for Blindingly Obvious Research Studies have discovered that staying on your own can sometimes make you feel lonely, thereby inducing pangs of longing and enhancing the need for company. In a study conducted across 2000 people, it was concluded that people staying alone were 26% more likely to feel lonely every once in while than people who were staying with flat mates or a spouse.

“Eating Cheese Could Lead to Longer Life”

Scientists at the Institute that Does a New Food Research Everyday to Confuse You on What’s Good and What’s Bad have discovered that eating cheese could lead to a longer lifespan. In a completely bonkers study conducted over five decades across two groups – one that ate cheese regularly and one that rarely ate cheese – it was found that the cheese-eating group lived, on average, five years longer. While the cheese lobby was elated at the findings, scientists cautioned that the longer lifespan could also be because the cheese eating group led a healthier life overall with a daily routine of cycling, circuit training, long-distance running, weight training and yoga, combined with living in the countryside.  However, it could just as well be cheese, so to be safe it’s best to eat cheese anyway, said the Chief Scientist.

“Men More Likely to Stare at Busty Women”

Scientists at the Institute that Specialises in Creepy & Pointless Research have concluded that men are twice as likely to ogle at women with bigger breasts than women with regular breasts. In a controversial study that reeks of sexism and had feminists fuming and men queuing up in eager anticipation, 500 men were asked to sit down and ogle at a bunch of women passing by. Surprise, surprise - it was discovered that the men were twice more likely to ogle at women with larger breasts.

I'm sure there is real science going on all the time - maybe it just doesn't make it to the news. The last time real science was in the news was when the God particle was discovered, although, much like God Himself, it disappeared after a week of frenzied activity. Whatever happened of the Large Hadron Collider once the God particle was found? It’s probably lying unused, gathering cobwebs and dust, to the extent that something can gather dust when it’s located along the pristine alpine-ness of the Franco-Swiss border. My guess is they're trying to flog it off to some Elon Musk/Bruce Wayne type playboy tech millionaire:

LHC Salesman: Good evening, sir. We’re calling from CERN, and we were wondering if you’d be interested in purchasing the Large Hadron Collider?

Playboy Tech Millionaire: A large hadron collider? What on earth for?

LHC Salesman: It’s great for splitting atoms at very high speeds. In fact, it’s the best particle accelerator ever built – far better than your run-of-the-mill, everyday cyclotron.

Millionaire: But I’m not really in the habit of splitting atoms in my spare time. 

LHC: You should, then! There's nothing quite like the thrill of a high speed collision between subatomic particles. It’s also a chance to own a piece of scientific history. Plus it’s a 14 km long tunnel – you could use it as an escape route, for rave parties, or your kids could use it to play hide and seek, or…

(Line disconnected)

Monumental Madness

One of the reasons I found history interesting was that it always had some truly bizarre, utterly crazy, completely bonkers occurrences that were happening all the time. At the same time, I’d also found history terribly boring because all these absurdly fascinating tales were narrated in a very matter-of-fact way and you were simply expected to remember it as a bunch of facts and figures instead of really getting into the stories. Take the Mughal emperors, for example. All of them were painted as such great rulers, but their stories always began with “Shah Jahan was one of the greatest Mughal emperors known for being a patron of the arts and architecture. He ascended the throne after killing his brothers, and then went on to rule for three decades. He is most famous for building the Taj Mahal, India’s greatest monument of all time.” I mean, isn’t it crazy how the fact that he killed his brothers to ascend to the throne has just been glossed over like it was some humdrum, everyday task that he performed, like waking up and brushing his teeth? Only Aurangzeb, who’d ruthlessly accumulated a staggeringly large portfolio of atrocities that was impossible to ignore, was painted in negative light. It would’ve been so much more interesting, and possibly accurate, if the paragraph on Shah Jahan were changed to “Best known for building the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan was certifiably crazy. He had no qualms about indulging in a spot of fratricide to ascend to the throne. He then developed an unhealthy, psychotic obsession with his wife Mumtaz, which led to an early onset of senility that manifested itself in devoting 22 years of his life to building the Taj Mahal. As if this wasn’t enough, he proceeded to chop off the hands of the people who’d worked on the Taj Mahal – certainly not the sort of thanks you’d expect for helping someone build a great monument. In this day and age, such a man would be locked away in an asylum or run for the US Presidency, but the 15^th century was a little more lax about such degenerate behaviour”.

The craziness was not just confined to the Mughals – the Vikings had their terrible fashion sense, the English were always fighting with everyone, the Greeks were busy inventing philosophy and triggering off long, pointless arguments on the human condition that continue to this day, and the Mongols spent so much time looting, plundering and pillaging everyone else that they had no culture or cuisine to speak of despite being around for so long. Perhaps the greatest sign that ancient man was just as crazy as modern man, though, was in the monuments. Sure, most of them are magnificent structures that make you gape in awe and marvel at their breathtaking beauty, but once you get past all that, the lingering feeling you’re left behind with is “What on earth were they thinking?”

Take the Great Wall of China, for example. It was built over hundreds of years with the aim of protecting China from regular Mongol invasions. It seems that the ancient Mongols had made it a habit to invade China regularly – probably whenever they were bored, which was pretty often given that there’s nothing much to do in Mongolia. So the Mongols were pretty crazy, but the Chinese were even more so given that they were perfectly happy spending hundreds of years just to build a wall. Surely, while it was getting built, the Mongols must’ve had a great time merrily raiding China from the sides where the wall wasn’t ready – but the Chinese still thought that putting up with periodic pillaging was worth it as long as, eventually, it stopped the Mongols.

To its credit, though, the Great Wall at least had some functional purpose. What are truly baffling, though, are the pyramids.  Sure, ancient man was highly enthusiastic in celebrating the dead and forever building monuments to commemorate them – but even by those standards, the Egyptians took it to an altogether different level. Today, after thousands of years, the pyramids remain truly magnificent structures that stand testament to how bonkers the ancient Egyptians really were. Yes, it’s an engineering marvel and a remarkable architectural feat. You wonder how the Egyptians moved all those huge boulders and created those impossibly big triangular buildings – but the bigger question is – “Why?” Like most civilizations, the Egyptians did slightly nutty things like burying the dead along with their cats and some slightly cool things like inventing paper – but what were they thinking when they decided to build the pyramids? What possessed them to wake up one day and announce – I’m going to spend the next decade building a giant stone triangular building, and then spend the next few hundred years building many more of the same? I'm guessing it set civilization back a few hundred years – the Egyptians could’ve invented a lot more things if they weren’t spending their entire time building pyramid after pyramid.

The Pyramids and the Great Wall provide an insight into why, even today, the Arabs and the Chinese spend so much time building absurd things. I’d recently seen a TV program on a ridiculous elevator being built all the way up a mountain, along the face of a cliff, and was not at all surprised to know that it was in China. It’s the same whenever someone sends you a link about some preposterous new thing that’s built like an underwater complex that’s as big as a city, or a skiing lodge in the middle of a desert, or an entire European-looking village being built in the middle of nowhere – you know it’s either China or the UAE that’s committed the atrocity. Although given that a good chunk of taxpayer money has now been allocated to building a pointlessly gigantic statue of Sardar Patel, India might soon be joining that list.

Perhaps if history had been taught in a more interesting way in school, we would not be repeating the mistakes of the past. But no one was really paying any attention, were they?

Nerves of Dubious Quality

Quantum mechanics, The Tree of Life, women and finance are amongst the most difficult things to understand that I’ve encountered in my life so far. As someone who’s had a hard time understanding anything remotely financial, I always held finance people in high regard. Sure, they were earning obscenely high amounts of money that most people felt they were undeserving of, but I’d always figured that if anyone could actually comprehend all that financial mumbo-jumbo, they were worth all that money. In any case, if you were in finance, you always seemed to be studying and giving all manner of exams for certifications that sounded truly serious and weighty – so perhaps all that money you earned was in some way compensation for the lack of a life otherwise. If you wanted to spend a lifetime studying and didn’t care much about the money, academia was your career of choice. But if you wanted to spend a lifetime studying, and be richly rewarded for all the trouble you went to, it was either finance or law.

The blind assumption that the finance sorts were supremely intelligent humans, though, is something that I’ve started to question whenever I read anything related to the stock markets, and my worst fears have now been confirmed with stock markets all over the world crashing over Brexit. The reality is that the finance people are not the smartest in the world; they are simply the most nervous in the world. From my limited understanding of the stock markets, here’s how it works: If you’re happy about something you go about buying shares, and if you’re sad about something, you go about selling shares. After doing this for a decade you either get very rich, have an apartment in Manhattan, a yacht in Monte Carlo and a lifestyle disease; or you get very poor, still have a lifestyle disease and are out on the streets scraping through dustbins for your next meal.

Coming to Brexit, it seems that all the finance types expected Brexit to not happen. They were so thrilled with themselves about this that they decided to go out and celebrate by buying a whole lot of shares. And now that Brexit has happened, they’re a panic-stricken bundle of nerves running about like headless chickens selling these shares left, right and centre. That just doesn’t make any sense, does it? It’s like printing the invitations to your wedding when you haven’t even started dating. And what was the rush to buy all those shares? If Brexit were anyway round the corner, wouldn’t any normal person just wait a few more days and then decide? 

Now, a lot of you might think that Brexit is a huge deal, and it’s only natural that the financial markets react to such a big development in the political and financial world. And I would’ve been fine with that if it was just Brexit that led to the nervousness – but the stock market guys are always nervous, aren’t they? It’s not just the big recessions or financial crises – every political announcement, every time interest rates are changed, every time interest rates are not changed, every by poll in every obscure constituency seems to make the stock markets nervous and collapse in a heap of panic. I can’t think of a bunch of people that get as nervous as often as the stock market guys. The entire financial system seems to be based around getting together the most nervous bunch of people you ever came across, handing them all your money and saying “Here, buy and sell shares as you please”.

Perhaps all those exams and certifications that the finance people write are not full of questions regarding the economy and derivatives and PE ratios and all that, but instead look like this:

Exam for Aspiring Financial People Who Buy & Sell Shares & Determine the Fate of the World Economy

1. The US has just had an election and voted in a Republican government. Will you:
1. Celebrate because you’re fond of right wing policies and feel they might benefit trade with India.
2. Be disappointed because your political leanings are more left liberal.
3. Not be affected as it doesn’t truly affect you in any way, plus you’ve started seeing this shrink who’s told you to be Zen about such things.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.
2. Beyonce has delivered yet another number one hit and her new song is the rage at all parties. Will you:
1. Rejoice as Beyonce has just the kind of foot-tapping dance music that you love, and sometimes even writes vaguely feminist lyrics.
2. Rave on about how music isn’t what it used to be and how it was so much better in the 60s and the 70s.
3. Not be affected too much as you can always download stuff you like anyway.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.
3. Tanmay Bhat has yet again said something in poor taste about another eminent personality. Will you:
1. Join the chorus of outrage and loudly condemn Tanmay Bhat and wish ill upon him.
2. Jump to his defense because you believe in freedom of speech and are appalled by people taking the moral high ground.
3. Not be affected too much as you know this will all be forgotten two days later when Salman Khan says something even more daft.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.
4. Pluto has just been stripped of its planetary status. Do you:
1. Break into a celebratory jig, as you were always suspicious of Pluto being a planet because of its unusually inclined orbit.
2. Break down in tears, as Pluto was your favourite planet because it shared its name with a cartoon dog.
3. Not be affected, as you’re no longer in school so you need not remember any of this anyway.
4. Get very nervous and sell all your shares.

As you may guess, it’s only if you answered D for every single question that you would pass the test. After all, Spiderman’s uncle may have said, “With great power comes great responsibility”. But in the financial world, with great power comes great nerves.

The Days of Being Civil

A few weeks ago, the IAS results were announced with great fanfare across newspapers in India. To be honest, I was a little surprised that it still made for front-page news given the number of career options that are there these days. It’s not like design school or hotel management results ever make it to the newspapers, so why the IAS? Perhaps it was one of those slow news days when no politician said anything embarrassing or outrageous, and there wasn’t any scam, scandal or disaster that was otherwise keeping the nation preoccupied and driving everyone into a state of outrage. It did, however, take me back to the time when, as a child, I wanted to be an IAS Officer. This doesn’t mean anything much because at various stages in my childhood I’d also wanted to be a zookeeper, a detective, a pilot, a librarian, a teacher, a sports journalist, a basketball player, a doctor, a shopkeeper and perhaps a dozen other professions that I simply cannot remember now. So it’s not like I suddenly felt that my life was a series of abject failures littered by crushed hopes, bitter disappointments and shattered dreams just because I didn’t end up being any of the above. If anything, I feel like my life has been a failure because no one is willing to pay me to just travel around and write about it.

But coming back to the IAS Officer business, as a child I had no clue what being an IAS Officer entailed, but it just sounded suitably impressive. I suppose it was because of the word Officer at the end of it – it added just that amount of heft and authoritativeness that was hard to match. Of course, when I later realized that all of Bihar came to Delhi to study for the IAS exams and it involved a level of dedicated, single-minded devotion to studying that comfortably surpassed engineering college preparations, I steered clear of the civil service exams. In any case, those were the days of a different, pre-liberalized India, when, childhood fantasies aside, apart from IAS Officer, there were precisely three career options to choose from – Doctor, Lawyer or Engineer. While Doctor had the whole nobility and lifesaving thing going for it; complex biological diagrams were enough to deter a weak-willed student such as myself who was always looking for the easy way out. Even before that, Doctor and Lawyer sounded scary since it meant more years in college and everyone told you it also meant studying for the rest of your life to stay updated in your profession. Of course, it isn’t like Engineering was a piece of cake either. After the 10^th boards, all of a sudden, the kids who took school very seriously suddenly treated it with casual disdain – school was something they just had to pass and get out of the way. 2 years of rigorous preparation and liberal burning of the midnight lamp was devoted to engineering preparation, only for a majority of them to then spend 4 years of engineering college lost in a haze of marijuana, old monk and navy cuts. Basically if you weren’t studying for medicine or law, here’s what your career choice flowchart looked like:

Pre-Liberalization Career Choice Flowchart for Someone not Studying Law or Medicine

Thankfully, by the time I got out of school, other options that involved considerably less studying did open up and I was able to slip out of the constricting dragnet imposed by the flowchart above. Now that I think of it, I suppose at least some other professions like advertising or marketing had always existed, but somehow no parent ever told you “Son, I want to see you grow up to be an advertising or marketing guy one day”.

In this day and age, though, the whole clamour for a job in the civil services does seem a little baffling. Even accounting for the security of a government job, why aren’t people as eager to join, say, the Censor Board, instead of the IAS? Of course, with the whole fiasco over Udta Punjab, it’s clear that the censor board is entirely peopled by idiots with the rational and emotional intelligence of pond scum. The qualification criterion is probably limited to displaying large amounts of incompetence with a liberal splash of sycophancy and a predilection for moral policing. But the occasional bad press aside, doesn’t it sound like one of the best jobs to have? I mean, think about it – if someone offered you money and asked if would you rather spend your days running the country or watching movies, what sounds like a more attractive prospect?

Imagine coming in to work everyday with the question “So what movies are we going to watch today?” You’d get paid to watch a particularly steamy sex scene again and again to decide whether it should be banned or not. It’s the sort of job you’d love to be thorough with. “Hey, play that bit where he utterly ravishes her naked body in a fit of passion one more time, will you? We must be absolutely sure if this warrants banning or not.” Your quarterly targets would be based on the number of movies you’d watched. Ordinary people goof off at the office and watch videos on the internet, you’d be so tired of videos that you’d probably be mastering Calculus or unraveling the mysteries of quantum mechanics in your spare time. The only downside I can think of is that if you’re really junior, you’d probably only be given the lousy Akshay Kumar or Abhishek Bachchan movies for the first few years, and you’ll have to work your way up the censor board food chain before getting access to the critically acclaimed art house stuff. Still, your job would hands down beat any of those regular jobs that involved crunching numbers or making strategic presentations.

Outside of the all-time dream job of being a travel or cookery show host, I cant think of too many jobs more enjoyable than joining the Censor Board – yet the entrance exams for the Censor Board of India barely attracts any attention at all. Perhaps the job is so attractive that no one ever quits and there’s already a 20-year waiting list like those prestigious clubs. I wish someone had told me all this 20 years ago - I'd probably have a job watching movies all day by now!

DeLinked In

Each week, without provocation and apropos of nothing, I receive requests from at least two complete strangers who wish to be added to my professional network on LinkedIn. This might make it sound like my professional network is the equivalent of those parties thrown by Jay Gatsby that everyone wishes to be part of. That to those on the outside looking in, it looks like the sort of professional network that helps people get jobs, make useful business contacts, publicize their successes, climb up the career ladder and that sort of thing. The reality, though, is quite the opposite. The last time I updated my LinkedIn profile was nearly a decade ago – to give you an idea, the iPhone had not been launched yet, Pluto was still a planet and not just a cartoon dog, India hadn’t played a single T20 match, and Israel and Palestine – well, ok…that situation was still messed up. But apart from that, it was a very different world.

The truth is that I’m simply terrible at business networking. I’m shy, withdrawn and prefer the quiet comfort of the written word to the raucous harshness of the spoken word. Networking, then, isn’t something that comes naturally to me. And when you throw in business along with it, it’s a uselessness that gets exacerbated exponentially to create a perfect storm of incompetence. It’s not like I don’t have a commonsensical understanding of business, but I’ve never had that eye for business that marks out an entrepreneur from, well, a regular person. Not just an eye, but I also lack the guts, heart or spine for business – it requires too much ambition and too much of dealing with people.

Of course, the unsuspecting strangers who wish to be part of my professional network do not know any of this, since it isn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d state explicitly on your LinkedIn profile. Still, it does make me wonder, who are these driven and motivated professionals that decided to add me to their network despite not knowing me at all? It would be understandable if I was an HR person, or if I had some big time designation like Vice President or Director or Partner or CEO. But I don’t – so it probably means that these people diligently tracked down profiles with the big shot designations first, sent them requests, possibly got rejected but persevered doggedly until they trickled down to my level. That just seems like an insane level of dedication to business networking. Was I missing out on something? Was there some very happening and exciting business life that was being played out on LinkedIn, the way it always seems to be the case on Facebook?

Each time I log in to Facebook, the first five minutes are enough to convince me that I have no life, and the next five minutes are enough to convince me that I have no opinions and am an uninformed country bumpkin who has been hiding under a rock while the whole world was seething with rage over something that offended someone. Half the people I know are partying, holidaying and checking in to fancy places. The other half are expressing opinions, getting outraged and having informed debates on topics that I didn’t even know are in the news. I wondered if it was the same on LinkedIn, but in a professional context?

What I mean is, were people eagerly updating their statuses with their latest professional achievements like “Landed a new client today – mopped the floor with my rivals”, “Got a big promotion and a bonus – time to get that sports car”, “Crunched numbers and absolutely wrestled them to the ground – I’ll totally rock the budget meeting!” or even simply “Ate a hearty business breakfast. Good food for thought”? Did they put up photos of themselves attending high-powered meetings or making strategic presentations? Was there a plethora of selfies out there but with people trying to look professional instead of pouting? Did they check in with statements such as “Checked in to CXO level meeting at posh 5 star business hotel” or “Checked in to World Trade Tech Village Global Corporate Business Park for tricky meeting with idiot client”? In other words, would logging in to LinkedIn make me feel like I have no professional life either, to go along with the social life that I already did not possess?

Thankfully this wasn’t the case, though after five minutes of browsing through LinkedIn it was clear that I had no opinions and was utterly uninformed in the professional sphere as well. People were holding forth on professional topics of interest, sharing links to new corporate developments, commenting on latest workplace trends, etc. It was an entire world of opinions and debates that I was completely oblivious to. And it’s not like LinkedIn didn’t try – they’d send me regular reminders that invites were waiting to be responded to; people were waiting to be recommended glowingly and that yet more habits of highly effective people were being discovered while I withered away in a state of ignorant stagnation. Every now and then, it even sent me beseeching mails imploring me to congratulate someone on completing 2 years in a job, and I foolishly ignored it thinking that no one actually did something like that. Yet it was only now that I realised that this congratulating is actually very real, just like people wishing you on your birthday on Facebook.

The oddest part, though, were the spate of links shared on increasing productivity and efficiency in the workplace. By the time you’d get through these, you’d have spent pretty much your entire workday. Now that’s not exactly being productive, is it?

The Perils of Being Inconspicuous

Back in college, we had this fellow who was so good at not standing out, at simply blending in to the background like a particularly plain variety of wallpaper, that it eventually led to his downfall by becoming his claim to fame and thereby making him stand out. Of course, in any classroom there are always some who stand out more while there are others who quietly go about their business. But this guy took it to an altogether different level – so much so that in the second year of college, one of our batch mates did not know his name or the fact that he was part of the batch. Now, a lot of you might think that isn’t such a remarkable feat at all – you’d have gone through 4 years of engineering college with over a 1000 batch mates and never known about a third of them. In this case, though, it’s the context that made it different.

Many colleges are blessed with a sprawling campus, spread over acres of landscaped greenery, dotted with department buildings, sports facilities and the odd patches of forestry. Others have smaller but adequately spacious campuses with modern facilities and comforts. We had an old hospital. And it was a rather small one at that, the sort of space where nothing could be hidden because there was no hiding space. What made it even tougher to be inconspicuous was that each year, there were just 2 batches of about a 100 odd each. It wasn’t the sort of space where a salacious rumour would unfurl in a slow and leisurely manner, deliciously gathering juicy tidbits as it traveled from person to person, with half truths and creative lies being sprinkled in as a shadowy game of Chinese whisper irresistibly gained momentum until the scandal finally erupted, leaving behind tattered reputations, broken hearts and ruined friendships in its wake. In fact it was the precise opposite – the sort of campus where the best-kept secret was common knowledge in ten minutes and within an hour would be the topic of heated discussion amidst howls of outrage at the next general body meeting.

Moreover, it was a business school – a place that fosters a cutthroat, competitive environment where students are actively encouraged to seek the spotlight, build networks, take credit and are even penalized for not talking. In such a scenario, then, to have never done anything of note, never been part of any scandal, never made a comical faux-pas, never uttered a word in anger, never gotten involved in an act of drunken debauchery, never been rumored to be dating someone, never been the one everyone sought just when an assignment was due, never organized a pointless talk or done anything at all remotely story-worthy took an extraordinary level of self-denial and restraint. Until that fateful day, of course, when the story of the batch mate who didn’t know of him spread like wildfire and his very low visibility became the cause for his newly acquired status of high visibility.

In many ways, Karnataka is exactly like him when it comes to the South Indian states. For a part of India that’s synonymous with loud colours, flashy politicians and over the top movies, the state of Karnataka manages to remain remarkably low-key. Take the film industry, for example. Even ignorant North Indians who call all South Indians Madraasis would’ve heard of Rajnikanth. A good number of them would’ve also heard of Chiranjeevi or Mohanlal. But a Kannada actor? Not a chance. The only Kannada actor they would’ve heard of would be Rajkumar, and that’s purely thanks to Veerappan having kidnapped him all those years ago.

It’s the same with food. Now, I must admit that I was pretty ignorant about South Indian food until I began life in Bangalore. Like many a clueless North Indian, I thought South Indian food consisted entirely of Idli, Dosa, Vada, Uthappam, Sambar and Rasam, along with maybe 2-3 varieties of rice. I assumed that the average South Indian went through life judiciously rotating between these dishes for breakfast, lunch and dinner before dying of culinary boredom. Over the years, though, I’ve come to realize how terribly wrong I was, and how each of the Southern States boasted of distinct cuisines that had much to admire. Except for Karnataka.

The Kerala cuisine is a lot like the people of the state – fun loving, indulgent and with a fondness for the good life. It’s like that entertaining uncle whose visits you looked forward to as a kid, the one who’d bring you fancy gifts, regale you with tall tales and take you out for a fun evening. It’s the sort of food that tells you “Hey, it’s a holiday, so why don’t you sit back and relax with a drink while I rustle something up”. Like a lot of coastal cuisines, while vegetables exist it’s the non-veg where the real fun lies. Seafood, beef, mutton or chicken – the Kerala cuisine displays exceptional mastery over the entire spectrum of non-veg cooking.

Tamil cuisine, much like the state itself, has a sense of the extremes about it. There is the Tam Brahm part that’s characterized by Spartan vegetarian restraint – it’s the bespectacled studious boy in school that’s always buried in his books and would feel guilty at the mere thought of having fun. Then there’s the rest of Tamil cuisine, which, as a sort of “F*$# You” to the Tam Brahm cuisine, goes all-out with the non-veg, the oils and the spices. As if the rest of the Tamilians are rebelling against the restraint imposed on them by the Tam Brahms and reveling in an uninhibited display of sinful, decadent indulgence through their cooking.

Telugu cuisine, like their movies, is the ultimate masala fare. It’s that over-the-top, utterly bonkers potboiler, the culinary equivalent of violent pelvic thrusts and garish fluorescent clothing. Like Kerala cuisine, Telugu cuisine also goes well with alcohol, but the Telugu attitude to alcohol is a lot more focused. It’s not the laid back; relax by the backwater with a drink in hand approach. Instead, it’s grim men standing around seedy, dingy bars, drinking earnestly and copiously to get away from life’s many troubles. The intense spiciness of the food is designed to make you forget about everything else at that moment in time and hence works well in such situations.

Karnataka cuisine, and one has to use the word cuisine liberally to even call it that, feels like someone went to a bad hostel mess and decided that it could form the basis of an entire culinary discipline. Like a punishment or a prison sentence, there is an endless sense of bleak monotony. Every dish manages to look dull, grey, and lifeless, packing in all the appeal of a particularly depressing bowl of porridge. It’s the sort of food you feel condemned to eat in stoic silence, almost as if in mourning. Some people live to eat, while others eat to live. In Karnataka, they eat miserably to live. And, in a remarkable feat of culinary incompetence, they’ve managed to make their sambar worse than what you’d find anywhere in North India!

Culturally, then, Karnataka has somehow managed to carve itself a niche of inconspicuousness, carefully honed over decades of bland everyday nothingness in a wide variety of fields. And then Bangalore came along and single handedly shot Karnataka into prominence. No wonder Karnataka hates it so much and the city is so neglected!